Why I left a brand team to do this alone

Since I started in marketing there were only ever two endings I could picture: climb the ladder inside a brand until the title said director, CMO, maybe further, or build my own agency. I did not know which one it would be. It turned out the first one trained me for the second.

Intern, part time, full time

I started at Bonduelle as an intern with some marketing coursework and very little design experience. The internship covered websites, social, strategy, creative, mood boards. The internship turned into a part-time job, thirty to forty hours a week while I finished school. Graduation turned it into a full-time role.

And then I just took on everything. Websites, graphic design, print ads, Instacart ads, landing pages, emails, whatever needed doing across the marketing and creative ecosystem. I never wanted to be pigeonholed into one lane. If something needed to exist and nobody owned it, I raised my hand.

If I didn't know how to do it, I'd figure it out by doing it.

The trust is the whole story

None of that works without a team that lets it happen. My managers, my directors, the executives I got to sit with, they handed me real projects knowing I might not know how to do them yet, and trusted that I would figure it out. That trust is the reason I am here. If Bonduelle had not given me that opportunity, I would be nowhere near where I am today, and I know it.

We worked with agencies too, and watching that work taught me something I could not unlearn: the things they delivered were achievable. Not easy, but learnable. The only thing between me and that work was doing it enough times. So I did it enough times.

Learn by doing. That is the entire method.

The jump

Toward the end, old coworkers started sending me inquiries. I reached out to local businesses and saw what I could actually offer them, and it was more than I expected. People I respected told me, in their own ways, that I was on the right track. When the people who watched you work believe you can do it alone, you start believing it too.

I left in March of 2026 and freelanced for a few months. In September I stopped calling it freelancing. Carterative is a one-man agency, on purpose: everything I learned to do inside a brand team, offered straight to brands, with nothing in between.

I expected a lot out of myself since I was a kid. This is me finding out how far that goes.