“Agencies need to understand your business better than you do."

This week, Bill opens up about his personal journey from a fresh college grad to Chief Marketing Officer, revealing the growing pains and hard-earned lessons of building marketing departments inside mid-market companies. Bill discusses the pitfalls of under-resourced marketing teams, the illusion of "just hiring one more person," and why so many marketing managers, and even VPs, burn out trying to do it all. He shares the real story behind why 50 Marketing was founded and the hybrid marketing team model that’s transforming how B2B and manufacturing companies approach marketing execution.

Welcome to the Missing Half podcast, where we're discovering what's missing in manufacturing and B2B marketing. Today, I wanna get personal. I want to take you on my journey as I went from a fresh college graduate who was a marketing manager, who then was promoted to VP of Marketing and ultimately to Chief Operations Officer in charge of sales and marketing.

I'm gonna share what I wish I had back then. The team, the techniques, the processes, the playbooks, the tools. And most importantly the lessons that led us to develop the solutions that we offer at 50 Marketing today.

And my first real marketing job, I was a department of two. There were two of us. I was a marketing manager and I had someone who was basically a marketing assistant who, and we were, at my first marketing job, I was the marketing manager and we were a team of two. I had a marketing assistant and we were tasked with everything. We were a team of two that was responsible for buying, and this was way back in the day, 40 media properties. We bought television, radio. We also did billboards, newspaper, inserts. There was a lot of D2C and B2B marketing done together for the various businesses we represented. And there was a lot of internal traffic. There were a lot of competing priorities.

And in that day and age, we were almost judged by just getting things done. Did you meet a deadline? Did you get the copy done? Did you get the ad submitted? It was a very binary process and there was no room for testing. There was very little room for innovation. And frankly, at the time, the marketing industry was not mature or even started in any type of digital approach. So it was very old school, traditional, and just getting it done and getting it out there was the main idea.

Eventually we thought we had the answer to our chaos. Hire one more person. We hired a web designer as digital started to take off. That was a disaster because I didn't know how to manage them. I didn't know what the proper expectations should be for that role. And we weren't able to provide support to that team member and give them any direction. At that time, the web was so new and so embryonic and cutting edge that there were no guides. were no tips and tricks you could download off of the internet because it wasn't there yet. We were out there just trying to figure it out on our own. And that was a disaster.

We then tried to get into video and we repeated the same mistake. We hired a video person because hiring that person that was going to solve all our problems. Adding headcount only added headache and heartache. I didn't know how to manage them. I didn't know how to scope the work. I didn't know how to provide proper support. And it wasn't because these were bad people or bad workers. It was because we didn't have the structure, the tools, the techniques or the frameworks to provide a successful opportunity for them to achieve the goals we had set forth.

So what did we learn through all this? One, adding headcount wasn't the answer. And adding headcount to solve a problem, what felt good and it was able to be sold to management, but it rarely achieved the goals that we had set forth and really just caused more problems, more headache, more heartache and didn't achieve our goals. And during this process, we failed. We started things we never finished. We would get things eight tenths of the way done and then go back to step one and retool the entire project because we missed steps. We had no idea what we were doing. This was back in the early 2000s and we were just really struggling trying to figure it out as we went along. And that was part of our Department of Two struggles that many Department of One or Department of one to three marketing teams face at mid-market companies.

And looking back, I realized we didn't fail because we were bad people or we had bad work habits or we weren't committed and we didn't work long hours. It was because we lacked the tools, the expertise, the training, the support and the resources necessary to achieve at the levels we can today. And one of the things I learned from that experience is that you can't do it all yourself and you have to lean on other resources to execute at a high level.

Eventually I worked my way up to management and I became a VP of Marketing and with the shiny new title, magically all of my problems didn't disappear. In fact, it was worse. The problems scaled. The problems we had when I was the marketing manager with a team of two now scaled to a team of five and we had multiple people, we had more requirements and items that we were trying to accomplish. We were starting to take over more sales management and sales enablement responsibilities. And the problems just kept mounting. And I was working every weekend, working vacations.

But these problems just kept scaling. And the root core of it was a lack of technical expertise and a lack of processes and tools that enabled us to work efficiently. And as is common with marketing teams of one to three to five at mid-market companies, we are tasked with so many things that you just, sometimes you just attack, attack with energy and try and outwork the problems. And this did not solve the problem.

