I worked with a startup several months ago while testing my Marketing Hire Sprint. They loved the process, and one of the biggest moments came when we pulled out all their expectations of the person they were about to hire and mapped them against the first 90 days.
At one point, they said, “I didn’t realise I had so many expectations.”
That was exactly the point. None of those expectations was particularly ridiculous in isolation, but there were a lot of them. Some were more important than others, some needed to happen later, and some didn’t really belong with the role at all. By getting everything out into the open, I could challenge some of their thinking, strip away the noise and help them shape the role around the business they were actually growing rather than around everything they hoped Marketing might somehow solve.
They told me the Sprint was absolutely worth the money. But they were also honest that, at their stage of growth, £3,500 had to compete with a long list of other legitimate investments.
Startups have an extraordinary number of demands on their money. Product, infrastructure, people, sales, technology and runway all compete for attention. Marketing can absolutely become a growth engine when it’s set up properly, but the question wasn’t whether the Sprint was worth the money. It was whether it was the right place for that particular startup to put £3,500 at that particular moment.
The idea of creating a DIY version of some of this work had already been bubbling away in my head. That conversation made it much louder.
Why the DIY series needed to exist
The stage at which startups begin thinking seriously about Marketing is often the stage at which they have the least spare capacity to get it wrong. They’re growing quickly, investors expect progress, the founder is already carrying too much, and they have more demands on time and money than resources to meet them.
The Sprint gives founders the benefit of having me in the room, applying the framework to their specific business, challenging their thinking and helping them make decisions in real time. But I also wanted to give founders a way to start working through some of that thinking themselves, using the same underlying principles and frameworks.
I didn’t want the only two options to be “book the Sprint” or “figure it all out yourself”.
Because what happens in the meantime?
A founder may keep doing all of the Marketing themselves. They may hire anyway. They may find somebody good but fail to hand over enough for that person to succeed. Or they may get six months down the line and realise things aren’t working in the way they expected.
Failed or underwhelming marketing hires are rarely just expensive in salary terms. They take time, energy and attention from founders who already have very little of any of those things to spare. Months of frustration may pass before anyone even understands what went wrong.
If I can make some of that thinking more accessible before a founder is ready to work with me directly, then I think that is worth doing.
What founders can work through themselves
Some parts of the process founders can absolutely work through without me, as long as they have the right framework and understand what they’re trying to uncover.
That is what the DIY Marketing Hire Readiness Series is designed to provide. I’ll give founders the frameworks I use, explain how to work through them, and introduce the questions behind them. I’ll challenge some of the assumptions founders commonly bring into a marketing hire, and I’ll ask questions that may feel uncomfortable because they force into the open what has often remained implicit.
That might mean getting much clearer on what Marketing is actually expected to achieve, what the founder genuinely wants to hand over, what success should look like in the first 90 days, where responsibility starts and stops, and what parts of the business currently live only in the founder’s head.
Some exercises may initially feel obvious, unnecessary, or even slightly tedious. They’re there for a reason. Although the videos are designed so founders can use them individually, they also fit together because the decisions are connected. Your business goals affect the role. The role affects the person you need. Your expectations affect the onboarding plan. All of that influences whether somebody has a realistic chance of succeeding once they join.
The DIY series gives you the method
The video series gives founders the method because that is the part they can work through without me in the room.
If I give you a framework, explain why it matters, show you how to use it and give you the questions you need to consider, you can do a significant amount of this work yourself. You can make hidden expectations visible, pressure-test what you are asking of the role, and start building a clearer picture of what Marketing actually needs to do for your business next.
That work is valuable in its own right, and for some founders, it may be exactly what they need.
But any prerecorded series has limits.
The Sprint gives you judgment and experience in the room
Every Marketing Hire Sprint follows a framework, but every Sprint is different because every business and every founder is different.
The challenges are different. The business’s strengths and weaknesses are different. The founder’s working style is different. The history of what has already been tried is different. Sometimes a business has hired before and been burned by the experience. Sometimes the founder has been carrying Marketing for years and has never really had to explain how they make decisions. Sometimes expectations sit below the surface until we start talking about them.
When I’m in the room, I can adapt the framework as we go. I can hear an answer and ask another question. I can challenge a contradiction. I can pick up on something a founder mentioned earlier and bring it back when it becomes relevant. I can dig into the unwritten rules and ways of working that have become so normal inside the business that nobody thinks to explain them anymore.
That’s where judgement and experience matter.
I can assess whether the goals make sense, whether the job description reflects the business need, whether the salary is realistic, whether the first 90 days are achievable and whether the milestones in the onboarding plan actually match what the founder expects from the role.
A prerecorded video can’t do that, because I’m not there to interpret what’s happening in the moment.
That’s the difference.
The DIY series gives you the method. The Sprint gives you judgment and in-the-room experience.
What a video can’t replicate
I could try to cram an entire consulting day into a collection of videos, but I don’t think that would improve the series.
The value of the Sprint doesn’t come from me hiding information that only Sprint paying clients get to see. It comes from me being there, applying the framework to a specific business, and changing the conversation based on what comes up.
A video can’t know when an answer needs challenging. It can’t spot the thing a founder has overlooked. It can’t recognise that two expectations contradict each other or that an apparently small comment points to a much bigger problem.
Trying to account for every possible scenario in advance would also make the DIY route bloated and overwhelming. I don’t want founders sitting through hours of caveats and exceptions just so I can claim I’ve put everything into the series.
The DIY route will include as much as it can without becoming overwhelming or pretending to replace the parts of the work that genuinely depend on me being there.
Who the DIY series is actually for
I’m building it for startups and growing businesses that know Marketing needs to become a more serious part of what happens next.
That may be a startup preparing to hire its first marketer. It may be a founder who has reached the limit of doing the work themselves. It may be a business that has hit a growth plateau and sees Marketing as part of how it gets moving again. It may also be a founder who has hired before and doesn’t want to repeat the same mistakes.
What those businesses have in common is that they’re considering a marketing hire because of where they want the business to go next.
The purpose of the series is to help them do more of the important thinking before that person arrives. Once the salary is being paid and the clock is running, it’s much more expensive to discover that nobody ever agreed on what Marketing was actually there to do.
I’m building the first videos now. If you want to know when the DIY Marketing Hire Readiness Series launches, you can join the waitlist – tatedigitalconsulting.co.uk