One marketer, six jobs: fix the workload before the hire

The visible work hides the real load

Content, ads, email and events can look like four neat lines in a job description. In practice, each contains planning, coordination, production, approvals, maintenance and measurement.

The marketer also answers sales requests, fixes presentation slides and revises pages when product changes. None of that appears in the quarterly plan, but all of it competes for the same week.

Before describing the person as slow, establish what they are actually carrying. This is the central problem in the Day 28 entry of my founder marketing series: priorities do not create focus unless something else leaves the workload.

Make the work visible

Ask the marketer to list recurring responsibilities and recent unplanned requests. Group them into production, coordination, analysis, maintenance and strategic work. Estimate effort roughly; you do not need minute-by-minute surveillance to identify an overloaded role.

Add dependencies. A landing page may require input from sales, product and a designer. The marketer's active work is only one part of the elapsed time. Repeated approval delays can make a capacity problem look like individual inefficiency.

Finally, mark which work has a hard deadline and which work gets pushed when urgent requests arrive. The same important task appearing in the deferred column every week is a management signal.

Choose the outcome before assigning more tasks

Define the most useful commercial change for the quarter. For one business, that might be getting qualified buyers to a first conversation. For another, it might be helping existing trial users reach a meaningful activation milestone.

Map the current workload to that outcome. Some work supports it directly. Some preserves essential operations. Some has a plausible longer-term value. Other work has continued simply because it was once requested.

Do not remove every long-term activity because it lacks immediate attribution. Instead, decide its role deliberately and protect the capacity it needs. The mistake is leaving all work active while calling only one item a priority.

Make four explicit decisions

1. Keep: essential work with a clear purpose and enough capacity to be done properly.
2. Stop: activity the company no longer intends to pursue.
3. Defer: useful work with a specific future review point.
4. Reassign: necessary work better handled by someone with the relevant skills or availability.

Put a name and review date against the decisions. Tell the people who generate requests what has changed. Otherwise the old workload returns through informal messages within days.

Buy targeted support

If design is the bottleneck, a design contractor may help more than another generalist. If the marketer is waiting for customer and channel decisions, senior direction may help more than production capacity.

Keep briefing and review time in the calculation. Outsourcing work does not make coordination disappear. A contractor arrangement that requires constant correction may save less capacity than it appears to.

Use a bounded initial assignment to test the working relationship. Define inputs, deliverables, review rounds and the standard for acceptance.

Review the new role fairly

After the workload changes, review whether important work finishes, dependencies improve and the agreed outcome shows useful signals. Ask what still blocks progress.

If the assignment is now realistic but quality or reliability remains weak, investigate capability and performance. The difference is that you are evaluating a job someone could actually do.

First 10 helps founders build and direct the marketing function. That includes saying which work the team should stop, not merely adding a longer plan to an already full week.

Apply this to your business

List every recurring request given to your marketer, then mark the three that matter to the current business constraint. Defer or reassign the rest for one month.