Hiring any employee is rarely just about filling a seat. At a certain stage in business, it becomes one of the most commercially significant decisions you make.
I see it often in growing, owner-led businesses. Revenue is steady. The team is expanding. Marketing feels inconsistent. The natural response is simple:
“We need to hire someone.”
And sometimes you do.
But before you advertise that marketing role, it’s worth stepping back and asking a more strategic question.
What are we actually hiring for?
The real cost of an unclear hire
Most hiring mistakes don’t happen because someone is incompetent. They happen because the role was unclear from the start. Which leads to unclear expectations and subjective performance.
When we’re not clear on what we need to do, frustration builds on both sides.
Research by Geoff Smart and Randy Street (in their book Who) suggests a hiring mistake can cost up to fifteen times the employee’s monthly salary. Not because people are “bad hires”, but because misalignment compounds.
Time is spent correcting
Re-directing
Re-explaining
Re-doing
The deeper issue isn’t capability.
It’s clarity.
Are you hiring for marketing activity or marketing leadership?
Marketing is particularly vulnerable to this trap. The first instinct is often “let’s hire a junior, they can run our socials.”
But content creation is not the same as strategic marketing leadership.
Posting more frequently won’t fix unclear positioning. Redesigning the website won’t fix a lack of strategy. And running ads won’t solve misaligned targets.
Before hiring, you need to define:
What commercial outcome is this role responsible for?
How does it link directly to the business strategy?
Who owns the budget?
Who sets the priorities?
Who is accountable for results?
If those answers aren’t clear, hiring won’t reduce your pressure. It will increase it. On the flip side, if you – the owner – are still going to have all those decisions sitting with you, it’s not going to reduce your pressure either.
Right person. Right seat. Right stage.
Jim Collins famously wrote, in his book Good to Great, that the most important decisions in business are not what decisions, but who decisions.
Who is the right person, for the right seat, at the right stage of growth.
In a $3-6 million business looking to scale, marketing stops being tactical. It becomes a strategic growth lever.
Marketing becomes a lever for growth, influencing revenue targets and shaping brand positioning in the market. It impacts pricing, and works hand in hand with sales to ensure a pipeline of enquiry.
That level of responsibility requires leadership thinking.
Not just execution.
This is where a fractional CMO makes sense
Many growing businesses assume their only options are:
Hire a junior marketer.
Recruit a full-time marketer.
Keep doing it themselves.
But there is another option.
A fractional CMO steps into the business at a senior level, owning the marketing function. They operate at executive level, without the commitment of a full-time 40-hour role. Instead, you access senior marketing leadership at a scale and investment level proportionate to your stage of growth.
A fractional CMO will:
Align marketing objectives to commercial targets.
Set priorities and a 12-month rhythm.
Establish reporting and accountability.
Mentor team members if and when they are hired.
In other words, they create structure. Then they build the team around it (if a team is even needed).
Getting clear, from the outset
Like anything in life, when we define what we want, it makes it easy to achieve it.
Hiring and growing our team is no different. Firstly, define the outcome and then define the path to achieve it.
If you’re still wearing the marketing hat in your business, then it probably is time to remove it. Bringing in senior marketing ownership to support you and your team will help deliver clarity, accountability and growth.
And when marketing has proper ownership, it stops being a drain on your time and starts acting as the growth lever it should be.
Jacqui Gage-Brown
📷 One deliberate shot at a time. Get the strategy right before you commit (promise my strategy is way better than my golf!).
