Before your first marketing hire, build what they will walk into

Every founder I speak to reaches the same point. Sales has carried the business this far, the founder has been doing marketing in the gaps between everything else, and somebody on the board says it is time to hire a marketer.

They are usually right. The question is what that person walks into on their first Monday.

What a marketing manager actually costs

Start with the money, because that is where most of these conversations start.

A good B2B marketing manager outside London costs about £50,000. That is the number on the job advert and the number that gets approved. It is not what the role costs.

Using the 2026/27 standard employer rates, National Insurance is 15% above the £5,000 annual secondary threshold, which adds £6,750. The minimum employer pension contribution, normally 3% of qualifying earnings rather than the full salary, is about £1,300. Payroll, HR software and employer's liability insurance come to around £750, and the software seats an employee needs (design, AI, stock imagery) about £1,000. That takes you to roughly £60,000 before any benefits or kit. Core tools like your CRM cost the same whichever route you take, so I have left them out of both sides.

Then there is the part nobody budgets for. A marketing manager is rarely a designer and almost never a strong copywriter. They will need both, and a day a week of each from decent UK freelancers costs around £24,000 a year.

Add it up and the £50,000 hire costs about £84,000 a year. That is before the months it takes to find someone and the months after that before they are properly productive.

The alternative costs a little more

The obvious alternative is an outsourced team: a fractional CMO one day a week, a freelance marketing manager two days a week, and the same designer and copywriter. At typical UK rates that comes to about £91,000.

Freelance costs assume 48 working weeks a year.

So the outsourced team costs around £7,000 a year more on these illustrative numbers. A London salary closes the gap. If your company is eligible for Employment Allowance and has enough of its allowance available to cover this hire’s employer National Insurance, the gap widens to around £14,000. Eligibility matters: a company whose only employee liable for employer National Insurance is its sole director cannot claim. Anyone telling you outsourcing is dramatically cheaper is selling something. I am selling something too, which is why I would rather make the assumptions clear.

The outsourced team also gives you fewer days. A full-time manager is in five days a week. The outsourced version is three days of CMO and manager time combined, plus the specialists.

What the difference buys is the one thing the in-house route leaves out. Hire a manager and you get a manager. Nobody in that setup is setting the strategy, unless the founder is doing it in the evenings. The outsourced team puts senior marketing leadership in the business one day a week, for roughly £600 a month more than the hire.

If cost were the whole argument, I would tell you to hire. It is not the whole argument.

What the first hire walks into

The manager starts. There is no agreed positioning, because the founder carries it in their head and it shifts depending on who they are talking to. There is no plan beyond "more leads". The CRM was set up by sales three years ago and nobody trusts the data. There is a website, a brand that was done on a budget, and a LinkedIn page that last posted in March.

A good manager will try to fix all of it at once. A less experienced one will start producing things, because producing things is visible and visible feels safe. Either way, six months in, the founder is looking at a busy marketing function and wondering what it is for.

None of that is the manager's fault. You have asked someone to execute a strategy that does not exist, inside a system that has not been built, while reporting to someone who cannot tell them whether the work is any good. Most marketing managers are hired to run a machine. A first hire is often handed the parts.

Getting it wrong costs more from January

Changes under the Employment Rights Act 2025 are scheduled for 1 January 2027: the qualifying period for ordinary unfair dismissal is due to fall from two years to six months, and the compensatory-award cap is due to be removed. The timetable remains subject to commencement and parliamentary processes.

At present, ordinary unfair dismissal generally requires two years’ service. That does not make dismissal risk-free before then: discrimination and many automatically unfair dismissal protections already apply from day one. Under the scheduled changes, ordinary unfair dismissal protection would generally apply after six months. A fair reason and a fair process matter, and compensation would still depend on evidenced loss rather than being an automatic or unlimited payout.

Six months is exactly when the situation above tends to become obvious. The founder has a busy, unfocused function and an employee who has done what they could with what they were given, and who would then qualify for ordinary unfair dismissal protection. That is a hard conversation to have fairly, because much of the problem was never theirs.

A genuinely independent outsourced team is different. Ending the arrangement is normally governed by the contract, but employment status and the terms still matter; outsourcing is not a blanket exemption from legal risk. And if you do hire, hiring into a defined role with clear first-year goals is what lets you judge performance properly inside those six months.

Anyone hiring now should take proper advice on probation periods and contracts. For this decision, the point is simpler. If the scheduled changes take effect, a first hire that goes wrong may become harder and more costly to unwind after six months.

Put the structure in first

For most companies at this stage, I would build the structure first and hire into it.

That means six months or so of senior marketing leadership, part time, with a small execution team around it, doing four things.

1. Settling the positioning. Who you are for, what you are the best choice for, and why. Written down, agreed by the leadership team, and used in sales conversations as well as on the website.
2. Setting the priorities. A plan with a small number of things in it, tied to commercial targets, with a budget that someone owns.
3. Building the system. A CRM that sales and marketing both trust, reporting the board can read, a content rhythm, and the AI workflows that let a small team produce at the level of a larger one.
4. Proving what works. Running enough activity to know which channels, messages and formats move pipeline for this business, so the first hire inherits evidence rather than opinions.

Then you hire, and the difference shows up straight away.

Why the hire goes better

The brief writes itself. You know what the job is because someone has been doing it. You are hiring into a defined role in a working operation, so you can describe it honestly and interview against it.

You also know what good looks like. A founder who is not a marketer finds it very hard to tell a strong marketing candidate from a confident one. Someone who has been running your marketing for six months can sit in on the interview and tell the difference in about ten minutes.

The new manager arrives with priorities, a plan, a working system and a set of results to build on. Their first quarter goes on improving something that works, which is a much better use of a new hire than building it from scratch. The person who built it can stay involved for as long as it is useful, at a day a week or less while the manager grows into the role, and then step back.

I mean that last part. An outsourced team is a way of getting to a good hire. It should not be a permanent substitute for having your own people, and I would be wary of anyone whose model depends on you never building a team of your own.

When to hire straight away

There are businesses where I would skip all of this and hire.

If the founder or CEO is genuinely strong at marketing, the strategy already exists and they will give the new person real time, a capable manager can execute well from day one. The same goes if the need is narrow and well defined, such as running an events programme or managing a single channel that already works.

And if you already have the strategy, the plan and the systems from an earlier phase of the business, you have done the structural work. Hire.

Here is a simple way to tell which camp you are in. Try writing a one-page brief for the role that says what this person should achieve in their first year and how you will know. If you can, you are ready. If the brief turns into a list of everything marketing could possibly do, you are hiring someone to work out what marketing should be. That is a leadership job, and it is an expensive one to hand to a first hire.

Run your own numbers

Use your own salary, day rates, employer costs and specialist support requirements to compare the options. The figures here are estimates, not quotes. The numbers will not make the decision for you. What they show is that the money can be close enough for the decision to rest on something else.