Your Business Has Unwritten Rules
Your New Marketer Is the Only Person Who Can See Them
I’ve spent the last decade or so moving between two cultures, one British, one Italian, and the single most useful thing it has taught me has almost nothing to do with either country.
It’s this. Every group of people operating together develops rules that nobody writes down, nobody teaches, and nobody can articulate, because to the people inside, they aren’t rules at all. They’re just how things are.
You cannot see the water you’re swimming in. That’s not a failure of attention. It’s what being immersed means.
And it matters for one specific commercial reason: your first marketing hire is going to break several of those rules in their first month, and neither of you will have the language to talk about what just happened.
What "cultural difference" actually looks like up close
The version of this you read about is broad and slightly useless. One culture is direct, another is relational. One documents, another discusses.
That’s true, and it isn’t what trips anyone up.
What trips you up is much smaller and much more specific. It’s how long a pause is allowed to be before someone fills it. Whether arriving at the stated time is punctual or overeager. Whether a favour creates an obligation. Whether disagreement in front of others is honesty or humiliation.
Nobody explains any of this, because nobody knows they know it.
And the way you find out is by getting it wrong in front of people who are too polite to name what you did — so they simply do it correctly around you, and you’re left reconstructing the rule from the evidence.
That experience is uncomfortable enough to be memorable. It also, eventually, teaches you a reflex: before asking how things work here, ask what’s being assumed here.
I’ve come to think that reflex is the most transferable thing about living between two cultures. Not tolerance. Not curiosity. The specific habit of looking for the rule nobody stated.
Your business has exactly the same thing
Here is a partial list of things almost every SaaS or tech business has decided, without deciding, and never written down.
- How finished something should be before you show it to anyone
- Whether disagreeing with the founder in a meeting is healthy debate or a problem
- Whether an unanswered Slack message means no, or means not yet
- How much detail you’re expected to bring to a decision — and how much is too much
- Whether “let’s discuss this” is an invitation or a warning
- Who actually needs to be in the room, as opposed to who’s on the invite
- Whether it’s acceptable to say “I don’t know”
- How quickly you’re expected to reply to the founder at 9 pm
- Whether asking for more resources is initiative or complaint
Every one of those was established early, mostly by accident, usually by watching how the founder behaved in the first year. Everyone who’s been there eighteen months operates them fluently and unconsciously.
None of it is in the handbook, if there is a handbook.
Why this hits your first marketing hire hardest
Any new employee has to learn the unwritten rules. That’s normal, and most functions have enough structure around them to survive the learning period.
Marketing doesn’t, and there are three reasons why.
They arrive with a different set
Your first marketer has almost certainly come from somewhere with a marketing function, an agency, a larger company, or another startup. That place had its own unwritten rules, and they absorbed them just as unconsciously. They’re not arriving as a blank sheet.
They’re arriving with confident, fluent instincts formed somewhere else, which they will apply here because those instincts have always been correct before.
Their work is unusually visible
A developer’s first few weeks are largely invisible. A marketer’s output is public, opinionated, and about the company’s identity. Every unwritten rule they break, they break in front of everyone.
And there's nobody to learn from
A second salesperson learns by watching the first. Your first marketer has no predecessor to imitate. The only model available is you, and you’re doing marketing on top of running a business, with total context and total authority. Copying you is impossible.
So they do the sensible thing. They observe, infer, and get it wrong a few times.
Then somebody starts describing them as not quite a fit.
The bit nobody says out loud
When a founder tells me a hire “didn’t fit the culture,” I’ve learned to ask a follow-up question: what would they have had to do to fit?
The answers are almost always things that were never articulated. They moved too fast, or not fast enough. They asked too many questions, or not enough. They should have flagged something sooner. They should have just got on with it.
Every one of those is a rule. None of them was stated. And the person was assessed against all of them.
That isn’t a fit problem. It’s an induction problem wearing a fit problem’s clothes, and I say that as someone who’s been on the receiving end of the conclusion.
The six-week window
Here’s the part I think is genuinely worth something, and it flips the whole thing from a risk into an asset.
Your new hire can see your assumptions.
They can see that your meetings have no agendas. That nobody can define a qualified lead. That three people gave them three different versions of the company’s positioning. That the thing everyone calls “the strategy” is a slide.
They can see all of it, with the clarity of someone who has just walked in from somewhere that did it differently.
And that clarity has a shelf life. Roughly six weeks, in my experience. After that, they’ve adapted. It stops looking strange. They start operating the unwritten rules as fluently as everyone else, and the visibility is gone for good.
Most businesses spend those six weeks training the noticing out of the person. Not deliberately, just through the ordinary process of settling in, where asking why is gradually understood to be less useful than getting on with things.
You could use them instead.
Ask, explicitly and early, what looks odd
Not “how are you settling in.” That gets you fine, thanks.
Something closer to: what have you seen this week that wouldn’t have happened where you worked before? What did you expect to exist here that doesn’t? What has confused you that everyone else seems relaxed about?
Put it in the diary, in the first month, more than once
A one-off invitation gets declined by anyone still working out whether it’s safe to answer honestly. A recurring slot where that’s the actual agenda gets used by week three.
And write the answers down
What they tell you is the first honest audit your business has had, possibly ever, done by someone with no history, no politics, and a genuine incentive for the place to work properly.
There’s a caveat worth being honest about.
Asking only works if the answers are safe to give. If the first piece of critical feedback is met with a defence, you’ve taught them what happens, and you’ll get nothing further.
That’s a decision you make in the moment, and it’s harder than it sounds when someone points at something you built.
What to do before they arrive
You can shorten the whole problem by writing down some of what’s currently assumed. It takes an hour, and it doesn’t need to be perfect.
How decisions get made here. What you expect to be consulted on and what you don’t. How much finish something needs before it’s shown. How disagreement is handled. What a good week looks like. What people usually get wrong in their first month.
That last one is the most useful sentence in the document, and almost nobody writes it.
None of that is culture in the poster-on-the-wall sense. It’s the operating manual for the unwritten rules, and having it means your marketer spends their first month doing marketing rather than reverse-engineering your business from behavioural evidence.
What this is really about
The reason two cultures teach you anything useful isn’t that you learn a second set of rules.
It’s that having two sets makes both of them visible. You stop being able to believe that any particular way of working is simply the way things are done, because you’ve watched an entire country do it differently and function perfectly well.
That’s the thing worth taking into a business.
Not “our culture is X.” But: what have we decided here that we’ve never said out loud, and who’s about to walk into it?
Your next hire is going to find out either way. The only question is whether they tell you, or whether you find out in the exit interview.