Awesomeness Connects Us All

In March 2020, the day before we all went home to work, I stood in our Chicago office and looked at this wall.

Our creatives painted it: the skyline, the lake, people mid-leap, and four words across the middle. “Awesomeness” was my word. They made it ours.

That wall says more about what we built than any number could. This is the story behind it.

I came to Aisle Rocket in 2006 to build its digital business from the ground up.

Our first big chapter was Sears and Kmart, in the early days of ecommerce, long before automation did the heavy lifting. We built a 200-person digital operation behind three national storefronts: a product content team in Chattanooga managing 1.6 million SKUs from 3,500 vendors, and a marketing team in Chicago refreshing about 600 ads every two weeks. Millions of transactions ran through it, and the testing taught us how shoppers actually behave. It took industrial discipline and a lot of heart.

From there we grew with our clients. We went from running retail sites to building entire brand ecosystems for Whirlpool, KitchenAid, Maytag, JennAir, Craftsman and many others, covering everything from the first moment a shopper starts looking to years of owning the product. Along the way came customer data platforms and machine-learning-powered connected products.

We never saw Aisle Rocket as an ad agency. We saw ourselves as builders who understood the shopper better than anyone, and we went after work the global agencies, and even the big consulting firms, assumed was theirs. We changed how the work was sold, too, with an agile retainer model built around outcomes and around our culture itself. Clients bought direct access to our team and the way we worked.

Chicago is a tough market for creative talent. The global agency networks are here, with bigger names and bigger offers. A retail-focused shop had to give people a better reason to come and a better reason to stay.

So I set out to build a place where talented people could do the most fulfilling work of their careers. A place where a junior designer could pitch an idea to a client, where a developer was trusted with a half-finished brief, and where the best idea won no matter whose it was.

We put words to who we were, in our own voice: bold, a little irreverent, and unmistakably us. Each value was an identity people could claim, and over time they did. The names showed up in our pitches and in the way people talked about each other.

That was the movement. A team of people proud of what they made and proud of who they made it with.

Ask anyone who worked at Aisle Rocket what made it special, and you’ll hear the same answer. The people.

The work was demanding and the standards were high. When a client sent an email at midnight, someone answered. And people still describe those years as fun, because they shared the standard with people they admired. When a team owns its standards, ambition feels like energy.

By 2020, Aisle Rocket was a thriving business: 160 people across four offices, a five-year run of year-over-year growth to multimillion-dollar revenue, and long relationships with some of the biggest names in American retail and home brands. In March 2020, we were acquired.

The buyer got far more than a client list. They got a team of motivated, creative people who wanted to be there, and a way of working strong enough to carry on without any single person, including me.

Aisle Rocket gave me the lessons I still lead by.

• Give people an identity worth living up to.Belonging is the strongest motivator I know.
• Remove the gatekeepers.Talented people do their best work with direct access to the client and the freedom to act.
• Make it safe to be wrong.Big ideas come from teams where a weak idea costs nothing.
• Team members first, customers second, stakeholders ultimately.Take care of the people, and they take care of everything else.

AI is taking over the operational work: the drafting, the sorting, the routine analysis. Productivity and efficiency, the measures we used to judge ourselves by, are becoming things machines handle well.

That puts people at the center of everything.

At Mauj, the House of Intelligence stands on three pillars: artificial intelligence, business intelligence and human intelligence. Value realization is human. Revenue exists only when a person believes your offer is worth it, and the teams who earn that belief are inspired, trusted and connected to each other.

The leaders of the next decade will be the ones who build places where talented people want to be. I did that at Aisle Rocket, and it’s what I bring to every organization I work with today.

The next morning, we all went home. The wall stayed in an empty office.

The people didn’t. They carried that culture into everything they did next. So did I.

My career is defined by the people who walked alongside me. If we’ve crossed paths before, reach out.

Careers change. The people are the legacy.

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