How does a small business or start up know when or what, or how, to hire for marketing needs?

So much falls under the marketing operations umbrella. Branding. Creative. Paid channels… And choosing what needs to be done that’s most impactful and by who can be daunting. Lots of “grey” matter when deciding on best courses of action for resources per the needs.

So… spend some time with me. Let’s make it black or white.

I’m a generalist who was once a specialist. I’ve worked with many decision makers for small biz & start ups over the years. I’ve seen the patterns and began to recognize and build systems and thinking for them.

Some Quick THOUGHTS...

Hiring criteria. 3 things: 1. They’ve done it before and can point to it. 2. Their price is “market rate” give or take. 3. They seem like someone you want to work with and bonus came by referral. If you only check 2 boxes - it can be painful.

Sequence Matters. Here’s the sequence: Brand [who] > Creative [what] > Marketing [where]. 1. Define/develop [who] the brand [is], then, based on that, 2. Build creative [what the “brand” looks like], then 3. Place that into marketing channels [where are all the places with the people you should be talking to], earned and paid for good ROI.

You Can’t go wrong with a free chat with me.

Tell me what’s going on. AMA. I never talk about areas I don’t have experience in. You can see all the PX [professional experience] on the main page or Linkedin.

btw, below are all good Examples of thoughts or issues that may not be easily categorized in “official” marketing categories.

No one knows who we are.

How would you sell this particular thing?

We think we should start working with influencers.

We’d like some fresh perspective from someone who’s not afraid to tell us the truth.

We’re a start up just beginning to allocate marketing dollars and would like thoughts on what to put where.

We’d like a second opinion of the work our agency is doing.

We’d like an outlier point of view on our product offering and how we are positioning it.

Please just breakdown a few things for us about creative, branding, and marketing strategy in general without trying to sell us on a retainer.

Could we do a brainstorming session with you? (Yes.)

We're spending too much time telling people about our product, so we know we need something for this.

What’s a good org chart to start our marketing operations, and how do you scale marketing anyway?

Do I need a “creative” agency, a “marketing” agency, a “branding” agency, and honestly what's the difference these days?

What “brand guidelines” do we actually need right now? What’s the least we need to do here, really?

What are the best platforms for us to start using now?

We have a mixed bag of high level “stupid” questions we just wanna hear quick takes on.