Career Outlooks
My career story is definitely not the most glamorous one, but it just might be the most common one.
I started business studies in my early twenties, mostly to please my family who thought that working in restaurants would be a dead end job. I did extremely well in school, but I didn’t really find business studies that interesting.
To be honest, almost the whole time during my Bachelor’s studies I had no idea what I would want to do with my degree. I actually thought that the best part of school was when I did my exchange period in Bali and was living my best life surfing and enjoying the sun.
It was just a fluke I ended up getting an internship at L’Oréal before my Bachelor’s thesis and realised, maybe I had really found my true calling. “So this is marketing!”, I thought.
Through that internship I found something that I thought I was really good at. Marketing allowed me to combine both my creativity and analytical skills. During my time at Loréal I also invented a way to save thousands of euros in packaging promotional materials every year (still in use today, over a decade later!) – that really sparked something within me. If an intern like me could come up with something so clever for marketing, I thought that the only boundary could be my own creativity.
So, I decided to pursue a career in marketing. I continued with my Master’s studies while already working a full time job in charge of marketing for a fashion retail chain in Finland. When the retail chain had a change in ownership and our marketing budgets were frozen, I found an interesting opportunity through my school – I applied for a fixed term job creating demand for a Finnish brand in California.
And I got the job! So I took some time off from my full time job (and my Master’s studies) and went to Los Angeles for three months to help the Finnish company get into local stores in California and Arizona. I only got back to Finland for five weeks after that to quit my job and leave for Los Angeles again, this time to stay for almost nine months, creating a whole new fitness brand from scratch.
Although the experience of working in marketing in Los Angeles was beyond incredible, I returned to Finland in 2016 and landed a job as a Digital Marketing Manager for a well-known Finnish B2B company. Out of all the applicants, I was the only candid one who didn’t try to sugar coat the fact that the company wasn’t doing a great job with digital marketing at that point. They knew that themselves and so my candidness got me the job.
The Digital Marketing Manager role was supposed to be a temporary job, but I ended up staying for five years and took the company from having practically zero digital visibility to being the industry leader in digitising their services. Somewhere between all the development work and travelling I also managed to actually finish my Master’s thesis and graduate.
I was lucky enough to have lots of possibilities within the organisation to develop my own role, grow my team and educate colleagues about digital marketing. That’s what kept me there for a long time. In this role I also managed the digital marketing partners we had in many of our operating countries and that turned out to be the hardest part of the entire job.
One day I just decided that there has to be a better way for companies to work with marketing agencies and I decided the easiest way to make that happen was to run the agency myself.
And so I found Trickle after one more pit stop. Or actually, Trickle found me with the help of a headhunter. I currently run the operations of Trickle Helsinki, a digital marketing agency, and sit on the board of directors. And finally feel like I’m exactly where I want to be. Like I found what I want to be when I grow up.
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I started off as a student not knowing what I’ll be when I graduate and grew into a complete marketing fanatic over the years. Not only do I now work full time in a digital marketing agency, but I also do pro bono work to help entrepreneurs with digital marketing, coach younger marketers, do speaking gigs about marketing, teach marketing at universities and basically live and breathe marketing all day every day.
The moral of the story is that you don’t always need to know where you’re going. The coincidences on the way will give you direction and lead you to a place you didn’t even know exists. And that’s a good thing – you might just end up finding what you want to be when you grow up.
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Writer profile:
- Name: Laura Myllykoski
- Job: Helsinki Lead & board member at Trickle
- Role at Helsingin Ekonomit: Board member
- Board member Oy SHH Academic Business Consulting AB
- Guest lecturer at Hanken Svenska Handelshögskolan & Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences
- Mentor for young marketers
- Digital marketing angel for entrepreneurs
