A Bloomberg piece landed in my feed this week. UK startups are being founded at the fastest rate in two years. But they’re creating an average of just 2.7 jobs each. That’s one less than a decade ago.

One founder summed it up: “My team is ChatGPT and Gemini.”

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If you’re currently trying to figure out how to build a marketing function, I imagine that lands one of two ways. Either it feels like permission to stay lean. Or it feels completely overwhelming, because the goalposts keep moving and you still don’t know what you actually need.

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And to be fair, both reactions make complete sense.

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The shape of a marketing team has changed more in the last year than in the previous ten. And in some cases, more in the last two weeks than the last two years. I want to try and make sense of it for you.

What’s actually changed

Not long ago, the assumption was that you’d scale your marketing team in a fairly predictable way. You’d start with a generalist, add a content person, bring on someone for demand gen, and eventually layer in specialists as you grew. There was a rough playbook.

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That playbook is now out of date.

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The roles that used to sit at the bottom of the org chart - admin, content support, junior research, basic copywriting - are increasingly being handled by AI tools. Not perfectly, and not without human oversight. But well enough that founders are making do without hiring for them (in the early days).

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At the same time, the skills that are genuinely hard to replace and are more valuable than ever: strategic thinking, customer understanding, positioning, judgment. The gap between “we have some marketing activity” and “we have a marketing function that actually drives growth” is getting wider, not narrower.

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And I’m seeing, across my own team and clients, that the people earlier in their careers are leaning into this shift by obsessively testing tools, sharing what they learn, building skills fast. And with this, they are moving quicker than any previous generation could. But they still need direction. They still need real life experience and someone who knows where to point them.

Fewer all-rounders, more specialists

One of the clearest patterns I’m seeing is that the junior all-rounder role is becoming harder to justify. Not because those people aren’t talented, but because AI has absorbed a lot of what used to fill their day.

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What teams actually need now is a different mix. Something closer to:

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• Strategic leadership: someone who can set direction, make calls, and connect marketing to commercial outcomes
• Deep channel expertise: someone who genuinely understands the mechanics of SEO, paid, content, or wherever your buyers actually spend time
• AI-fluent execution: someone who can work with tools intelligently and produce output at pace, without losing quality
• Customer and data insight: someone who can make sense of what the numbers and conversations are telling you

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These don’t all need to be separate hires. But they do need to be covered. The question is how.

The case for staying lean and de-risking the hire

Here’s where I’d push back on the idea that “staying lean” just means keeping headcount low. Done well, it means being intentional about what you bring in-house and when.

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One of the most expensive mistakes I see founders make is hiring a full-time marketer before they know what they actually need. They bring someone in with a broad brief, and six months later they realise the role doesn’t quite fit. The skills are wrong. The level is wrong. The budget’s been spent.

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Working with fractional experts first changes that dynamic. You get access to senior thinking and specialist skills without committing to a permanent hire. You get to test and learn — both what’s working in your marketing, and what kind of expertise you actually need at your side on a daily basis. And when you’re ready to hire in-house, you’re doing it with far more clarity.

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At The Scale Up Collective, this is a big part of what we do. We work with founders to get marketing moving in the right direction, and we help them understand what the team around it should look like. Sometimes that means staying fractional for longer. Sometimes it means we help them write the brief for their first in-house hire and hand it over gracefully. Either way, the decision gets made with evidence, not guesswork.

A rough guide to what ‘small but mighty’ looks like by stage

Every business is different, but if you’re trying to get your bearings, here’s how I’d think about it:

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Early stage (1–2 people)

Your priority is getting the basics right: capturing leads, starting to nurture them, and understanding what’s actually working. AI tools do a lot of the heavy lifting on content and research. Your job is to make smart decisions about where to focus. Avoid buying expensive tools before you have a clear use case, and don’t underestimate how much time a basic CRM will save you.

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Growth stage (3–5 people)

You’ve found something that works and now you need to scale it. This is where channel expertise really starts to matter — someone who lives and breathes SEO/GEO, or paid, or ABM, rather than someone who does a bit of everything. You also need cleaner data and better attribution so you’re not flying blind on where to invest.

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Scaling stage (5+ people)

The team is larger but the risk at this point is sprawl — too many tools with poor adoption, disconnected data, and unclear ownership. The businesses that scale well at this stage are the ones that invested in orchestration early: centralising data, building clean attribution, and making sure marketing and sales are genuinely aligned.

So what should you actually do?

If you’re feeling confused about what your marketing team should look like right now, you’re not behind. You’re paying attention. The landscape is genuinely uncertain, and anyone who tells you there’s one right answer is probably trying to sell you something.

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What I’d suggest:

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• Get really clear on what problem you’re trying to solve before you hire anyone. Is it awareness? Pipeline? Retention? The answer shapes everything
• Use fractional support to cover strategic gaps while you figure out what you need in-house. It’s lower risk and higher learning
• When you do hire, hire for depth in one area rather than breadth across all of them. The all-rounder is a tough ask in this market
• Don’t underestimate what AI can and can’t do. It’s a brilliant execution tool. It’s not a strategy

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The opportunity to build a marketing function that’s genuinely fit for where things are heading. You just need to build it differently than you would have two years ago.

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As always, happy to talk through what this looks like for your business specifically.