Your first marketing hire can't also be your strategy

"Hire a scrappy generalist first. Someone keen, capable and affordable who can do a bit of everything."

It's the standard advice for a first marketing hire, and half of it is right. A good junior generalist can do a lot.

The half that's wrong is the part nobody says out loud: that they'll also work out the strategy.

One hire, three jobs

A first marketer is usually handed three different jobs at once.

Decide who the company is for, what to say and where to say it.

Do the work: campaigns, content, the website, the CRM.

Prove what's working and what isn't.

The first needs experience and authority. The second needs time. The third needs both. A good junior hire can be excellent at the second and grow into the third. Few can do the first, especially while the founder is still changing their mind.

Without direction, they get busy

When nobody has set the direction, a junior marketer does the only sensible thing. They stay busy. Posts, a newsletter, a webinar, a refreshed sales deck. Activity is visible and easy to defend.

Then the founder asks what's working, and nobody can say, because the choices that would answer it were decisions only the founder could make.

The salary is the cheapest part of that mistake. The real costs come later: a year of activity that didn't build on itself, a capable person who leaves believing they failed, and a founder who now thinks marketing doesn't work for their business. The next hire starts further back than the first.

The most organised person in the company

A founder I worked with had a first marketing hire who'd become exactly that. They kept the content calendar moving, coordinated freelancers, ran the CRM, published the newsletter and got every campaign out on time.

The problem showed up when the founder asked what marketing should do next. The marketer had a list of possible campaigns, but no basis for choosing between them. Search, webinars or content? Which segment? More leads, or helping sales convert the ones they already had?

So decisions were made by default. The marketer chose what they knew how to deliver, the founder approved what sounded promising, and months later the business had a functioning marketing operation and no explanation of how any of it was meant to produce growth.

The fix started with the founder. They committed to the customers they most wanted to win, the problem they wanted to be known for solving and the commercial outcome marketing should move. Where that needed expertise the founder didn't have, the answer was experienced strategic support, not leaving the junior hire to guess. Then the marketer got a defined plan to run, measure and learn from, and a job they could actually grow in.

Three ways to set the hire up

Hire senior and give them room. Someone who has built a marketing function before will set the direction and do much of the work themselves in the first year. It costs more, and it's the right call if you can afford it.

Set the direction first, then hire to execute. Get the positioning, the ideal customer and the priorities written down before the hire starts. If you can't do it alone, a fractional CMO can set it and hand it to a capable junior.

Write the role around one outcome. "Book 20 qualified demos a quarter from operations leads at mid-sized companies" is a job. "Own marketing" is a hope.

Whichever you choose, write down which decisions the hire can make alone and which come back to you.