Mid-Size Company Friendly

Why marketing stalls at this size

A company between roughly 20 and 200 people is past the stage where founder-led marketing works and short of the stage where a full-time CMO is an obvious hire. That gap is where most marketing problems in mid-size companies actually come from. There is usually budget, usually a team, and usually activity — campaigns run, content ships, agencies invoice. What is missing is the layer above all of it: someone deciding what marketing is for this quarter, and holding the function to it.

The symptom founders describe is almost always the same. Marketing feels busy but not compounding. Every campaign needs your approval, so your calendar becomes the bottleneck. Results are hard to attribute, so budget decisions become arguments about opinion. New hires are made against a job description written in a hurry, then evaluated against a target that keeps moving. None of that is an effort problem, which is why hiring one more marketer rarely fixes it.

The work on this page is aimed at that specific layer. Not more execution — structure, direction and accountability, installed by someone who has done it before, and designed so it keeps running when the engagement ends.

What changes in the first 90 days

Every engagement model below runs on a weekly rhythm rather than a monthly report. The visible changes come in roughly this order:

• Priorities become explicit. What marketing is responsible for this quarter gets written down, so it can be argued with rather than assumed.
• Reporting becomes honest. A small set of numbers gets reviewed weekly, including the ones that are not flattering.
• Ownership becomes clear. Every recurring piece of marketing work has one name against it, not a team it is vaguely shared across.
• The founder's approval stops being a dependency for routine decisions, which is usually the first thing you actually feel.
• Hiring decisions get made against a defined role instead of against whoever is available.

Digital Marketing Consulting Plans

Which plan fits which problem

The plans are not tiers of the same thing, so picking the biggest one is not the safe default. They solve different problems, and the right one depends on who is currently accountable for marketing inside your company.

If you already have a team that produces work but no one senior setting direction, the advisory engagement is the fit: weekly guidance and accountability over the people you have, without handing the function over. If nobody owns marketing — or the person who does is you, between everything else — the part-time CMO engagement is the one that changes the shape of the problem, because ownership moves. If the gap is that the department itself does not exist yet, hiring comes first, and the roles are defined before anyone is screened.

Common questions