Growth Strategist for Top Brands in Hemp, Peptides, Telehealth

The Growth Inflection: Your growth just stalled. It’s probably not your marketing. Here’s what usually happens to a company between $10M and $50M: You grew on relationships. Referrals. The founder’s network. A few rainmakers who just know people. It worked. Until it didn’t. The referrals plateau. The founder runs out of hours. And suddenly “we’ll grow through word of mouth” isn’t a strategy...it’s a ceiling. The fix isn’t hiring a marketing coordinator to “do some campaigns.” It’s building a system that generates demand predictably, so growth doesn’t depend on three people’s Rolodexes. That transition, from relationship-led to system-led growth, is the hardest and most important one a company makes. If your growth flattened and you can’t quite say why, that’s usually the reason. #RevenueGrowth #ScalingBusiness #GTMStrategy

You don't need a bigger team. You need fewer layers slowing down good decisions. Larger agencies often mean more account managers between you and the people actually doing the strategic thinking. Working with a lean, specialized team means: - Direct access to senior strategists, not a junior account manager relaying messages - Faster decisions, because there's no internal approval chain - Full accountability, because there's nowhere for mistakes to hide Bigger isn't always better. Sometimes it's just slower. If you want direct access to senior strategists instead of an account manager, let's talk - link in Featured. #MarketingStrategy #B2BMarketing #BusinessGrowth

A senior marketing leader told me he's walked away from two roles in the last year. Not because the money was wrong, but because the founder hadn't decided whether they actually wanted a CMO or just someone to execute their own ideas. It's more common than people admit. There's a version of a "CMO brief" that's really just a Head of Marketing role with a bigger title attached and the best candidates, the ones who've built teams from scratch, owned GTM, managed through chaos, spot it immediately and they walk. What founders at Series A/B often actually need is someone who'll push back on the strategy, not just deliver it. Someone who'll tell you your positioning is wrong before you spend £200k finding out the hard way. The candidates worth hiring know the difference. The question is whether the brief or your process reflects it. If you're thinking about a senior marketing hire and want a second opinion on the brief before you go to market, happy to chat.

I'm sure your algorithm has served you this one too: "The CMO is dying." I'd offer a different take. The CMO isn't dying. It's being renamed by companies working through a real problem. We've reached a point where new C-level titles get created faster than organizations can absorb them, usually with good intentions. But without a clear mandate attached, a new title can just add a layer to the org chart and leave people unsure who owns what. The better move is spending less energy inventing more seats at the table and more energy defining the mandate & its KPI's, as well as the right person to deliver on it. Farshid Master wrote one of the clearest breakdowns I've read on this. His point: companies aren't eliminating the marketing function, they're relabeling it -- Chief Growth Officer, Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Commercial Officer -- while the accountability underneath stays the same. His conclusion is worth sitting with... the title was never the asset. The mandate, authority, and reporting line were. I'd add another layer: this isn't only a mandate problem, it's a recruiting one. Not every CMO has been a business or strategic thinker who happens to sit and have grown up in marketing. Some have spent a career running campaigns, full stop. If you're looking for a true growth marketer- you can see the difference before you ask a single 'values' question. Look at the scope of roles they've actually led. Have they intentionally moved through brand, social, performance, ecom, and the tech infrastructure underneath it? Or stayed on one side, never learning to conduct the whole orchestra? That's where interviews should probe: not "tell me about a campaign you're proud of," but how they've balanced short-term pressure against long-term brand building/CLTV. Titles won't fix that. Hiring for range will. Marketing has a critical stake in P&L management. Brand heart. P&L spine. That's been my operating principle since I was lucky enough to report directly into a Brand President with an incredibly strong financial background early in my career. Article link in comments ⬇️.

Do you worry that hiring a CMO is premature? Nobody worries a CFO hire is premature, you just accept someone needs to own the numbers before the numbers become a problem. Marketing is treated in the completely opposite way, no one owns it, people just kick the can down the road occasionally dabbling in a channel or two. The founders who actually define the marketing role early, even if that is part time or in a fractional capacity stop thinking in terms of "what should we post this week" and start putting the onus on that person to think "what are we doing to shift the needle this quarter." Fractional doesn't mean small or half-arsed, in fact it means someone finally has to answer for it and that can make all the difference. #FractionalCMO #B2BMarketing

Want to know what a fractional CMO does in the first 30 days of an engagement? It's not a new campaing, a brand refresh, or an updated content calendar. No, those come later. The first thing is taking apart the car and looking at all the parts. What number moves business? Where is traffic going, and where does it get lost? What's a real cost to acquire a new customer/client/project/student, traced back to the channel that kicked off the relationship. What's being measured, what's being ignored, and what's being reported in a way that looks like progress but isn't. Most companies never have anyoen do this. They've had people execute tactics, but never someone witht the sole job of figuring out what's really happening. The month of clarity is worth more than the next six months of spend.

