Bad at maths. badass at marketing.

The past:

Since I was little, I’ve always told myself that I’m terrible at Maths.

I loved English as a subject and always got good grades in subjects like French and Spanish without as much effort as the more numerical counterparts. So to me ‘my brain just didn’t work that way’.

Well. There’s that and a rather traumatic experience when I was 10, where my teacher demanded “what do you mean you don’t understand?!” over and over when I asked for help on a question in front of the whole class.

Earth. Swallow. Me. Whole.

Naturally, this lead me further down the garden path of “I’m a creative, I love words and language and I just can’t do that whole numbers thing”. So let’s rewind to over a decade ago where I’m finding my way in the post-uni world, landing myself a Marketing Assistant role at The Lucky Onion.

What nobody tells you about marketing, before you get into marketing, is that despite all the beautiful branding, clever campaigns and creative ideas, the best marketers are detectives. They're curious. They're constantly asking questions. And more often than not, the answers are hidden in the numbers.

At first, I resisted them. I'd look at spreadsheets and dashboards and immediately feel that familiar school-day panic creeping in. But over time I realised something important: Marketing numbers aren't really numbers. They're just people.

Every click is a decision. Every repeat purchase is trust. Every unsubscribe is feedback. Numbers are behaviour. And once I understood that, everything changed.

The present:

Today, when clients come to me asking why sales are down, how can they grow their business to the next level or whether their marketing is working, I always anchor myself back into the same place. The data.

If you’ve got them, use them as your compass. Not because they tell you everything, but because they tell you where to look next.

And if you don’t have them, spend time putting the systems and processes in place to get them.

The irony isn't lost on me that the girl who spent most of school convinced she was bad at Maths now spends a huge amount of her time buried in reports, analysing trends, building KPI dashboards and helping businesses make decisions based on data.

The difference is that nobody ever taught me that numbers could tell stories.

That they could reveal patterns. That they could help us understand people.

Maths was all about getting the right answer. But marketing taught me it's often about asking better questions.

The future:

These days, I spend less time looking for silver bullets and more time looking for patterns. And the truth is, most businesses don't have a marketing problem. They have a clarity problem.

They're sat on years of customer behaviour, sales data, campaign results, feedback forms and website analytics, but they're so close to it that they can't see what it's trying to tell them.

That's the part of marketing I now find myself drawn to more and more. Not chasing vanity metrics or reporting for reporting's sake, but helping businesses understand what's actually happening beneath the surface.

Where are people dropping off? What's driving loyalty? Why does one product fly and another struggle? Which opportunities are hiding in plain sight? How can you find even more new customers?

Because when you stop treating data as a scorecard and start treating it as the foundation to your thought processes, it becomes something far more valuable. It becomes direction.

And perhaps that's why I no longer see myself as someone who's bad at Maths. I meaaaan, I still couldn't tell you what half of the equations I learnt at school were for. But I can tell you that behind every number is a person, and behind every person is a pattern.

Turns out I didn't need to become good at Maths after all. I just needed to keep showing up at the front of the class to ask more questions.