This will be my last post for the Holland-Mark channel, and my last day at Holland-Mark. There’ll be plenty of time to talk about where I’m going and why I felt compelled to leave a successful partnership of good friends, but for my swan song here I thought I’d share a few thoughts on my journey that might be useful to you.

It’s too long, but it’s a pretty good story. The short version is that I’ve come to organize the journey of my career in the same way I’ve tried to organize the journey of a business.

I start with a Vision of who I am, and the ways I think I’m uniquely able to create and capture value in the world. From there I focus on finding the Truth – to corrupt this original vision with the external reality – in a way that refines it based on new information and ideas. Once I’m there, it comes down to Conviction, to having the fortitude to accept and act on the changes necessary to deliver the result.

That’s it, really. If you want the details… here’s what happened.

Vision

What I’m passionate about is helping startups tell their story. It’s taken a while to boil it down to something that specific, but it all started with getting thrown out of Cornell…

<Queue wavy lines, fade to black. Huey Lewis on a flip-digit alarm clock…>

I was a model student growing up, top 1% academics plus football, track, class president, the whole bit. I was named the Outstanding Senior of my graduating class, in large part thanks to a rare Ivy League acceptance for the Johnston, RI public school system, and I left for Cornell ready to fulfill my destiny of running the world.

My first semester I played ball, met the men who would become my friends for life, and a girl who seemed like my life until she dumped me for a junior. The net effect was a less-than-stellar 1.4 GPA, and a trip to the Dean’s office – with my Dad – for a little “chat.”

“You seem like a smart guy, Michael, but you’re not quite cutting the mustard here are you,” said Glenn Altschuler, who would go on to be a prolific author and frequent contributor to the Huffington Post. “I’m wondering why that is, and why you’re doing especially poorly in your major, Economics.”

The truth was I’d become an econ major because my Dad and I (neither of whom had gone to college at the time) thought it would be the most direct path to business, and to making enough money to pay back the debt we were about to take on.

“Do you actually like economics, Michael?” the Dean asked, from behind a mountain of paper, John Lennon glasses, and a formidable moustache I remember vividly even now.

“No,” I said from beneath a Big Red football jacket, an itchy crotch, and a crushing hangover. “I don’t.”

“Ah,” he said. “Then I guess we’ve found the problem.”

After a lengthy but kind admonition of the both of us, he said something that would have a huge impact on the rest of my life. “If you can come back here tomorrow and tell me what you’re really interested in doing, I’ll let you study it here. If not, I think it’s probably best for everyone if you just go back to Rhode Island with your Dad, and figure out where to go from there.”

Wow. Follow your bliss, or go hang out at the corner of Hartford and Atwood Avenue for the rest of your life. It was a turning point for me. It was a gift.

Hours later, reflecting on an Ithaca hillside as the sun dipped into Lake Cayuga, I figured something out about myself. I was a good thinker, but certainly not the best I knew. I was also creative, but again, not enough so to be truly great. What made me unique, I reasoned, was the combination of those things. No one more logical was as creative, and none more creative seemed near as logical.

The next day I returned to the Dean’s office, and told him I wanted to be in Advertising. “So it shall be,” he said (he talked that way.) And so it was.

After that I killed it a Cornell, then as a shiny young adman in New York City. I got off on seeing my ideas become reality, then watching them impact my clients’ businesses. Eventually I figured out you could turn an idea into a business, and after a couple years at a local trade school for that kind of thing, I set out to be an entrepreneur.

Since then I’ve spent my career in one form or another of startup marketing, some more on “startup,” and the rest more on “marketing.” At Holland-Mark I worked hard to build a practice in exactly that area, a platform for me to make a living doing just what I loved. That was my vision, anyway, and I’ve spent the last few years working hard to make it real.

Truth

But you know what? While helping startups tell their story is a great way to keep Mike Troiano happy, it’s not a great foundation on which to build a 50-person agency. Startups change too fast. Most of the ones that can pay have answered the questions they really need answered, and most of the ones who haven’t can’t afford the help they really need.

I’m proud of the work we’ve done for our startup clients. Zipcar, Gazelle, Hello Health, Linkable Networks, Springpad, Intronis, BuyWithMe, VSnap, Notch Brewing, BostInno, Actifio, Plexxi, Adelphic Mobile, Blank Label, CoachUp, Kibits, Quant5, Weathermob, Of Course, Gemvara, and even the New England Venture Capital Association itself. It’s a list I’m proud of, and work I think made a difference. But it’s a tough way to keep a large group of people busy and billing.

Solving that problem means doing less of what I’m truly passionate about. It’s an Economics major. Not an Advertising one.

Conviction

If you’re any good at all at this line of work, you come across a lot of job opportunities along the way. I’ve passed on more than a few good ones, some quite recently. But a few weeks ago, one came my way I just couldn’t say no to. And it came to me just at the time H-M’s truth was becoming clear, just as I was becoming restless to start to implement my ideas myself, and just as the build-up to Demo Day had me spoiling for another shoot-for-the-moon adventure.

More on that next week. For now I just want to say thank you to my friends at Holland-Mark, to the people I’ve (hopefully) taught over the last few years, and to the ones I’ve (definitely) learned from over the same period. I’d like to thank my partners for being the men I hoped they’d be when we locked arms and set down this road together, and for continuing to be my friends on the journey ahead. Finally, I’d like to thank my clients – startup or not – who believed in me, invested in my ideas, and became my friends. One of our early principles was that we’d only work for people we liked and respected at H-M, and on that score our record was perfect.

Finally, to you, I want to say thanks for your time, your feedback, your unwavering support. Writing for this forum has been a pleasure, to the last word, and if you’ve gotten half from it as I have I feel very proud indeed.

So goodbye for now. And I’ll see you on Monday morning, for a new beginning.