Your first marketing hire should be an execution generalist who takes over the marketing you are already doing. At this stage the strategy lives in your head and it works. What you are short of is hours.
The plan stays yours. Your own calendar decides which work leaves your desk first.
A founder sent me her calendar before the job description. Tuesday and half of Wednesday went to a launch email that took four hours to write and twenty minutes to send.
Friday was supposed to be the ad account, which she had not opened in three weeks. Marketing worked at her company because she was doing it personally, and she had run out of Fridays.
Her draft posting said Head of Marketing at the top. Nothing under it said who writes next Tuesday's launch email.
Founders write job descriptions out of what the company needs. The hire has to come out of what you can no longer carry.
Why does a senior first hire stall?
Because seniority is a directing skill and there is nothing here yet to direct. Their last job had a team of six, spend across four channels, and quarterly commitments to defend.
Here they get an ad account login, three old briefs, and a founder in sales calls until six. They start writing a plan, because that is the only work the seat contains.
Your first marketing hire inherits whatever system exists. If none exists, you have hired someone to invent one while you keep doing the work.
Months one and two go to customer interviews, a tracking review and a positioning workshop. The output is often good, and it is work you could have done yourself.
Tuesday's launch email still has to go out, so you write it. By month four your week looks like the one you were trying to escape, with a senior salary now attached to discussing it.
Month nine ends with them asking for the team that was implied, or leaving for a company that already has one. You lose the money, a second search, and a year of standing still.
Sort your last fortnight into three bands
The exercise takes twenty minutes. Open the last fortnight and write down every piece of marketing work you touched, including the ones you never got to.
Read your own calendar before you read an org chart. The first hire takes the thing you are worst at protecting time for.
Judgment is the work only you can currently do: what the product is for, which customer you chase next, what it costs, which bet gets the next dollar.
Craft carries your taste, like the launch email in your voice. Volume is everything else, and on most lists it is the majority: campaign builds, scheduling, resizing, page edits, pulling numbers, chasing replies.
Now find the band you kept failing to get to. Count what slid rather than what took hours. For nearly every founder here that band is volume, because no volume item carries a deadline.
One result changes the answer. If the band you keep dropping is judgment, a first marketing hire will not fix your week, because that gap sits above the work. The signals that tell the two apart are in when to hire a fractional CMO, with the wider options in who should lead your growth.
Generalist or specialist for the first marketing hire?
A generalist, in nearly every case, and the reason is arithmetic. Tag every volume item with a channel. If no channel takes more than roughly half, a specialist leaves the rest of the list with you.
The other half of the arithmetic is whether one channel contains a real week of work. A paid specialist on a modest spend runs out of genuine optimization by Tuesday, then fills the week proposing untested channels.
The exception is real, and its three conditions hold together or not at all. One channel carries most of your revenue. A production step throttles it, usually creative volume or page builds, with a full week of work inside it.
When all three are true, hire into that lane and cover the remaining volume with contractors.
Should the first hire be in-house or a contractor?
Both, and the split follows a single line: whether the work has been written down yet.
Contractors are excellent value on anything you can specify. Send a brief, get an output, review it, pay for it.
That trade works badly on the parts of your marketing that exist only in your head, because specifying them costs the resource you are short of. A ninety-minute brief for a two-hour job buys you thirty minutes.
So put one employee alongside a contractor bench, and make writing things down part of that job. Six months later your undocumented judgment is a documented process, a small version of the growth operating system I install at larger companies.
Why the head of marketing title backfires here
A Head of Marketing posting reaches people whose recent years were spent directing output other people produced. It is a genuine skill with nothing to act on when the marketing department is one person.
Seniority solves judgment problems. Volume problems need hands, and most first hires are volume problems wearing a senior title.
Somebody who accepts a Head title also expects people underneath them within a year, and if your plan is one more marketer eighteen months out, the role tops out on day one.
There is a quieter cost. Founders feel faintly embarrassed asking a Head of Marketing to resize a banner, so they quietly keep doing it themselves. A title that makes you too polite to hand over work is the wrong one.
Two questions sort candidates. Ask them to walk through the last landing page they built personally, and listen for whether the verbs belong to them or a team. Then ask what they shipped last month.
An answer of a plan, a hiring process and three agency reviews describes a good marketer pointed at a different company.
Write the posting from that list. Five lines carry the weight:
- The actual tasks from your calendar, named as tasks, in the first five lines.
- A title at the level of the work: marketing manager or founding marketer.
- One sentence promising a year of building things with their own hands.
- What you keep: positioning, price, the next customer, the quality bar.
- What ninety days produce, as output shipped rather than territory owned.
What you keep owning after you hire
First hires rarely fail on ability. They fail on the handoff, when a founder gives away a band that cannot leave yet.
Keep judgment. Positioning, price, which segment you go after next, what the offer actually is. A candidate who claims they can invent your positioning is selling you something.
Keep the quality bar, because taste transfers through months of correction rather than a brand document. If your distribution runs through you, keep being the face of it.
Keep roughly a quarter of the marketing time you have now, as one standing hour a week where you make calls and they leave with work.
When am I ready for the second hire?
When their calendar starts looking like yours did. Run the same audit on their week.
Six to nine months in, everything routes through your first marketer, and whatever they keep failing to get to names the second role. This time you can specify it honestly, because somebody wrote it down.
Wait for one signal first. Your first marketer should be able to disappear for a fortnight with the marketing still going out. If it stops when they stop, a second hire gives you two people improvising.
Once there is a machine with a bottleneck you can read, hiring stops being a question about your calendar and becomes a question about that bottleneck, which is where building a growth team from zero picks up.
When I am the wrong person to call
Worth saying plainly on my own site: most companies making a first marketing hire should not hire me.
My engagements start at $20,000 a month, and the businesses I take on are usually well past product market fit, typically $15 million in revenue or more, with a marketing function that has grown into something requiring a leader.
You are almost certainly smaller than that, and buying senior judgment means buying the one thing you already have plenty of. You are the strategy in your company. The shortage is execution.
Even the fixed-scope version, a $12,500 growth audit, is usually the wrong purchase at your size. Most of what it would tell you is in the calendar exercise above.
Put the money into the person who clears your Sunday list. Come back to someone like me when the argument in the room has become which part of your marketing deserves the next dollar.
The unglamorous version that works
You keep the decisions. Somebody else clears the queue. Your Fridays come back, and marketing stops being capped by the hours you personally have.
A year from now the job may need a bigger title, and the person you hired may well grow into it.
Hire for the twelve months in front of you, described in the words your own calendar already wrote down.
If your marketing has already outgrown the founder who built it, and the question has turned into who leads it next, that is the problem I get hired for. Let's talk.