It's the first question almost everyone asks. Fair enough, it's a meaningful number and you should know exactly what you're getting for it. So let me be straightforward about it. £10K a month typically buys you two to two and a half days a week of genuine senior marketing leadership. Not a consultant who turns up, runs a workshop, and sends you a strategy deck you'll never fully implement. Not an agency account manager who's junior to the person who pitched you.

Your marketing team is busy. Genuinely, visibly busy. Campaigns running. Social posting. Agencies being managed. Dashboards full of numbers. Slack humming. And yet, if someone asked you to prove what marketing actually contributed to revenue last quarter, you'd need a meeting, three spreadsheets, and a fair amount of educated guessing.

I ask the same question in almost every new client conversation. "Can you show me your marketing strategy?" What I get back, almost without exception, is a marketing plan. A channel calendar. A budget spreadsheet. A list of campaigns organised by quarter. Sometimes a slide deck with a mission statement at the front and a Gantt chart at the back. Occasionally something with a SWOT analysis that nobody has looked at since the away day where it was created.

There's a growth stage that almost every scaling business hits, and it's one of the most expensive to navigate badly. You're past the scrappy early days. Your marketing manager is good, genuinely good, but they're being asked to do things that are beyond their experience level. Set strategy. Own the tech stack. Manage agencies. Present to the board. They're doing their best, and their best isn't enough, because it was never meant to be.

Every sector I have worked in has had its version of the same conversation over the past two years. Financial services, healthcare, travel technology, gaming, consumer. Different industries, different boardrooms, different language. But the same underlying question: what do we do about AI?

I've led marketing inside a global gaming company, a pharmaceutical giant, a travel technology business, a financial services firm, and a consumer electronics brand. Different industries. Different products. Completely different regulatory environments, buyer behaviours, and commercial models. And yet the fundamental approach I used in every single one of them was the same.

I've built marketing teams from nothing more than once. A blank org chart, a budget, and a brief that usually says something like "we need to get serious about marketing." Every time, I've made some version of the same mistakes early on, and every time I've learned something that changed how I approached the next one. Here's what I actually look for now when I'm building from scratch, along with a few things I've stopped caring about.

I'm going to say something that will make some marketers uncomfortable. Most marketing dashboards are works of fiction. Not deliberate fiction. Nobody is sitting there making numbers up. But they're built to show activity rather than impact, and there's a significant difference between the two. Impressions, reach, engagement rate, share of voice, brand sentiment. All of these can be going in the right direction while your business is standing completely still.

Here's a pattern I've seen more times than I can count. A founder builds something genuinely good. They get early traction. Revenue starts moving. Someone on the board says "we need to get serious about marketing" and suddenly there's a job spec circulating for a Chief Marketing Officer with a six-figure salary and a mandate to "own the brand and drive growth."