A Day in the Life: Lead

Start of day

Your morning starts off like any other, bright and early at 6 am. You’re a morning person, and you enjoy the calm stillness that early mornings bring. As you sip on a cup of coffee with your cat in your lap, you set your intentions for the day and meditate before work.

At about 7:30 a.m., you hop online. Because you work in the East Coast, you have the luxury of a few interruption-free hours every morning before the rest of the team in Central Canada and the West Coast start their day. Flywheel is a remote-first company, so teammates are scattered across the country. In fact, you yourself spent some time working in Budapest before moving to Hamilton with your wife!

You check your email and open up Notion (Flywheel’s project management tool) to see what’s on your plate for the rest of the week and plan your day accordingly. You like to block off time to work on specific projects, otherwise small Slack pings and requests can derail your daily plans. 

You’re a Digital Ads Lead, which means you’re responsible for all things regarding paid advertisements for Flywheel’s clients. From setting up tools and integrations like Google Analytics and Facebook Business Manager to building out ad campaigns and consistently measuring and optimizing them for success, it’s important for you to understand your clients’ business objectives, what success looks like, and how to help them get there. 

It’s the end of the month, which means client reporting is in full swing. As a lead, it’s your job to pull analytics and data at the end of each month for the clients whose account you manage, distill it into tangible insights, and give recommendations for actionable next steps—which you’ll implement next month. You remind yourself to schedule a meeting with your clients for next week to present this report to them and answer any questions they have. 

Mid-morning

You hop onto Google Ads and Facebook Ads Manager and launch into troubleshooting underperforming ads and routine campaign management. This is where you tend to spend the majority of your time. Although you love getting in the weeds and optimizing ads, you’re responsible for setting campaign strategies alongside directors. This is unique to Flywheel and sets it apart from other agencies you’ve worked at.

There’s a rewarding sense of accomplishment that comes with building a campaign that you strategized into something that performs as well or better than you expected. Sure, there are periods of frustration when things don’t work out as expected, but the payoff when it goes right can be extremely satisfying. 

Working in an agency setting comes with its unique set of challenges, though. There are a million ways campaigns can be optimized and it’s easy to get stuck in an endless loop, but you have to be conscious of the time allotted to each client and work quickly and efficiently while delivering the best results possible. 

Lucky for you, you have a strong team of Strategists that you trust working alongside you, whom you can delegate tasks to and bring your campaigns to life. Not only do Strategists help with this sort of task execution, but you mentor them as well and even learn from them. At Flywheel, it isn’t a hierarchy, but a playbook. Because you all work remotely on different hours, you don’t get the luxury of quick, in-person chats—this is where being a strong project manager is a necessary skill for a Lead. 

You muse that everyone you work with is intelligent, hardworking, and motivates each other to be the best they can be. It’s a far cry from past work experiences, and something you value about Flywheel. You’ve even sharpened your own copywriting, CRO, and e-Commerce skills because you have so many experts on the team you can call on.

Noon

Lunchtime! One of your favourite Flywheel perks is flexible hours, which means teammates don’t work on a regular 9-5 set schedule. When you were new to your role, this was a challenge because communication happens asynchronously, but Flywheel provides the necessary resources to make working in this sort of environment smooth sailing. It also allows you to run errands, go to the bank, or visit the doctor during the day if need be, without having to worry about taking time off or scheduling around work obligations. As long as deadlines and deliverables are met, you’re encouraged to take time for yourself as needed.

You sit down for lunch with your partner and cat, chatting (and meowing) about your days so far. This quality time at home is something you have come to cherish working in a remote environment. 

Afternoon

After lunch, you hop onto Zoom for a one-on-one with one of the Strategists on your team. One-on-ones are crucial to removing roadblocks on current projects, assessing how your team’s Strategists are feeling, and helping them achieve their professional development goals. 

Flywheel places a great emphasis on learning and development; it’s the type of place where teammates are young and hungry to grow in their skills and career. Unlike other companies, which discourage side hustles, Flywheel celebrates the entrepreneurial spirit. In fact, another one of your favourite perks is Gyroscope—a program in which Flywheelers can “hire” each other for a set amount of hours every month to work on their own personal projects or side hustles, whether it’s web development, content writing, ad campaign set up, or any other services Flywheel offers. You, yourself, have taken advantage of this many times for your personal websites. 

You’re excited about this one-on-one today, because you get to take your new web cam for a spin. Thanks to a quarterly bonus awarded last month, all teammates were given a chunk of change to level up their work-from-home setup. You splurged on a new webcam, and ergonomic chair (although your cat tends to claim it more often than not).  

Late afternoon

After your one-on-one, you speak with a client about the status of current deliverables. Because Flywheel doesn’t utilize project managers, leads are expected to take on this role, communicating with client contacts, establishing positive relationships, and relaying necessary information to the team working on the account. This is part of Flywheel’s unique, Direct To Expert agency model. 

In addition to understanding the fundamentals of digital marketing and applying them across search, social, video, and display advertising, key skills for a Flywheel lead to have are project management chops and proactiveness. This includes setting realistic due dates, managing expectations, and ensuring that enough context is conveyed—but not so much that it’s overwhelming. 

End of day

The last task of the day is putting the final touches on a client’s monthly report, and scheduling a meeting with them for the following week to review it together. Flywheel believes in client education, which is why you go through reports together, answering questions and showing them how we got to certain insights and why. In fact, you recently educated a client so well that they decided to take their digital marketing in-house! While most agencies may view that as losing a client and their revenue, you were proud that you were able to set them up to go off on their own. It was like sending a kid off to college, knowing they had all the tools they needed to succeed.

Finally, you log off at around 3 p.m. after a full day. Flexible hours means you can start your day early, and end early, too! Some teammates even schedule their week with half days on Fridays, or work late into the night. Work is what you make it at Flywheel, and you’ve certainly reaped the rewards of this progressive culture and dynamic environment.

We’re always looking for talented Flywheelers to join our team! Check out our open positions and connect with us on social media to keep in touch.