You’ve been meaning to do this for a while. Marketing has been the thing on the list, the thing you keep patching, outsourcing in pieces, or doing yourself at 9pm on a Tuesday night. Finally, bringing someone in-house feels like the responsible move. It’s controllable. It’s committed. It looks like the business is growing up. And it might be a $90,000/year mistake. Not because the person you hire won’t be talented. They probably will be. Because the job you’re hiring them into doesn’t actually exist yet.
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Activity Without Direction (The Vicious Cycle)
Here’s what happens. You bring someone in with genuine ability and real enthusiasm. In the first few weeks, they’re learning the business, meeting the team, getting up to speed. By week six, they’re asking questions you don’t have answers to yet:
What’s our positioning? You know it intuitively, but it’s never been written down.
Who’s our primary audience? You have a sense, but it shifts depending on who you’re talking to.
What does success look like in 90 days? Good question. You’re not exactly sure.
So they do what any capable person does in ambiguity. They get busy. They build a content calendar. They refresh the website copy. They set up a reporting dashboard. The activity looks like progress. But activity without direction isn’t momentum, it’s movement, noise. And movement without momentum is expensive. By month six, you’re wondering why it isn’t working. By month nine, you’re both frustrated. At the one year anniversary, you’re back at square one with a severance conversation and a hard lesson.The hire wasn’t the mistake. The timing was.
The Multiplier, Not the Builder
A marketing manager is a force multiplier. The critical word being multiplier. They take what exists and make it go further, faster. But you have to have something for them to multiply. A clear position in the market. A defined audience. A sales process they can feed. An honest understanding of what’s working and what isn’t. Without that foundation, you’re not hiring a force multiplier. You’re hiring someone to build the foundation while also executing on top of it, while also figuring out the strategy, while also educating you on what good looks like. That’s three jobs. It’s not fair to them, and it doesn’t serve you.
The Solution: Build the infrastructure First
The businesses that hire well at this stage do one thing differently. They build the infrastructure before the hire, not after.They get clear on positioning. They know who they’re talking to and what they need that person to believe. They have a point of view on their category that’s actually differentiated. Not “we’re better” but specifically and provably how and for whom. They’ve connected their marketing to their sales reality. And they know what success looks like in measurable terms before anyone starts. When that foundation exists, a great marketing manager hire is a rocket. When it doesn’t, it’s a very expensive way to discover you needed the foundation first. None of this means don’t hire. It means know what you’re buying.
Job or Black Hole
If the foundation is there, hire. Give them room to run, measure outcomes not activity, and stay in it long enough for the compounding to start. If it isn’t, build it first. That work is faster than you think, and it makes every dollar you spend on marketing after go significantly further.
The question isn’t whether you need a marketing manager. You probably do. The question is whether you’re hiring them into a job, or into a black hole.
If you’re not sure which one it is, that’s usually a sign. Let’s talk.