Your marketing hire didn't fail. Your setup probably did.
Here's a story I've watched play out more times than I can count.
A business is doing well. It's grown on word of mouth and graft, there are a couple of salespeople, someone in the office keeping the admin and the orders moving, and the owner decides it's time to take marketing seriously. So they hire a marketing person. Usually someone junior. A recent graduate, an apprentice, someone a couple of years in and keen. Affordable, eager, full of ideas.
Then, somewhere between six and twelve months later, that person is gone. The verdict is always the same: they "didn't deliver." Leads didn't jump, the phone didn't ring more, the magic didn't happen. The owner quietly concludes that marketing doesn't really work for a business like theirs, and goes back to relying on word of mouth.
And the junior? They go off to the next small business, a bit more dented than before, and the exact same thing happens to them again.
I've seen it enough times now to say it plainly: in almost every one of those cases, the person didn't fail. The setup did. And the person carried the can for it.
What actually went wrong
Here's the root of it, and once you see it you can't unsee it. The owner hired a doer and expected a director.
They brought in someone junior, cheap and still learning, and then handed them decisions that need twenty years of commercial judgement. What should we spend? Which channels are even right for us? Is this campaign working, and if not, why? Those are not executive-level questions. They're director-level questions, and the one thing a junior hasn't bought yet is the experience to answer them. Then, when they get those calls wrong, because of course they do, they get blamed for it.
A good junior can execute brilliantly. They can build the thing, run the thing, post the thing, chase the thing. What they cannot do is set their own direction, because direction is the part that experience pays for, and they haven't lived long enough to have it yet. Expecting them to is like hiring a talented apprentice joiner and being annoyed they can't design the building.
Every complaint I hear about these hires is really just that one mismatch wearing a different mask:
The expectations are sky high, because the owner is unconsciously expecting director-level output from an executive-level hire.
There's no framework or direction, because nobody senior is setting the strategy the junior is meant to execute, so they end up improvising. And improvising without experience looks an awful lot like floundering.
The owner keeps overruling them, because the owner does have the commercial instinct, they've just never formalised it into direction. So instead of steering up front, they veto after the fact. Which teaches the junior nothing except that their judgement isn't trusted.
Put those together and you get a person who never stood a chance, labelled a failure, moving on disillusioned, while the owner decides the whole idea was a mistake.
To be clear, hiring them is the right move
None of this is an argument against hiring junior marketers. The opposite. Bringing in an eager, capable person early in their career is one of the smartest things a growing business can do. They're affordable, they're hungry, they'll grow with you, and a good one will repay the investment many times over.
But it only works if you do the one step almost everyone skips. You have to supply the thing they can't bring themselves: direction. Hire the doer, by all means, just don't forget that someone has to be the director. If that isn't going to be them, and at their level it can't be, then it has to be you, or someone you bring in to do it.
So before you make the hire, get honest about three things.
What this person is actually for. Write the role around execution, not strategy. You're hiring someone to do the marketing well, not to decide what the marketing should be. If the job description quietly assumes they'll set the direction too, you're hiring the wrong seniority for the money.
Who is setting their direction. This is the big one. If the honest answer is "they will," stop and rethink. Either pay up for someone senior enough to direct themselves, or accept that you, or someone on your behalf, will be supplying the strategy they work to.
What good actually looks like. Define success at six and twelve months in terms they can actually control, things they do and produce, not "more leads" or "more revenue", which depend on a hundred factors above their pay grade. Judge a junior on the revenue line and you've set them up to fail before day one.
Five things to put in place so they grow and deliver
Get the thinking above right, then give them the scaffolding to succeed:
Direction, written down. A simple strategy and a short list of priorities for the quarter, so they always know what actually matters right now and aren't guessing. It doesn't need to be a thirty-page plan. A page will do.
One number they own. Give them a single, level-appropriate metric they can genuinely move, an activity or output figure, not the company revenue they have no real control over. Ownership of the right number builds confidence. Ownership of the wrong one breeds despair.
A decision boundary. Agree what they can decide on their own and what needs a conversation first. This single thing kills the "overruled after the fact" problem at the root, because the steering happens before the work, not after it.
A regular steer, not a random veto. Put a short recurring session in the diary where you set direction and answer their questions, up front. Five minutes of guidance before the work beats an hour of frustrated corrections after it, for both of you.
Senior input they can learn from. A junior left to teach themselves stays junior. They need someone with real commercial scar tissue feeding their development, whether that's you carving out genuine time, an experienced mentor, or outside help brought in for exactly this. The form matters less than the fact that it exists.
That last point is the one most owners can't honestly tick, not because they don't care, but because they're flat out running the business and don't have the senior marketing experience to give. That's fine. It just has to come from somewhere, because it's the difference between a hire who blossoms and one who quietly drowns.
The bit worth sitting with
If you've let a marketing person go in the last few years, convinced they didn't work out, it's worth asking an uncomfortable question: were they actually the problem, or were they a junior asked to be a director, with no direction, getting overruled, and never really given a chance?
I ask because I've met a lot of those people on the other side of it, dusting themselves off at the next business, and most of them were good. They just needed someone to point them in the right direction and let them get on with it.
Hire the junior. It's a great move. Just remember you're hiring the doer, and make sure someone's doing the directing.
