Marketing Isn’t That Hard (After You’ve Seen What a Real Crisis Looks Like)
Erin Balsa’s story might be the most grounded take on success I’ve heard in years.
Hey 👋 I’m Andrew - and welcome to the Delivering Value Substack, where I write about the stuff growth leaders don’t always talk about: lessons from the trenches, honest convos with other leaders, and what I’m learning as I build my business solo.
This post is part of my Candid Convos series, where I chat with SaaS leaders to unpack the toughest moments in their careers - and explore how they navigated ‘em.
Erin Balsa was holding an iced coffee in one hand and a clipboard in the other when the girl made a run for it.
It was a summer afternoon. Shift change at the residential center where Erin supervised a unit of teens with behavioral challenges. These were kids who had been through major life challenges: abuse, incarceration, trauma.
And this girl was fast.
Erin dropped her iced coffee, clipboard, and sprinted after her. She caught her at the end of the long driveway. Restrained her. Then hugged her.
The girl was crying. “Please,” she begged, “I just can’t be here anymore.”
Years later, Erin still gets emotional remembering that moment.
“So now when something goes sideways in marketing? I don’t get stressed. Like… I’ve seen real crisis” she shared.
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She didn’t take the traditional path into content marketing. She took the long one.
Erin grew up on a one-lane road in southern Rhode Island.
Her neighbors were eccentric, artistic, and often shirtless. “One guy used to burp the alphabet for us when we walked home from school.”
Her parents were just as unconventional. Her dad was a welder who moonlighted as a school janitor on weekends. Her family once scooped up a dead fox from the side of the road to have it taxidermied.
She grew up artistic, a little wild, but always a good student. She went to college at Bryant and eventually transferred to UMass Dartmouth to study English and get certified to teach.
Her twenties were spent teaching in public schools, working in detention centers, and supervising at-risk teens.
The money was tough. One job paid her just $27,000 a year. She got a penny raise the next year. Literally, one penny per hour more. “So when people in tech complain about getting a 2% raise, I’m like… yo, I got a penny raise once. A literal penny. Couldn’t even buy a gumball with it” she shared laughing.
But the work was really rewarding, especially when the kids would open up to her on long drives through the city.
They’d save up reward points for months just to spend an afternoon driving around, drinking iced coffee, talking about life. It was human and messy and emotionally intense, and it gave Erin a kind of emotional stamina that most marketers and tech employees never build.
“I think that's why I don’t get rattled,” she says. “When you’ve worked in that kind of environment, the drama in tech just doesn’t hit the same.”
She was always creative. She just didn’t know it could pay the bills.
Somewhere along the line, Erin started a personal blog.
After work, she’d come home, crack open her laptop, and write about her life. She didn’t know much about SEO or audience building at the time.
She just posted links on Facebook.
And her friends loved it. “You should be a writer!” they kept saying. So when she spotted an Assistant Editor job listing for Providence Magazine, she was interested. She didn’t have a professional writing background, but she figured why not - and took a shot. They gave her a writing test and an editing test. She passed both.
Suddenly she was covering restaurants, local artists, events, and business owners.
It was fast-paced, creative, and high-stakes in a different way (once something went to print, it was final). She was finally getting paid to use the creative muscles she’d had all along.
That role became her launchpad into content marketing.
She freelanced on the side, learned how to manage projects, got picked up by startups, and eventually worked her way into a Director of Content role at Predictive Index.
The leap into solopreneurship wasn’t scary, because she’d already done harder things.
At Predictive Index, Erin had what most people would call a great job.
Solid salary.
Supportive boss.
A team she’d helped grow.
She also had a growing audience on Linkedin. And her DMs were full of people asking for help:
Can you help us write research reports?
Can you coach our content team?
Can you audit our strategy?
At first, it felt flattering to be recognized for her craft.
But over time, it became harder to ignore the pull. The freedom. The creativity. The feeling of doing high-impact work, but on her own terms. So she did something most people would be too scared to do… she told her employer that she planned to leave.
She gave them six months notice, helped them hire and train her replacement, and started her solopreneur journey.
Her first year on her own, Erin made more money than she ever had in-house. Year two was even better - she was booked out, energized, fully in her zone of genius. But then came baby number three. And an international move, from Massachusetts to England.
Year three hit differently.
“It was really hard. Trying to adapt my family to a new country… it was gray, and we didn’t know England. I had no friends or family.
I’ve only been working part-time last year and this year.
So how much can you really grow a business if you only have three days a week to even do your client work?”
And then her vision started to go.
She was trying to sign a receipt at a restaurant when she realized she couldn’t see what she was writing.
At first, she brushed it off. But the fog didn’t clear. Something was off. And eventually, she was diagnosed with cataracts - extremely rare for someone her age.
And that’s when the questions came.
What if it gets worse?
What if I can’t see at all?
How much of this business depends on me - my brain, my eyes, my energy?
She started thinking about how to protect the life she was building. Letting go of the custom work that ran on urgency and creative sprints. And focusing instead on research reports, which were more repeatable, proven, and easier to deliver on her own terms.
She realized she didn’t want to grow a huge business. She wasn’t interested in scaling for the sake of it.
Most of us spend years trying to “get ahead.”
Chasing titles, obsessing over metrics, convincing ourselves everything’s urgent. In the process, we train ourselves to treat deadlines like emergencies. And convince ourselves that we’re more important than we really are.
But here’s the truth:
Working in tech is fun, challenging, and rewarding. The work can be meaningful. But in the grand-scheme of life, it’s not that important.
In 5 years, nobody will remember that campaign.
(writing that to my former-self, who treated everything like it was life or death - and sacrificed my mental health in the process.)
But the people you showed up for - and the impact you have on others… That’s what really matters.
Catch Erin’s entire story on YouTube
Listen on Spotify
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