Are You Paid Enough to be This Stressed?

I’ve quit a few jobs in my short time in the working world, and one of those jobs I quit because I wasn’t paid enough to be that stressed.

Looking back at it, some might say it was akin to slave labour. The stress I was under daily to perform impossible turnaround times for tuppence, wasn’t balancing out in my head.

And so, after six months of sleepless nights and constantly thinking about work, I threw in the towel.

And now, I think it’s about time I wrote about my first and last time ever working in an agency setting.

Did the risk pay off?

Let’s take our minds reluctantly back to 2021. I was living in Liverpool, we were in lockdown and I was working from home for the American Finance company I had been working for in New York City.

Due to the pandemic, I was able to stay on at my job, but this meant my team were based both in New York and San Francisco, and I was the only one based in the UK. The work I was doing at the time was monotonous and didn’t excite me, so I was looking for a way to get back into influencer marketing and PR.

I found an influencer marketing role at an agency on LinkedIn and within a week or less, I was hired. It was the fastest hiring process I’d ever gone through, but I was incredibly excited to get back to doing what I loved.

The risk I mentioned? I took an £8,000 pay-cut in order to do so. I went from a £30,000 salary at the boring financial job, to a £22,000 salary at a remote influencer marketing agency.

Making the impossible happen

When I list out the things that I had to do during my time at this agency in conversation, I’m often asked how I didn’t have a breakdown.

For instance, for one client, I was in charge of different markets around the world – namely France, Germany, Spain, Italy and Australia. I was regularly tasked with turning around content in less than a week in these regions.

Now, imagine it’s Monday morning and you have to find, outreach, negotiate, contract, and brief influencers, create content, review, approve and get that content live by Friday. Sounds very tight, but perhaps doable.

Now add in the fact that these influencers and agents are in Australia while you’re based in the UK, so you never speak to each other on the same day. Or add in that these influencers and agents are based in Italy and don’t speak very good English.

This led to many sleepless nights, or me waking at 4am and checking my work emails to see if I could respond to an Australian agent in realtime. Or using Google Translate to negotiate fees and explain contract terms when I have no background in legal contracts.

Making influencers jump out of planes

Now onto my next stressful experience within these six months and that was arranging for influencers to jump out of planes, bungee jump, skydive and abseil down skyscrapers.

Which might have been ok if the influencers and these locations were based in the UK, but of course, they were not. While I sat behind my laptop (this time in Edinburgh), I was sending influencers in the Netherlands and Germany to go and jump out of planes and hoping everything went smoothly.

On top of that, having to make sure everything was filmed and live within two weeks. God forbid there was a storm on the day the influencer was going to drive three hours across Germany to go and skydive.

But like the previous example, it all worked out and I managed to complete it without anyone dying or getting injured.

It’s just not worth it

I loved that I was back to working with influencers and talent agents again and working on some really cool campaigns, however the stress just didn’t make it feel worth it.

Had there been longer lead times, and I was able to work in markets where I spoke the language (and was in a relatively similar timezone), then I think I may still be at that same agency today.

The work was fun, but the stress and pressure weren’t. The turnaround at this agency seems to prove that others might feel the same way that I do, not to mention the very low salary in comparison to other influencer agencies around.

Some things I’m thankful for having worked here is that I now value work-life balance, I value not being stressed at my job, and I know that I never want to work in an agency setting ever again.

To conclude, I definitely wasn’t paid enough to be that stressed at an entry-level job, and your mental wellbeing is much more important than an influencer posting a TikTok.