08 Sep Why I’m Saying Goodbye to Marketing and Hello to Coaching

I love marketing. I’m good at it. So deciding to make a massive career pivot and leave marketing behind was not an easy one. But the best decisions aren’t always the easiest ones, are they?

Here’s the story.

Why I’m saying goodbye to marketing

In August 2025, marketing stopped being fun. I lost two huge clients back-to-back.

One was a nonprofit that shut its doors because funding dried up.

The other was a small and growing company that decided to focus on business development over marketing. Even though I hated losing them, I agreed with this decision. Business development brought in immediate sales, while marketing, as we know, is a long-term game. It just made sense.

But still. I lost a lot of income in one fell swoop.

In past years, I didn’t worry. Losing two clients at the same time would still have sucked. But new clients and projects would have moved in and taken their place quickly.

As they say, times have changed.

I figured generative AI would catch up with me one day, and one day arrived. I can’t compete with sycophantic AI machines that are not copywriters or marketing strategists, that don’t have decades of experience or even an iota of discernment – but are free.

(And by the way, a lot of people are leaving marketing. When few-to-no human experts are left in the field, it’s going be a problem.)

As you might imagine, I spent last fall on the struggle bus. Things usually pick up in January. Instead, I lost another huge client. (I’m 99.99% sure the new CMO outsourced my work to AI.)

Winter sucked. Spring sucked. It was clear I needed to do something new, but I was deep in the suck, exhausted and demoralized.

And why I’m saying hello to coaching

Then I was introduced to an astrologer. (Yes, the story is really going in this direction now.)

She read my birth chart from a career and money perspective and one thing she said to me landed.

“The more fun you have, the more money you make.”

For the first time in almost a year, something made sense.

My entire life is centered on having fun. I work a four-day workweek so I can have more fun. Clients ask me about the fun I have. My friends love getting roped into fun. I am really good at having fun.

The astrologer’s one comment turned into an idea that I kept sharing and getting feedback on until I landed on The Fun Coach. And so here we are.

In August, I enrolled four beta testers in the program, and I told my marketing clients about the new company.

(That was a scary email to send, but I reassured them we’d continue to work together as before. I love them all too much and have way too much integrity to leave them high and dry. And their responses, by the way, were nothing but supportive.)

In October, I’ll start accepting paid clients.

But most importantly, I am having fun at work again. And that’s the whole point.

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