By Stephen Jenkins, Founder, Too Many Dreams
In the corner of a bustling open-plan office, a stack of brand guidelines sits gathering dust. Across the room, the product team debates the next big feature release, while sales maps out its strategy to hit an aggressive quarterly target.
Here, in the high-energy atmosphere of a startup, marketing’s voice can struggle to be heard over the more immediate demands of product development and sales. The sheer pace of business often means that strategic marketing initiatives become secondary – either hastily cobbled together at the last minute or shelved for future consideration.
For marketing professionals, the challenge of working in a startup environment isn’t just about speed; it’s about maintaining strategic clarity while navigating fluid priorities, constant pressure, and constrained capacity – like a Formula 1 driver who must remain intensely focused on the race strategy, all while handling high-speed turns and avoiding collisions.
In his 2012 book, “The Founder’s Dilemmas,” Noam Wasserman outlined some of the challenges facing a founder-led business – from determining who will have key roles to choosing the right investors. Here we add another: finding the right balance between speed and strategy in marketing.
Successful founders are bursting with ideas, and these ideas come thick and fast. The challenge is how execution keeps pace. In the rush, marketing risks switching to defence, becoming more reactive than strategic and diminishing its impact.
To overcome this challenge, the key is for startups and scaleups to build a marketing function that’s agile and forward looking, balancing quick wins with sustained brand growth. The long and the short.
“Be like water” – flexible brand positioning
This is because, in a world of rapidly shifting priorities, marketing excellence requires a robust brand and communications strategy that can consistently reinforce its distinctive position. But it also needs to be adaptive, dynamic, and incredibly resilient. This environment demands marketing professionals who aren’t just great at execution, but who are also superb strategists, capable of refining how a startup’s value proposition is best communicated on-the-fly.
Bruce Lee said the secret to excelling at martial arts was to “be like water,” to adapt to whatever circumstances demand. So too must marketers be willing to reshape their execution as new ideas arise and new opportunities present themselves. It’s about understanding your north star whilst being flexible and adventurous and open to every promising route to success.
Elevating the marketing conversation
In the startup world, it’s common for founders to spearhead marketing efforts. However, as these companies begin to scale, the need for a more structured approach becomes clear.
Initially, a startup may have a CEO, CRO, CTO, and CFO on board, but rarely a CMO. Often, the first marketing hires—whether a Marketing Manager or Director—find themselves swamped with the administrative side of marketing: events, social media, newsletters, and the like, with little room to craft vital positioning and execution strategies.
That means the important work of building brand identity, brand fundamentals, and positioning receive less attention than they should. Even a founder who is committed to marketing has only so many hours in the day to devote to this activity – particularly if more broad entrepreneurialism is their strong suit
Competing through talent
Startups and scaleups therefore require experienced talent that can execute at pace, and there’s a growing demand for marketing professionals who blend strategic vision with the ability to get stuck in and deliver results directly.
The right talent mix can propel a company from hard-won survival to rapid growth. Startups and scaleups need people who can hit the ground running, those who bring both experience and the ability to execute swiftly. It’s about finding individuals who can think big but act bigger. That’s why fractional CMOs are never the whole answer. When startups opt solely for a fractional CMO, the role tends to lean more towards advisory, focusing on counsel and recommendations rather than the hands-on campaign management that they need.
How marketing leaders can support high-growth businesses
Founders need senior marketers who can really challenge assumptions, question the status quo, and drive impactful results. Post-Covid, the landscape’s changed. There’s been a noticeable uptick in demand for top-tier marketing specialists, many of whom now favour the flexibility of freelance careers over traditional in-house roles.
This shift brings in a fresh challenge for internal marketing leaders: the need to source, coordinate, and integrate external talent into their teams. It’s no small feat to align these freelance talents with the company’s strategic goals while keeping the energy and momentum up.
Marketing leads need to be as skilled in managing these dynamic, distributed teams as they are in strategising and executing campaigns. They need to be able to keep all these moving parts in sync, ensuring everyone’s pulling in the same direction, and maintaining that crucial strategic alignment that high-growth companies so desperately require.
Combining agility with strategic vision, placing an equal emphasis on long-term vision and short-term adaptability, and integrating the best external talent available – these are the keys to success for founder-led businesses. Get it right, and there’s no dilemma at all. Just a less taxing and more considered route to growth.
