skills/marketing-plan/references/team-and-agency-model.md
The marketing operations stack (Section 11 of every plan) describes what gets done. This doc describes who does it — the operating principle, the org shape, the first hire, the agency model, and how it evolves as the company scales.
Excerpted and adapted from Founding Marketing by Corey Haines.
Strategy lives in-house. Execution can — and often should — be outsourced.
Two failure modes are common when founders ignore this:
The traditional advice — "hire full-time for competitive advantages, only use agencies for commoditized work" — made sense when marketing moved slowly and talent stayed for decades. That world is gone. Full-time hires take months to ramp and years to develop deep expertise. The best agencies and contractors deliver results immediately, with cross-industry pattern recognition you couldn't build in-house affordably.
The strategic heart of the marketing operation. Specifically:
These are not delegatable. An external partner can sharpen the articulation, but the underlying conviction must come from the team.
External expertise shines in specific contexts:
The trick is defining what's being outsourced. Vague briefs ("help us with marketing") produce vague results. Specific briefs ("ship 20 RSAs across 4 ad groups by month-end with the CTR benchmarks in the brief") produce shippable work.
Every marketing engine has three primary functions. Whether you have a team of 1 or 50, the functions exist — even if one person owns several.
Drives quantitative outcomes: leads, signups, paid traffic, conversion rate, CAC.
Drives positioning quality, message-market fit, launch impact, sales enablement.
Drives organic traffic, brand affinity, thought leadership, trust signals.
These three functions are interconnected. Growth without story is performance with no positioning. Story without distribution is a great pitch nobody hears. Trust without demand capture is brand affinity that doesn't compound into revenue.
The most consequential decision in building the marketing engine isn't about channels or technology — it's who leads.
The first marketing hire should be a strategist, not a tactician. Counterintuitive when there's a mountain of tactical work to ship. Essential for sustainable growth.
The standard advice is to hire a T-shaped marketer: broad knowledge across many areas, deep in one. That's fine for a tactical IC role.
For the first strategic hire, look for π-shaped: two deep skill sets, plus broad surface-level competency across the rest. The two depths create unique leverage through their combination.
Product Marketing + Growth Marketing
Product Marketing + Content Marketing
Growth Marketing + Content Marketing
The wrong shape for a first hire: deep paid media specialist alone, deep SEO specialist alone, deep designer alone. These are tactical depths; they need a strategic owner above them.
A common mistake: making the first marketing hire a "CMO" or "VP." Creates problems when you actually need to scale the org, because there's no headroom above them.
The right progression:
| Title | Scope |
|---|---|
| Manager | Individual contributor, co-manages freelancers |
| Lead | Senior IC, manages freelancers/agencies |
| Director / Head | Manages ICs and vendors |
| VP | Manages Directors |
| Chief (CMO) | Manages VPs |
The first hire is almost always Marketing Manager or Marketing Lead. They should be able to:
Both strategic and hands-on. Comfortable setting direction and rolling up sleeves. Most importantly: a builder — creates processes, frameworks, and systems that scale beyond their individual capacity.
Think of the marketing organization as an engine. Each part has a specific role; the magic is in how they work together.
What powers everything else. Without good fuel, even the best engine sputters.
Quality of the fuel determines efficiency. Poor positioning, weak stories, inconsistent branding waste energy regardless of execution.
Where strategy turns into action.
Needs to be well-maintained and properly tuned. Right processes, tools, people in place to execute consistently.
How you know if you're heading in the right direction.
Without good instrumentation, flying blind. Need both leading and lagging indicators.
Not all agencies are created equal. Ranked from most appropriate for early-stage to least:
For most pre-Series-A companies, this is the right answer for nearly all outsourced work.
The difference between a successful and failed agency relationship usually comes down to structure and management.
The best agency relationships feel like partnership: they understand the business, care about success, bring expertise you couldn't build in-house affordably. Takes work on both sides — clear expectations, open communication, mutual respect.
The right ratio of internal to external resources isn't static. It evolves with stage, needs, and market conditions.
Mode: discovery and iteration
Mode: optimization
Mode: coordination
The metaphor: a symphony orchestra. The internal team conducts. External partners play their instruments with expertise.
| Section | What to include |
|---|---|
| 3 (Current state) | Team composition — every person who touches marketing, what they own. Identify where the team is π-shaped vs. T-shaped vs. tactical-only. Flag gaps. |
| 9 (90-day roadmap) | If the team is missing the strategic owner, the first move is the first marketing hire (Lead or Manager). If the team has strategy but no execution capacity, the first move is the first contractor or specialized agency. |
| 10 (12-month outlook) | Map team evolution against funding-stage capability unlocks (see funding-stage-unlocks.md). When does the second hire come in? When does an agency relationship deepen? |
| 11 (Marketing operations stack) | RACI is more honest with this model: "owned by" = internal strategic role; "executed by" = internal IC, contractor, or agency. The plan should make it explicit who does what. |
| 13 (Open decisions) | If "first marketing hire" is open, name it as a top-three decision. If "in-house vs agency" for a specific function is open, frame the tradeoff using this doc's heuristics. |