I help busy founders set up the marketing foundations of a B2B business — positioning, messaging, demand, and distribution — before they hire in-house. You get senior execution, quickly, without committing to a full-time marketer too early.
Most founders struggle because:
They hire before fundamentals are clear
They don’t yet know what “good marketing” looks like for their business
Junior hires need direction you don’t have time to give
Senior hires are expensive and still need context
Agencies optimise channels before strategy
So marketing becomes a mix of activity, opinion, and guesswork — with little to show for it.
I act as your first marketing hire, focused on building foundations that compound and identifying quick wins to build immediate pipeline.
We start by getting clarity on who you’re really for and why you win.
This becomes the reference point for everything that follows.
Once positioning is clear, we translate it into usable messaging.
This helps you niche into a segment of market where your value is most recognised.
You don’t need perfection at this stage.
Enough to support sales conversations and inbound demand properly.
When people are looking, you should be visible.
This should land you immediate pipeline that you can close.
Rather than chasing every channel, we set up the right ones. This might include:
Everything I set up is designed to be taken over by your first full-time hire later.
I’m there to get you to the next stage, not lock you in.
This is a good fit if you:
It’s especially useful between first revenue and first marketing hire.
Don’t take the risk on an unproven full-time employee. Hiring a freelancer is a risk-free way of getting senior, hands-on expertise fast.
A startup should make its first marketing hire when it has a few customers, early market signals, and founders who are becoming the bottleneck — not when product–market fit is “fully achieved”.
In practice, this is usually the right time when:
At this stage, marketing isn’t about scaling spend or running playbooks. It’s about:
Waiting until “perfect” product–market fit often means founders spend too long doing marketing badly — or not at all — while neglecting strategy, customers, and product decisions only they can make.
The right time to hire your first marketer is when:
The product has early traction, the signal is there, and the founders’ time is better spent elsewhere.
That’s when marketing starts to reduce risk rather than add it.
You likely need a freelance marketer if you want senior, hands-on help to figure out what to do next — and an agency if you already know exactly what needs executing at scale.
A freelance marketer is usually the right choice when:
An agency tends to make more sense when:
For many B2B startups, hiring an agency too early adds risk. Agencies are optimised for execution against a brief, not for shaping strategy, prioritising experiments, or working through ambiguity.
A freelance marketer sits between founder-led marketing and a full internal team. They help:
If you’re still asking “what should we be doing next?”, a freelance marketer is usually the better starting point.
It’s closer to a fractional marketing role, but without the rigidity of a traditional consultancy.
In practice, I operate as an embedded, hands-on marketing lead within your business. That means:
Unlike a traditional consultancy, this isn’t a short engagement that ends with a deck or set of recommendations. I stay involved to turn decisions into action, iterate based on results, and adapt as the business evolves.
At the same time, it’s more flexible than a formal fractional hire:
For early-stage and growing B2B companies, this model sits between:
The goal is to give you experienced marketing leadership and execution, exactly when you need it, without the risk of hiring too early or locking into the wrong structure.
When marketing hasn’t worked before, it’s rarely because marketing itself doesn’t work. It’s usually because the right activities were done at the wrong time, in the wrong way, or without alignment to how buyers actually buy.
Marketing fails most often when:
In B2B, marketing only works when it’s grounded in real buyer behaviour:
This service starts by getting closer to that reality. Instead of forcing a playbook, the focus is on:
Marketing isn’t one-size-fits-all — but it does work for every business when it’s aligned to buyers and timed correctly.
If marketing hasn’t worked for you before, that’s usually a signal that alignment was missing — not that marketing isn’t worth doing.
Mostly no — and sometimes yes, depending on the situation.
For most pre-revenue startups, marketing works best when it’s founder-led. At that stage, the business usually needs:
That’s because pre-revenue is the riskiest point in the life of a business. You often do need deals, leads, or quick wins just to stay alive — and founders are usually best placed to make that happen early on.
In those cases, this service is not a substitute for founder-led selling, and it’s rarely the right primary investment.
Where this can make sense pre-revenue is when:
In those scenarios, marketing can help:
For early-revenue startups, this becomes much more applicable — especially once founders are stretched and need help turning early traction into repeatable progress.
In short:
If you’re unsure which bucket you’re in, that uncertainty itself is a useful signal — and something we can sanity-check quickly before you commit to anything.
Both — but with a strong bias toward execution.
I don’t operate as a traditional advisor who delivers recommendations and steps away. I work hands-on to decide what matters, do the work, and iterate based on what actually happens.
That typically includes:
Advice without execution is rarely useful at this stage of a business. Equally, execution without thinking leads to wasted effort. This service combines both so decisions turn into progress, not just plans.
If you already have people in place, I can work alongside them. If you don’t, I can own the work end-to-end.
The goal is not to tell you what to do — it’s to move the business forward.
Prioritisation starts with the biggest problems the business is trying to solve right now — usually revenue, momentum, or survival.
The first focus is almost always on:
In practice, that means prioritising quick wins and activities that can:
Early-stage and growing businesses don’t need long backlogs or perfect plans. They need progress.
Once those foundations are in place, priorities expand to:
There’s no fixed framework or playbook. Priorities are set by:
The goal is to focus effort where it can move the needle quickly, then build from there — not to do everything at once.
It depends on how clear your needs are and how much risk you’re willing to take.
A fractional marketer is usually the better choice when:
A full-time employee makes more sense when:
For many startups, hiring full-time too early is risky. If you hire the wrong profile, you’re locked into:
A fractional marketer reduces that risk by helping you:
In practice, many companies use a fractional marketer before making their first full-time hire — not instead of it.
Usually, yes — but it depends on the situation.
In most early-stage startups, the founder is the best salesperson at the beginning. Founders understand the problem deeply, can adapt messaging in real time, and learn directly from buyer conversations. That makes founder-led sales the right starting point.
Marketing often comes before a dedicated sales hire when:
In this case, marketing supports sales by:
However, hiring sales first can make sense when:
There’s no fixed order that works for every business. The key question is:
Where is the biggest bottleneck right now — demand or closing?
Most early-stage companies don’t fail because they hired marketing too early or sales too late. They fail because they hire without aligning roles to how buyers actually buy.
The right sequence is the one that removes the biggest constraint to growth, given your stage, product, and founder involvement.
No. There’s no minimum commitment for this service.
You’re not locked into a long-term contract. Work is scoped based on what you need right now, and you can pause or stop if priorities change.
That flexibility is intentional. Early-stage and growing businesses change quickly, and this service is designed to adapt to that reality rather than force artificial commitments.
The aim is to earn ongoing work through progress and results, not contracts.