People keep commenting on my LinkedIn posts and DMs telling me I'm inspirational and motivational.
Okay, cool. I'll take it.
It also seems crazy to me, because I'm literally an unemployed, now middle-aged mom (even though I feel 27), in the Connecticut suburbs trying to get a damn job while raising my 4- and 6-year-old boys. I seem pretty normal.
And there's a huge gap between "you're inspirational" and "we are pursuing other candidates who better meet our needs at this time." I've been living in that gap for six months. Over and over and over.
This is my attempt to close it.
Because here's what I finally figured out. Whatever spark people see in my posts is real, it has a 20-year track record, and almost none of it made it onto my resume. On paper I'm a big-company person. Macy's. CVS Health. Elevance. GoodRx. Fifteen years of Fortune-scale logos. On the inside, I've been a builder the whole time. New businesses, new capabilities, new marketing engines, new teams. I've been running the same play since I was 22, and the play works anywhere something needs to be built. The company size never mattered. The building did.
Fair warning, this got long. It was fun to write, it had been circling my brain for months, and it needed to escape.
People are onions. My resume is the outermost layer, and it's probably the least interesting one.
Here's mine, peeled back.
Making the band
At 22, I found my first client by networking on MySpace.
They were a rock group called Bludshot, and I found them the exact same way I find opportunities on LinkedIn today. Show up. Engage. Be useful. Get hired.
Some context. I'd just graduated from Elon, where I started as a music major before combining it with business, and I was waitressing while figuring out my first move. I always wanted to combine music and business together. Bludshot hired me as their manager to book their shows and promote them, and for about six months I booked them across Virginia, ran all the promotion, and figured out an entire industry with no playbook and no boss.
I eventually faded it out because I'd started a full-time job at Clear Channel, and driving home from Richmond at 2 a.m. on a weeknight was too much even for a 22-year-old.
But I wasn't done. I founded Live Jive Entertainment and booked talent for local venues. Finding acts, promoting shows, standing there when the doors opened. A tiny events business I could manage on nights and weekends, while acting as a sales coordinator by day.
I didn't call any of this entrepreneurship. I called it figuring it out.
I still work this way. I don't need to be the founder to act like an owner. Give me an unclear problem, limited resources, and enough room to move, and I'll start building. Every chapter after this one is that sentence, repeated.
The sales gauntlet
When I interviewed to move from Sales Coordinator to Account Executive at Clear Channel, leadership told me, more or less: you're either going to be wildly successful in this role or brutally fail.
Most people failed fast. Nobody expected much from me either.
I'll admit that proving people wrong is still one of the great pleasures of my professional life. But something more useful happened in that job than winning. I learned how comfortable I am walking into a situation without the answer and finding it live.
The job was cold calling like a machine and walking into businesses off the street to find decision makers. A girlfriend of mine was also in sales, and we'd go prospecting together pretending we were Paris and Nicole, because it was that era and staying positive was half the job. More fun with a friend. I did plenty of it alone too.
Then I noticed the thing that would quietly shape my whole career: every client asked for the expensive, flashy thing (a radio host in a tent, giving out swag in their parking lot), and almost none of them needed it. What they needed was reach they could afford. So I sold them that instead. Evening spots. Online radio inventory - streaming spots and banners.
I got so good at selling the assets nobody was thinking about that Clear Channel invented a role around it: their first interactive account manager for DC and Baltimore. Then they had me teach the other reps. I was never selling a “banner”, I sold programs, reaching your customer at a more efficient spend, lead generation programs.
Clients came in asking for a tactic. I pushed back asking what outcome they actually needed and what was standing in the way. I thought that was just good selling.
It was the first time I diagnosed before prescribing. It would not be the last.
Building without permission
I moved to New York for business school at NYU Stern. Days at work, nights in class. Then I got let go from a job - in mid transition from ad sales to marketing.
Here's what I did with that. I kept hunting for full-time work, and at the same time I built myself an apprenticeship in the startup world, because nobody was going to hand me one.
There was a pre-launch concert ticketing startup with, technically, nothing for me to do. They hadn't launched. So I invented the job: building hype on social media before there was a product to point at. That turned into paid gigs with other NYC startups, building brand followings on Twitter and Facebook back when "social media marketing" was barely a job title. I knew a fraction of what I know now. I built the followings anyway.
I did all of this while being crazily over-involved at Stern. I was involved in the student government the entire time and was a class core group leader. And I led our a cappella group, Net Present Vocals, where we rewrote pop songs as business school parodies. Yes, I'm the biggest nerd ever. I love it. I sang on stage at Radio City Music Hall twice because of that #funfact
Then came a contract role at Quidsi, marketing a site called afterschool.com, with a marketing budget of exactly zero dollars. So the job became a hustle: I built an affiliate partner channel by signing up camps and local partners one at a time, out of relationships instead of spend.
