You need a marketing team
and you've never built one
I design the function, stand up the systems, then recruit and onboard the people who own it — running it myself while it's being staffed. Six months later you have a hired, onboarded team in seats running documented systems.
Is this you?
- You just raised, the board expects a GTM plan, and "marketing" is currently a founder and a part-time designer.
- You know you need marketing hires but can't write the job description with confidence.
- You've been burned by an agency that executed hard against the wrong plan.
- You want the function in-house eventually — you just don't want to build it by trial and error.
If you recognised at least three of those, keep reading. If none of them landed, one of the other two tracks probably fits better.
What I do, month by month
00
Review
Thirty minutes on your stage, your motion and what the function needs to do. Three observations prepared in advance.
Free · 30 min
01
Teardown
The full diagnostic — twelve audit areas — plus org design for your stage: what the function must do, in what order, and who does it. Out: a roadmap and a staffing plan.
Month 1
02
Build
Foundations first: positioning, site, CRM, attribution, content ops. I run the function myself while roles are defined, comp is benchmarked and candidates are sourced.
Months 2–3
03
Run
Execution at full pace while hires start and onboard against written first-90-day plans. Every system they inherit is documented the week it's built.
Months 4–5
04
Transfer
The team takes the controls. I step back to review cadence, hand over the playbooks, and leave a job spec for the leadership hire when you're ready for one.
Month 6
What you get at month six
- A hired, onboarded marketing team — typically two to three people, not six — in seats and shipping.
- Role definitions, comp benchmarks and first-90-day plans for every seat.
- The full stack, stood up and documented: CRM, attribution, automation, content ops.
- Written playbooks for every recurring motion: campaigns, events, content, reporting.
- A 30-day handoff plan and an honest recommendation on what the function needs next.
What I need from you
- Hiring budget and the authority to use it — the plan dies if requisitions stall for a quarter.
- A decision-maker in the monthly review and in final interviews.
- Access to sales data and your customer conversations; positioning gets built from evidence.
- An internal owner-in-waiting: someone who will hold the function after the handoff.
Where AI fits in this track
Build is where AI-native pays off hardest: the function is designed around instrumented systems from day one, so you hire two or three people running pipelines instead of six running spreadsheets. That's the difference between a team you can afford and a department you can't.
Relevant work
The closest published work: Motivo Engineering — a marketing and BD function designed, built and run from zero, systems included.
Motivo Engineering case studyRelevant industries
Questions about Build
What should our first marketing hire actually be?
Almost never a CMO, and almost never an intern. For most Series A hardware companies it's a technically-literate generalist who can write, run a CRM and own a program end to end — reporting to a plan someone senior validated. The Teardown answers it specifically for your company, because it depends on your motion.
Do you do the recruiting yourselves?
I write the role definitions, benchmark compensation, source and screen candidates, and sit in the final interviews with you. You make the hire — it's your team. If you already work with a recruiter, I'll run them against a real spec instead of a title.
What if we can't hire fast enough?
The function doesn't wait. I run it myself while seats are being filled, so pipeline work starts in month two, not after onboarding. If hiring drags past month six, we either extend or switch to the Run track until your people are in place.
How big a team are we talking about?
Smaller than you fear. Because the systems are AI-native from day one — signal monitoring, enrichment, reporting automation — most Series A–B hardware companies need two to three people, not six. The org design is scoped to your stage and motion in month one.
Structure, terms and the month-three checkpoint are on the engagements page. The method behind all three tracks is on the Approach page. Month one is the Teardown.
Bring me your hardest go-to-market problem
Thirty minutes. I'll come with three observations about your market already prepared. No deck.