Body
For 14 months I was the marketing department. Writing blog posts at 11pm, scheduling social media between investor calls, A/Bing testing landing pages on weekends. Our team hit 60 people and I was still the one approving ad copy at midnight.
So I hired a Head of Marketing. Great resume. 8 years experience. Came from a Series B company that had scaled to $40M ARR. I was pumped.
First two weeks she just asked questions. Which is fine. Week three, she presents a "marketing roadmap" that's basically a prettier version of what I'd already been doing. Week four she asks for a $14k/month tool stack budget.
Here's what nobody tells you about your first marketing hire. They inherit your mess. Every half-built funnel, every abandoned campaign, every landing page you threw together at 2am that somehow still converts at 3.2%. They have to figure out what's working by accident and what's working on purpose. Most of it is by accident.
The other thing. You've been making marketing decisions based on gut and customer conversations for over a year. You have context that lives nowhere. Not in docs, not in Slack, not in your CRM. It's just in your head. And you'll get frustrated when they don't "get it" even though you never actually transferred any of it.
Took us about 3 months before she stopped trying to rebuild everything from scratch and I stopped micromanaging every Instagram caption.
The hire was right. My onboarding was garbage. I handed someone the keys to a car with no manual, half the dashboard lights on, and said "you're the expert, figure it out."
Honestly still not sure what the right way to do that handoff is. Anyone actually done this cleanly?