We added staff. I tried to delegate, used management systems, did some training on management, delegation, all those things, and it didn't work. The problems just got bigger. Now instead of worrying about just getting projects done, I was managing multiple projects simultaneously. I was also trying to figure out how to break new ground and innovate as the internet and all things digital was just changing and the ground was shifting underneath our feet.

And at the same time, we were still dealing with the same old problems, lack of technical experience, no time to train, no budget for outside resources. And when we had budget for outside resources, it was an additional challenge on how to manage these team members or these resources to get exactly what we want accomplished. And sometimes we didn't even know what questions to ask during the projects. And managing external vendors or external resources, we didn't have the time or the framework to execute those initiatives properly. Worst of all, I was burning out. Long days, long weeks, long weekends at work, missing vacations. It just wasn't adding up to a successful future.

So one of the other mistakes I made at this point as a VP of marketing is, oh, I just need to find the right marketing manager. And I should have known better because I had lived it. But I see this mistake even to this day with companies putting that job posting out there that's more like a bingo card of every skill that every marketing expert has in from every niche. And you know the post. It's someone who's good at web dev, video, conversion rate optimization, copywriting, marketing automation, social media, you name it. Keep listing. Go to Indeed today and type in marketing manager and I guarantee in the top five results, there will be three or four of them that have a laundry list of every technical area of expertise that is a minimum requirement for someone who has three to five years of experience and who's willing to work for subpart wages. That's the way the industry works. And I made this mistake, even though I should have known better because I had lived it. And I started to look for someone to fix all my problems. Well, that didn't work either. I was under impressed by the people I interviewed. And that wasn't because of them. It was because of my improper expectations of what one person could or should be able to do in a reasonable timeframe with the requests that we had made.

So what's the answer to all these problems and what did I learn? Well, there is an answer that can work today and it's the hybrid model. It's where small teams, teams of one to three people at a mid-sized company, partner with an agency in a hybrid way to create a marketing department that can actually execute what needs to be done for success. And what does this team look like? There's a marketing responsible person at the company that works day to day with a CMO level strategist, a marketing manager, a project manager, a traffic manager, copywriters, web developers, web designers, graphic designers, CRO specialists, marketing automation specialists, video teams. The list goes on and on. This is the model that we designed to solve the problems that I experienced for years and years and to remove the frustration, to avoid the long, long working days, the longer weeks and the missed vacations.

When we're looking at this hybrid model, we also need an agency that is a partner. That is as long term and understands your business in some ways better than you do yourself. And that's something that's also was missing with the first couple of agencies that I hired. They provided a service. They never understood our business. And that is table stakes for making these hybrid models work. Agencies, hybrid teams have to understand the core business, the UVP, the problems their clients are experiencing, and the solutions they're offering in order for those relationships to work well. And this gives you an agency that isn't just a vendor, they're a partner. And this agency is what I wish I had when I was a VP and a marketing manager. And that's what we built today. That's what 50 Marketing has become. An agency built by marketing managers for marketing managers. An agency built by marketing executives for marketing executives.

For marketing managers and the C-suite, we've built an agency that is scalable and can dynamically react to market conditions. We can scale up and scale down to make sure that you have the resources you need to be successful. And we handle the technical aspects of the deliverables and the campaigns. For executives, we know that you feel constrained by the capacity of your team and you don't know how to solve the technical training and the resource problem that you experience in trying to in-source the entire marketing function. For marketing managers, you want a hybrid team that can help you execute and offset the gaps you have in your knowledge and technical expertise.

The hybrid approach is the answer we see for both the marketing manager and the marketing executive. And it's the only sustainable model we see working in manufacturing and B2B companies today.

So if you're listening to this today and you're saying to yourself, man, this sounds like my life. This is exactly what I've been experiencing. Bill must have been a fly on the wall in my office when we were having the last meeting. Know a few things. One, you're not alone. So many of us are struggling with this or have struggled with this in the past. And number two, if you're interested in living in a different world and having a huge paradigm shift to a hybrid model where you can get things done consistently. You can scale up and down and you can dynamically react to your market with a full suite of team members who have the technical skills needed to deliver across the entire marketing function, you are not far away from that reality. Because no one should have to run the marketing gauntlet alone. I know, I've been there. Thanks for listening and until next time.