And then, the fork in the road that explains my entire resume. I had my MBA and I refused to start over at entry level. The startup world wouldn't let me in at that level without more startup proof, no matter how much startup work I'd actually done. Macy's made me an offer, and honestly, I was thrilled. I'd been hustling through part-time and startup gigs for a while. I wanted stability, and it was a great opportunity.
I thought I was choosing the big-company path over the startup path.
What actually happened is I smuggled the builder path inside with me.
Undercover at the big logos
I started at Macy's in 2013, at macys.com specifically. E-commerce marketing. My world was the website. The stores were a separate team. We eventually all merged together through multiple reorgs (as one does).
And here's the pattern that followed me through every big company for the next decade: I kept getting handed the afterthoughts, and I kept running them like they were my own company.
The kids business was nobody's priority (except for me and the kids buyers!). I led the charge on a more fashion-forward direction for it anyway. The first editorial experience I built drove over $1 million in sales. The holiday version drove nearly $4 million and became the top fashion editorial experience on the site that year. The quarterly editorial converted 25% better than the standard category page. For the category everyone forgot about.
The leased business, brands like Sunglass Hut living inside Macy's, was another afterthought compared to the big women’s ready to wear business, accessories, cosmetics etc. Three years on that account, targets of 30 to 40% online growth, met or exceeded year after year. The company restructured around me multiple times, and every time, the partners inside and outside the building asked to keep working with me. The numbers were the argument
At CVS I worked on launching optical and audiology centers, a brand-new business inside a Fortune 5 company. If I'm being honest, the business had a complicated run. CVS poured resources in, then pared back fast. But building from zero inside a machine that size is an education you can't buy. Also, I visited The Villages in Florida for it. If you know, you know. Enough said.
At Elevance I earned my first director role. Then I moved to CarelonRx, Elevance's pharmacy benefit manager, got promoted, and led my first team. My team had a very broad scope; from managing more operational member comms, new onboarding for groups, and the formulary site to more strategic marketing initiatives that I’d been doing for years.
I led member marketing for what ended up being a very turbulent project; the relaunch of our home delivery pharmacy. We were the pilots in a brand new Adobe Martech stack and had the biggest paid media budget that I’ve ever seen in health insurance. This was the biggest thing that never was for me. My team and I planned, and pivoted and pivoted. And pivoted. As our budget and channels got delayed and stripped away because of a very messy launch (had nothing to do with marketing but we adapted). By the time it shrunk and got fully launched I had left the company.. But I digress.
In prep for the home delivery campaign…We had no real way to size our audiences on the pharmacy side. So I got a granular audience-sizing capability built that had never existed. Then I used it, and found roughly 5 million members completely unaccounted for in the targeting of our most important pharmacy campaign.
Nobody asked me to look. Fixing it took months and a lot of pushing. We fixed it.
Sit with that one for a second, because it's the whole thesis. That wasn't a better-email problem or a better-media problem. Every visible piece of that campaign could have been optimized to perfection and we'd still have missed millions of eligible people, because the problem was upstream, in logic nobody owned. Someone had to go looking for it. Apparently that someone is me.
I mentioned the chaos above that caused a year of delays? I pivoted my team toward the operational communications and shifted my own scope with them. We supported a huge reduction in call center volume by getting members to self serve. Sometimes the plan changes, adaptability is crucial.
At GoodRx, a young public company with plenty of startup chaos of its own. I had stood up a brand new function there, Integrated Marketing, with new processes built out from best practices of previous roles.I launched a GLP-1 program that brought in about 15,000 new subscribers in its first two and a half months. Then came the RIF in January 2026.
None of this reads as scrappy on a resume. Inside a big logo, it all flattens into bullet points, and the company names do the talking. "Big company person," the file says.
The file is wrong.
The pattern I missed
For most of my career, I thought I was searching for my marketing specialty or box. Brand? Integrated? Lifecycle? Growth? Go-to-market? I could make a case for all of them, which was exactly the problem. Every box captured a piece of my experience and missed the thing connecting all of it.
The connecting thread was never a channel or a campaign type.
It was diagnosis. And then building whatever needed to exist to fix what I found.
Diagnosis without building is a consultant. Building without diagnosis is a channel manager. The pattern is both, in that order. Every time.
