Summary
The myth says specialists drive growth. The truth? Generalists are the reason businesses survive long enough to grow at all.
There’s a mythology in modern business: success belongs to the specialist. The ad buyer who only touches Google. The designer who only does logos. The copywriter who only writes headlines. Respect to all of them.
But here’s the problem: most businesses don’t run on neat swim lanes. Especially not startups, nonprofits, or scrappy companies trying to grow without the budgets of Fortune 100s. They run on generalists — the people who do literally everything.
And I don’t mean “wearing a couple hats.” I mean the milliner who makes all the hats, puts them on, and still has to take the call when the DNS records fail at midnight.
What Being a Marketing Generalist Really Looks Like
If you know, you know. If you don’t, here’s what it looks like in reality.
One day it’s:
- Spinning up a new website from scratch — CMS, SEO, CSS, HTML, forms, APIs, the whole messy soup.
- Shooting video, cutting it, adding a voice track, and syncing music before midnight.
- Drafting an email sequence, setting up deliverability records, and testing why Gmail decided your subject line looked like spam.
The next day it’s:
- Designing a PowerPoint template that won’t implode when someone pastes in a chart.
- Running a campaign in three ad platforms, while building custom audiences from CRM data you cleaned yourself.
- Answering the dreaded client line: “Can you just make it pop?”
And yes, the answer is always: of course.
The Economics Nobody Talks About
Specialists are a luxury. Generalists are survival.
Half of startups don’t fail due to bad ideas — they fail because no one can execute across disciplines. That’s where generalists keep businesses alive.
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Startups don’t ship without generalists. Nonprofits don’t raise money without them. Entire growth engines stay alive only because some one person knows how all the moving parts connect.
Economists talk about “comparative advantage.” Here’s the irony: generalists are the ultimate comparative advantage. We bridge disciplines. We see connections. We absorb complexity and turn it into clarity. And when AI slices off narrow tasks, who’s left standing? The ones who can pull the tools, the data, the design, and the story into one coherent system.
The Myth of “Not Possible”
I’ve lost count of how many times someone has said: “No way you can do all that.”
But here’s the truth: many of us can. And do. Not because we’re magical unicorns, but because real life demanded it. When budgets are thin, when timelines collapse, when leadership needs both strategy and execution, generalists are the ones who step up.
We’re not confused. We’re fluent in chaos. And we’re good enough at everything to make real results happen sooner than later.
Generalists Get Stuff Done
When projects catch fire, no one calls a narrowly scoped specialist. They call the person who can seamlessly switch between a strategy deck, an ad account, a code editor, and a Canva file without blinking.
That’s the generalist. That’s us.
We don’t always get the credit. But we’re the reason launches happen, campaigns run, and businesses survive long enough to hire those specialists later.
A Word to My Fellow Generalists
If you’re reading this and nodding, I want you to hear this clearly: you are not a “jack of all trades, master of none.”
You are the Swiss Army Knife of growth. The margin of resilience in an economy obsessed with efficiency. The connective tissue that keeps brands alive when resources don’t match ambition.
So own it. Stop apologizing for your range because your fluency in chaos is your edge. Specialists may define the edges of craft. But generalists? We hold the whole thing together.
And in a world increasingly run by AI, that human ability to see the system — not just the part — is exactly what will keep us irreplaceable. And because we’re generalists, AI is just another tool in our repertoire that we wield with precision.
Final Word
We don’t just “do marketing.” We do markets. We do the connections. We do the full arc from vision to execution. We live and breathe strategy.
So here’s to the generalists. The firefighters, the builders, the fixers, the strategists, the late-night troubleshooters. The people who ship.
Your job title may not fit in a tweet, but you are the reason brands breathe.
— Sterling Phoenix
