A Founder’s Guide to Avoiding Marketing Churn
Before you hire (or rehire) marketing leadership, ask yourself these 5 questions.
Because churn isn’t about bad talent, it’s about a misaligned setup. And fixing it starts at the top.
You’re back here again.
Staring down another marketing leadership search.
Wondering if this time it’ll finally work.
Maybe your last hire didn’t stick. Or maybe they stayed—but the results didn’t.
You thought you’d found someone great. Maybe they were great. But somewhere between the job description and the day-to-day, things went sideways.
You're not alone.
Every day, I see smart founders dealing with the same cycle: hire a marketing leader, expect traction, wait for results, get frustrated, lose confidence—and eventually, start over. Meanwhile, I see experienced, strategic marketers leaving roles quietly (or loudly), exhausted and demoralized.
This isn’t a fluke. It’s a pattern.
And it reflects something deeper:
A mismatch between what companies want from marketing and what they enable
A culture that demands ownership without authority
And a fundamental misunderstanding of what modern marketing leadership really looks like
The data backs it up:
According to Marketing Week’s 2025 Career & Salary Survey:
58.1% of marketers feel overwhelmed
56.1% feel undervalued
Over 50% report emotional exhaustion or a loss of enjoyment in their work
And Spencer Stuart’s CMO Tenure Study 2025: The Evolution of Marketing Leadership reports that average CMO tenure is just 4.3 years—one of the shortest in the C-suite.
These aren’t performance issues. They’re structural ones. And they’re fixable.
So before you post that next job spec or bring someone new on board, take a breath. These five questions can help you shift the setup—so your next hire has the clarity, authority, and support they actually need to succeed.
1. Are you clear on the real problem this hire needs to solve?
It’s easy to write a job spec that says “Head of Marketing” and then list everything from SEO to sales enablement to brand to PR. But when everything’s a priority, nothing gets done well.
Founder lens: What’s the single most important business outcome this person needs to drive in the next 6–12 months? If you can’t name it, the role isn’t ready yet.
2. Are you giving them true ownership—or just responsibility?
You might expect your marketing hire to own revenue. But do they control the budget? The messaging? The website? The sales handoff? The brand perception?
If you’re handing out accountability without decision-making power, you’re not enabling leadership, you’re outsourcing pressure.
3. Are you expecting them to “partner” with sales, or fix sales?
Marketing doesn’t succeed in a vacuum. If you expect your new hire to generate leads, but sales won’t follow up or share insights, you’ve got a structural issue, not a marketing one.
You can’t hire alignment—you have to build it. If your last marketer struggled here, ask: were they set up to collaborate… or to fight upstream?
4. Are you hiring a leader, but expecting them to execute full time?
Early-stage companies need hands-on people. But too often, founders hire for strategy and then bury their hire in tasks: writing emails, fixing decks, managing HubSpot, updating the website.
If you're not ready for a full team, find outside support that can handle execution—so your marketing leader can actually lead. That’s one way I support clients through Grounded Growth Studio.
5. Are your expectations aligned with your actual growth stage?
The resume from a Fortune 100 brand may look shiny, but that person probably had a team, a budget, and infrastructure. Will they thrive in your current reality?
Set expectations based on your stage, not your ambition. Better yet, bring in a partner to help define what the role really needs to be. I help founders do this early—before misalignment costs time, morale, and momentum.
Bottom line:
If your past hires haven’t worked out, it doesn’t mean marketing leadership is impossible.
It means the setup wasn’t right.
When structure, authority, and expectations are aligned, your Head of Marketing becomes a force multiplier. But if the foundations aren’t in place, even the most talented hire will struggle.
Before you make the same mistake twice, ask yourself these five questions.
And if you want a thought partner to help get this hire right, from role clarity to team design to realistic roadmapping—reach out. Let’s stop the churn cycle before it starts.