I gravitate toward the question behind the question. When a campaign isn't working, I want to know whether the campaign is actually the problem. When adoption is low, I want to know whether people understand the value, trust the promise, can complete the experience, and have a reason to act now. When teams are debating channels, I want to know whether the positioning, offer, and audience are strong enough for any channel to succeed.
Who's the customer, and what's actually stopping them from acting? Is the offer right? The experience? The economics? Are we measuring the right behavior, or treating a symptom because the real problem sits somewhere less convenient?
That's still marketing. It's just marketing at the level of the business instead of the channel.
I'm not always right. That's not the point. The point is the decision gets better when someone forces the upstream questions before everyone starts polishing downstream execution. In every company I've worked for, I've ended up being that someone, whether or not it was in the job description.
Not because execution is beneath me. Execution is where strategy proves it deserves to exist. But somebody has to define the right problem first, and I've stopped pretending that's not my favorite part.
Right now
Which brings me to the chapter you can watch happening in real time.
I got laid off in January. I could have spent six months only submitting applications.
Instead, I built two things from zero, in public, with no funding and no permission.
The first is an audience. Since January, my LinkedIn content has done over 1.6 million impressions and reached more than 535,000 people, 85% of them outside my own network. Almost 19,000 engagements, including 6,665 saves. In the past 90 days alone, my following grew 64% and my profile was viewed 9,000 times.
The part I didn't expect: it helps people. I write about my own search, what's working, what's failing, how I'm using AI at every step, and people use it to run their own searches. That was never the plan. It's become my favorite part. And people want to talk to me because of it. C-suite people, senior people, everyday people navigating the same brutal market I am.
The second is a product. I taught myself an entirely new technical stack, built and shipped a working suite of AI tools at juliedx.com, and got real people paying for them. In one recent 30-day stretch, 662 people ran my tools 877 times, driven by nothing but content. I'm not driving gazillions of dollars here. It's a small thing I built alone, and it works.
And notice what I built. Not another AI tool that spits out copy. A diagnostic system. Tools that look at marketing and figure out what's wrong before recommending what to fix.
Nobody gave me an org chart or a job description, and I still ended up building the exact same thing I've been doing since Bludshot and a MySpace page: see the opening, build the thing, figure it out live.
At some point you have to stop calling that a coincidence.
Actually, count it up.
A booking business. A sales playbook a company invented a role around. Brand followings before social media was a job. An affiliate channel with zero budget. An editorial franchise for a forgotten category. A retail health launch inside a Fortune 5. An audience-sizing capability that found 5 million missing members. An integrated marketing function at a public company. And in the past six months, an audience of half a million people and a product people pay for.
Ten builds. Two of them this year. Alone. Unemployed.
My titles all said marketing. The work underneath them was building, every single time. That’s the box I fit into. It’s never the job title though, which is why I have to read every job description carefully.
So here's what I'm actually telling you
For years I introduced myself as a marketing leader. That was accurate. It just wasn't complete.
I'm a builder. Marketing is my discipline. Consumer behavior is my lens. Diagnosis is the instinct. Growth is the outcome.
I've been interviewing with larger companies and startups, and I'm genuinely open to either, because the size of the company matters less than the shape of the work. What I'm looking for is a business that wants someone to think beyond the channel, connect the customer experience to the commercial model, and take real ownership of growth. That could be a startup. It could be an established company building something new. It could absolutely still carry a marketing title.
If you're trying to figure out where I fit, the title matters less than the remit. It could be Director of Growth. Head of Growth. Director or VP of Lifecycle, Consumer, or Integrated Marketing. General Manager. Head of Go-to-Market. Director of Commercial Strategy. Chief of Staff. Business Unit Leader. Or I mean, it could just be Julie.
Those titles look different. The work doesn't.
Give me a business that needs to grow. Give me a customer behavior problem nobody fully understands. Give me a new product to launch, a stalled growth curve, or a team optimizing tactics before agreeing on the actual problem. Give me the room to connect all of it into one coherent growth strategy, and a mandate wide enough to fix what's actually broken instead of what's convenient.
I'm not the person you hire to pick a marketing channel. I'm the person you hire when growth isn't happening, nobody can agree on why, and somebody needs to find the real problem and build the path out.
I've been doing exactly that since I was 22. For a rock band. For radio clients. For startups that couldn't pay me. For afterthought businesses inside giant companies. For 5 million members nobody knew were missing. And for the past six months, for myself, in public, where you can check my work.
My resume tells you where I sat. This story tells you what I do. Now I just need to figure out how to position myself without a long essay.
What I do is, I find the constraint. I help people see the problem differently. Then I build what comes next.
Somebody's going to get the version of me that's been waiting for this.
Now you know exactly what you'd be hiring. 💎