My Year of the Tiger | Daniel Kotlinski

I have been working at Tigers since 2018. I started as the first non-operational person hired at the company - my job was to stabilize the marketing process of the company' s own brand, as well as to scale it up. Coming to the company, I was comfortable working with a brand that was already recognizable, but strongly connected to the personal brand of its founder, Francis. I set myself the goal of broadening the brand's perception - so as to make its image at least to some extent independent of a specific person. As a marketing manager, I managed to achieve a lot - including transforming our blog into an educational platform Knowledge Base (today's Tiger's House), becoming co-author of the 3rd edition of the "Book of Ads", growing the group on FB from 3 to 14 thousand members, helping to start mastermind meetings around the Tigers Social brand in 12 cities across Poland, creating and promoting our first educational products, inventing and independently organizing 3 editions of Tigers United. I created the communication and Employer Branding strategy at Tigers and implemented it across all communication channels. I coordinated the company's publishing process, which involved practically all specialists (a sizable editorial team would have been out of it!). Throughout this time, I co-founded brand management, participating in our strategy trips year after year. I am one of the last two people still working at the company who co-created our vision, mission and values. After 3 years, my appetite was only growing - I really wanted to tackle the challenges of our clients, so I decided to expand into strategy. In 2022, I completed more than 20 strategic projects, creating and positioning brands working with Tigers in digital. I brought Ola into the world of strategy, who moved from Social Media to Strategy and is the second full-time strategist for our clients. I just finished recruiting a third strategist. I conceived and implemented a series of internal Strategist's Club meetups (3 editions behind us!). I recorded an online course on the topic of communication strategy design, which went around as the best seller of all our digital products. I took part in RUNMAGEDDON to immerse myself in the topic before creating a strategy for the brand....

And below you will find my questionnaire, where I will tell you more about it!

Your three biggest accomplishments are.

The order is random, all equally important:

1. Supporting the business - winning a tender to support one of the largest entertainment apps in the world
2. Own your product - selling out in 1.5 weeks of 12 seats of my first open training on communication strategy design (we opened enrollment for December - check details)
3. Personal branding - 200,000 reach of my profile on LinkedIn in 2022 (so far!).

What turns me on the most at work is perfectly expressed in a passage from Gallup's talent description "Discovery," which I have in TOP5:

I'm delighted when I manage to uncover underneath the complicated surface some pertinent, simple concept that explains the nature of things. An idea is a connection. I have the type of mind that always tells me to look for connections, and so I am intrigued when I see some hidden connection in seemingly unrelated phenomena.

Boris Marushchak, Senior Team Leader at Tigers:

From an internal work perspective, working with Daniel has been very developmental, although challenging at times. On the one hand, my own struggle with a sense of inadequate knowledge in strategic topics, and on the other, Daniel's dominant qualities like support, caring and curiosity - create a unique space to realize my own potential.

Ola Bulanda, Junior Strategy Planner at Tigers:

Working with Daniel is a cosmic experience - strategy lives in every cell of his body. He is able to ask such pertinent questions like no one else, that he always successfully finds the answer he is looking for. The projects that come out of his hand uniquely combine hard KPIs with creative realizations. And his wide-eyed perspective always puts him ahead of the competition.

The biggest challenge and how you dealt with it....

I remember it very clearly - July 15, 2021. A moment of overwork, overheating contacts, taking more than I could carry, in areas where I didn't want to grow at all - but I was so rushed with wheelbarrows that I didn't notice that most of them were empty... in addition - a few months after crossing the magic 30. At the time, I wrote a text that included a passage:

In all of this, I realized, first of all, that until now I had not treated myself with any kind of attentiveness. I was a "means of transportation" to achieve goals. For a long time (perhaps never?) I had not heard my voice speaking to myself.

Around that time it occurred to me that I would not develop on the managerial path (although at the time it seemed to be the only way to do super big things) and I wanted to focus on competence development - to be an expert in a specific field. It's creating that gives me fun, motivation and a sense of freedom; working on projects, not people ;-) For 3 months I worked on myself in a coaching program, changed my diet, started running. But most of all - I got very strong and immediate support from the organization. We reorganized my responsibilities so that I could find my place in the company, and Francis referred me to a proven coach. Since then, I've made a huge professional leap, focusing on a very specific area of expertise - and I think I've learned as much in a year as I did in the previous 3 years!

What developed you...

Leadership support from Karolina Kawska, mentoring conversations with Francis, daily collaboration with my favorite strategist Ola Bulanda, great and difficult cases from our clients (RUNMAGEDDON and KABAK are the most developing ones).

What has changed in your perception of work/social media/digital marketing/sales....

That any change in an unsatisfactory situation never begins with dithering over a tool, but with a thorough understanding of the source of the problem. I used some time ago the statement that the strategist's task is to "split the problem" into as small components as possible and work in concentration on the chosen issue. Besides - that patience and consistency in action is the most underrated "competitive advantage" in the market.

Most satisfying moment...

The information that we sold out my open training on communication strategy, and then that we have a client for the implementation of the same in a closed format. That's tens of thousands in pre-sale revenue - and it's not the amount itself, but the fact that I've managed to build a personal brand based on trust. People recognize me at conferences or write to me, acknowledging that they associate my content and business point of view - it's damn driving and gives gigantic satisfaction in what I do.

Advice to myself from a year ago....

No nervous movements - it's just a natural dopamine hole that is about to be washed away by a wave of fresh excitement about the next project.