I spent six years building marketing functions inside other people's companies — a global industrial brand, a marketplace scaling fast enough to break things weekly, a telco running campaigns at a scale I'd never touched before, and a B2B services business where I owned brand end to end. Every one of those roles taught me something I still use. None of them prepared me for the thing I actually wanted to do next.
The pattern I kept noticing
The companies I found most interesting were early-stage B2B software businesses with a genuinely good product and no marketing function to speak of. They had a founder doing all the selling, a handful of customers who loved them, and no idea how to turn that into a repeatable engine. What they needed was someone senior enough to set direction and hands-on enough to build it. What they could afford was neither. So they hired a junior marketer, gave them no strategy, and concluded eighteen months later that marketing doesn't work.
Why full-time wasn't the answer
I could have joined one of them. But a company at that stage doesn't need a marketing leader five days a week — it needs one two days a week for a year, and then it needs a team. Sitting in a full-time seat, I'd have spent half my week inventing work to fill it. That's not a knock on in-house roles; it's a mismatch between what the stage requires and what a permanent contract asks for.
What I'm actually offering
Embedded, part-time marketing leadership. I take the seat a CMO would take — owning the strategy, the numbers and the team — for a fraction of the week and a fraction of the cost. Not a report and a handover. Not a deck. I'm in the standups, in the pipeline reviews, and accountable for whether the number moves. Where a company already has junior marketers, I manage and develop them rather than replacing them.
- Diagnose first: ICP, positioning, and where the funnel actually leaks
- Fix the foundations before adding channels — messaging beats media spend
- Build the operating rhythm: what gets reviewed, how often, by whom
- Leave behind a plan and a team that runs without me
What this year looks like
I'm starting deliberately small — a handful of engagements, deep rather than wide, so I can be genuinely useful rather than spread across a dozen logos. I'll write here about what I'm seeing: what's working in B2B SaaS marketing, what's quietly stopped working, and where I've been wrong. If you're a founder with product-market fit and no marketing engine, that's the conversation I want to have.
Going independent isn't a rejection of in-house work — it's a bet that the companies who most need senior marketing thinking are exactly the ones who can't yet buy it full-time. Let's see if I'm right.
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