You hired a Head of Marketing to fix growth.
Six months later, you’re frustrated and they’re updating their CV.
You didn’t hire the wrong person.
You hired the right person for the wrong job.
You hired a doer and expected a strategist.
So now you’ve got a smart, hardworking marketer trying to fix:
• A fuzzy ICP
• An unclear value prop
• A scattered offer
• A broken sales process
• No forecasting model
• A founder who still holds the real strategy in their head
That’s not a marketing job.
That’s a fractional CMO job.
A £1M–£10M business doesn’t need someone to “do content.”
It needs someone who can build the revenue engine:
• Positioning
• Offer architecture
• Channel prioritisation
• Budget decisions
• Pipeline governance
The reason your Head of Marketing is failing isn’t skill.
It’s scope.
You hired someone to execute and handed them a mess that needs designing.
If your Head of Marketing disappeared tomorrow, would the GTM strategy still exist?
If the answer is “no,” you don’t have a marketer problem.
You have a leadership gap.
And until you fix that, no hire will save your growth.
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