What works today is
already dying.

If you look at Brooke Cullison's resume, the story is incredibly legible. It is a straight, steep line up the mountain.

She drove 400% revenue growth at FOCL. She doubled DTC revenue at Liquid I.V. She runs media and acquisition at Neuro. She wrote a book on retention over the summer. If you met her at an industry mixer, the applause would write itself.

But remember the premise: You will spend your whole career being congratulated for the wrong thing.

People will applaud the numbers, completely missing the specific, ruthless psychology it took to hit them. What actually separates Brooke isn't her ability to scale a brand. It's her profound, almost clinical acceptance that what works today is already dying.

The Expiration of "Now"

In performance marketing, the dashboard is a tyrant that begs you to live in the present. It points to the audience converting today and tells you to pour every dollar there. The celebrated, highly legible choice is to do exactly that, harvest the low-hanging fruit, hit your quarterly target, and let the future worry about itself.

Brooke knows the low-hanging fruit has an expiration date.

While everyone else rides a winning channel until it breaks, Brooke assumes it's already breaking.

"I can go after the low-hanging fruit today — but what's gonna happen in six months when it's no longer there?"Brooke Cullison

When customer acquisition costs spiral out of control, most marketers panic and start optimizing buttons. Brooke accepts the reality because she's focused on the long game. She's divested from the dopamine hit of the immediate win to build an ecosystem that actually lasts, which is why she wrote The Growth Loop, a book focused on keeping your customer. She accepts a much higher degree of difficulty today so the company can win tomorrow.

"If you invest in bringing your customers back, you can then go and leverage a higher CAC to outbid your competitors."Brooke Cullison

Engineering for the Next Era

That exact same philosophy of embracing the expiration of the present is the defining signature of her leadership.

She applies that same ticking clock to her junior team. The low-hanging fruit of management is to just do the work yourself. When a junior employee writes a bad brief, it is infinitely faster to line-edit it and move on.

Brooke refuses and instead spends the time coaching. She sits down, explains the why, and forces them to stumble through the first draft themselves. She calls it intense work, but she does it because she knows her current team's capabilities can't stay stagnant; they'll need to evolve and level up. As the company scales, she will need them to be more senior. She isn't just managing a team; she is engineering operators who are ready to rise with the business.

And then, after all of this painstaking investment, a team member might hint that they are ready to move on. Most managers spend weeks in denial, trying to freeze the current era in place or getting bitter about the lost time.

Brooke accepts the reality because she is always focused on the long-term game. She finds a genuine reason to be excited for that person and their next move. Then, she wakes up the next morning and drafts a new org chart and job description before the resignation is even finalized. The current era is over, and she is already building the next one.

Planting Seeds

When you look closely, you can see this has always been her playbook: a long-term investment in the future, the next generation, the thing that is next.

Long before she was a VP, back in 2013, she was doing the grueling work of putting books into the hands of underprivileged children for Milk + Bookies. Tie everything Brooke has done together, and it all comes down to planting the seed for the world that she wants to be in, because she knows tomorrow is coming.

I can personally vouch for this, because I watched her do it just a few days ago. We were talking about CartStars, which we built primarily for executive leaders. It would be incredibly easy to just focus on the present and on the senior people already in the room. But Brooke was already looking past the immediate win, actively mapping out how we can build a bridge to mentor the next generation of operators — the exact people we need to hire now and the exact people who will be executives in a few years.

CEOs and boards will cheer for her doubled revenue. They will miss the quiet foresight it took to build the foundation under it. Brooke fought the dashboard, she embraced the expiration of now, and she built the future.

I am incredibly lucky to call her a friend.

For her relentless focus, for her relentless desire to grow, and for her candid admission of the fact that nothing in life is permanent:

She is seen.