I have a question. Why do we still think growth belongs to one department? We hire a #CMO and expect #demand. We hire a #CRO and expect #revenue. Some organizations hire a Chief #Growth Officer hoping someone will connect the dots. But here's what I've been seeing. These roles fail not because they are incapable, but because they're trying to optimize one part of a system that's fundamentally interconnected. A brilliant #marketing strategy can fail because sales isn't ready. A great #sales team can struggle because the positioning is weak. A fantastic #product can go unnoticed because the #GTM isn't designed for the market. Growth doesn't happen inside marketing. It doesn't happen inside sales either. It happens in the space where #strategy, #positioning, #product, marketing, sales, #customer success, #partnerships, and now #AI, work together. That's why I don't think the future belongs to companies that keep building bigger #departments. I think it belongs to companies that build a better growth system. That's also why we didn't build mDNA digital as another marketing agency. We are building an external Chief Growth Office - that builds many fragmented GTM pieces to work comprehensively towards one business goal. A team that can sit with #founders, challenge assumptions, #architect GTM, support #prezales, strengthen #positioning, unlock new #opportunities, and stay accountable until growth becomes repeatable. I believe the next decade won't be won by the best marketing team or the best sales team. It will be won by the companies that stop treating growth as a function and start treating it as a discipline. #branding #positioning #leadership

Most agency owners treat hiring as an afterthought. And it’s costing them millions of dollars per year. Having a team full of A-players is your biggest competitive advantage as an agency, so we treat hiring like a full marketing funnel: → An always-on hiring pipeline → Content that attracts senior operators the same way it pulls DTC founders. → A referral bonus for team members who bring in top talent. → A database of talent we've been building for years. The result is that when we need to fill a new seat quickly, we can move fast. We’re not at a shortage of high quality talent, because we’re always engaged with them in our pipeline. Once you build a recruiting system like this for your agency, everything downstream compounds. → Better hires mean stronger delivery → Stronger delivery means higher client retention → Higher retention means better margins → Better margins mean you can pay top of market for the next A-player Most agencies plateau at $30k, $50k, $100k/month because they don't take hiring seriously. The ones that scale past it treat it as the most important lever in the business alongside client acquisition.

Thinking about hiring a growth marketer? Read this first. 👇 When growth slows down, hiring feels like the move. Get someone in who owns it. Someone who's done it before. Fair enough. It just doesn't fix things as often as people hope. The new hire walks into the exact setup that stalled things in the first place. 1️⃣ Same offer. 2️⃣ Same targeting. 3️⃣ Same plan nobody's gone through. A good person can't do much with a plan that was already broken. So six months go by and the growth still isn't there. Now everyone's second-guessing the hire. Most of the time the hire was fine. The mistake was doing it before sorting the rest out. So before you go looking for a growth strategist, work out what's really holding growth back. Is the offer any good? Are you even going after the right people? Get that sorted first. Then whoever you bring in has a real shot. Bring them into a mess, and they'll spend the first year just working out what's broken. ♻️ Repost if someone you know needs to see it.

Most teams don’t have a growth problem. They have a distribution problem. They’ve built a great product, refined their offer, and invested in marketing but they’re still relying on the same playbook: more ads, more cold emails, and bigger lead lists. The reality? Sustainable growth doesn’t come from reaching more people. It comes from reaching the right people through the right channels. That’s where partnership intelligence changes the game. Instead of guessing who to contact next, imagine discovering niche communities where your ideal customers already gather, identifying buyers actively aligned with your solution, or connecting with partners who can introduce your business to entirely new audiences. That’s the shift from chasing attention to building strategic growth. If your team is ready to move beyond cold outreach and unlock warmer, more meaningful opportunities, it’s time to rethink your growth strategy. Explore what’s possible at pigeonhire.com. #Pigeonhire #PartnershipIntelligence #GrowthStrategy #BusinessDevelopment