Last time I talked about the insight gap: the expensive habit of running marketing without really knowing why your best customers chose you.

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If that one landed, here's what tends to come next.

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"Okay. So we need to do the research. And then... we need someone to do something about it."

That's the moment a lot of founders reach for a hire.

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And it's often the most expensive mistake they make.

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The Hire That Makes Things Worse

I want to be specific about this, because I've watched it play out more times than I'd like.

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Founder gets to a point where growth feels inconsistent. They've got a small team running activity. Something isn't working, but they can't quite name what. So they decide what they need is senior marketing leadership. They hire a Head of Growth, or a VP Marketing, or a Director of Demand Gen with an impressive CV.

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Six months later: the hire is frustrated. The team is spinning. The founder is back in the weeds. And the growth is still inconsistent.

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Not because the hire was wrong. Because the hire came before the decisions.

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A marketer, even a great one, needs a few things in place before they can do anything useful: a clear position in the market, a defined customer, a view on which channels are worth prioritising, and a founder who's genuinely ready to delegate. Without those, you're not giving them a job. You're giving them a puzzle. And you're paying senior rates for them to piece it together.

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What the Right Structure Actually Looks Like

The honest answer is: it depends on where you are. But there are patterns I see work consistently.

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In the early messy middle, before you have repeatable growth, the highest-leverage move is almost never a full-time senior hire. It's fractional. You get the thinking, the strategy, the decisions, without the overhead of a full-time salary before you've earned the right to spend it. You bring in specialist execution underneath that, usually a small number of people who know exactly what they're doing in their lane.

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The fractional model works because it buys you two things: time and information. Time to generate enough revenue that a full-time senior hire makes financial sense. And information to know what direction you're actually going in, so that when you do hire, you're hiring into something real. Too many founders make the full-time hire while both of those are still unclear, and they end up paying to find out what fractional would have told them for a fraction of the cost.

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Once you're moving and the model is working, then you hire. You hire into a role that has a clear brief, a clear budget, and a clear owner. Not into a vacuum.

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The most common pattern I see go wrong is the reverse: hire someone senior into an undefined role and hope they create the structure. Occasionally a brilliant operator pulls this off. More often it costs the founder twelve months and significant goodwill with the team.

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What Good Looks Like in the Messy Middle

It doesn't look like a busy marketing team.

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It looks like:

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• A founder who can say, in two sentences, what makes them different and who they're for
• A small team with clear ownership over a small number of channels
• A metric or two that actually connects marketing activity to revenue
• Regular decisions being made, not endless discussion about strategy

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That's it. Quieter than most founders expect. Less activity. More clarity.

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The messy middle is hard because it requires restraint. You're tempted to add: more people, more channels, more content, more spend. The instinct is to grow your way through uncertainty. But usually what's needed is the opposite: strip it back, make the call, then build.

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The One Thing to Do This Week

Before you think about your next marketing hire, answer this: what would you put in their brief?

Not a job description. A brief. What are they responsible for? What does success look like in six months? What decisions have already been made that they'll be working within?

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If you can't answer those clearly, the problem isn't the hire. It's the decisions that need to come before it.

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Drop me an email if this is where you are. I'm happy to think it through with you.

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P.S. Next time we're going into channels. Specifically: how to decide which two or three are actually worth your time right now, and how to stop spreading your budget across things none of you genuinely believe in. See you Thursday.‍