At Simplébo, a B2B SaaS provider, I was handed the mandate this site calls a rescue and turnaround: close the structural gap between a “founder-led” and a “function-led” company. The company had grown to ~70 people on the back of the founder’s personal craft, but the “marketing” function consisted of a single, brilliant collaborator. He had been hired to deploy HubSpot, then given a hybrid SEO role, and eventually became the default destination for every request that smelled like growth.
He was over-stretched and under-supported. The founder’s frustration was clear: the collaborator didn’t take enough risks and wasn’t spending the budgets allocated to him. From the outside, it looked like a performance or confidence issue.
But as I stepped into the role of transition lead, it became obvious that this was not a people problem; it was an architecture problem.
TL;DR
I designed and staffed a lean marketing division for a 70-person SaaS company by auditing actual needs and redeploying existing talent. By structuring the function around four essential poles and recruiting only three missing roles, I built a capability that fed leads to sales and remained operational two years after my departure.
The diagnosis: a structural void
I spent my first week living inside the company, attending every meeting and interviewing every key stakeholder. The “symptom” (a collaborator who under-used his budget) was actually a rational response to his environment.
He was being pulled in a dozen directions by different departments because he was the only one who knew how to do a bit of everything. He had no team, no clear poles of expertise, and no orchestration between the commercial, marketing, business development, and IT teams.
The founder’s instinct was to offer more: more budget, more headcount, more resources. But throwing money at an unstructured gap only creates expensive chaos, as the problem wasn’t a lack of spending but a lack of design.
The lean-management call
The options were straightforward:
- Giving the current setup more money.
- Outsourcing the entire function to an agency.
- Designing the capability from scratch.
I chose the third path, but with a strict lean-management constraint. I built it with a team, but the approach was not to simply hire a new group to paper over the existing gaps. Instead, I audited the actual needs, defined the necessary poles of expertise, and redeployed the talent already in the building.
The goal was to build a structure that was lean enough to be agile but robust enough to be institutionalized.
The build: from audit to orchestration
I proposed a structure based on four essential poles: SEO, paid acquisition, content production, and automation & data.
I repositioned the original multi-hat collaborator as the senior lead for automation and data. This moved him out of the “generalist” trap and into a role that leveraged his deep institutional knowledge and technical skill.
I kept the existing apprentice as a content assistant and recruited only the three missing roles. To avoid repeating past mistakes in paid acquisition, I re-engaged the former growth hacker, who had already left the company, as an external mentor for the new hire. This ensured the new hire had a direct line to proven tactical success without the company bearing the full risk of a blind hire.
I proposed a cross-functional working group to coordinate efforts between partnerships, business development, marketing, and sales; the direction accepted it. By repatriating all marketing trades, including communication, which had previously sat under HR, I transformed the division into a dedicated feeder for the sales team. I also spun off a Business Intelligence (BI) pole under IT, which unlocked critical tracking and email-flow automation.
The friction of the build
This was not a fast miracle. The diagnosis alone took six months of coaching before the structural cause was fully named and accepted.
The lean model also carried inherent risks:
- Repositioning a collaborator is always a bet that their knowledge outweighs their old job title.
- Relying on a departed employee as a mentor requires a high degree of goodwill and a specific type of professional relationship.
These were not failures, but they were the points of friction that required constant management.
Outcome: what the build left behind
By the time I stepped away, the marketing division was fully constituted and functioning as a lead-generation engine for sales. The company had successfully crossed the 70-person threshold with a professionalized operational core. The real proof of a successful build is how it runs after the builder leaves.
Two years later, the organization and the teams I put in place were still running, now under the leadership of a newly hired marketing director. The capability had been institutionalized.
If this is the shape of your problem, let’s talk.
For more on how I approach these transitions, you can read more about my process.