A marketing team of five has the same strategic decisions to make as a team of fifty — and a fraction of the budget, the bandwidth and the institutional knowledge to make them with. I work with small teams and solo marketers who need a senior peer to think alongside, not another vendor to manage.
The people I work with don't lack energy or effort. They lack a senior peer — someone who's run marketing at scale, knows which bets compound and which drain, and can sit in the decisions with them rather than advising from the outside. I've built and led marketing at GetYourGuide, ZenMate, ProSiebenSat.1, FinCompare and beyond. Small teams are where those patterns matter most, because the margin for error is smallest.
Most marketing advice is written for teams with specialised roles, dedicated budgets and months of runway. A small team runs on different constraints: one person is doing strategy and execution simultaneously, the budget has to justify itself in weeks not quarters, and there's no team to delegate to when the plan hits reality. The frameworks built for large teams don't scale down — they need to be rebuilt from the constraints up.
You can't specialise when you're a generalist by necessity — Enterprise marketing runs on separation of concerns: brand here, performance there, content its own function. A team of five can't work that way. You need a sequenced approach — which lever to pull first, which to build later, what to buy and what to build in-house — tailored to the stage you're actually at.
The decision cycles are faster and the stakes are higher per decision — A large team can absorb a bad channel bet or a failed campaign. A small team can't. The cost of thinking about the wrong things isn't waste — it's existential. Getting the prioritisation right the first time requires senior pattern recognition, not another framework from a course.
AI changes the math, if you know how to apply it — A team of five with the right AI workflows can produce the output quality of a team of fifteen. But only if the workflows are built around your actual work — not generic templates from a tool's landing page. I help small teams rebuild the operating model around AI natively, so the leverage is real and the quality holds.
"A small team that operates with precision beats a large team running without one."
I don't produce strategy for someone else to implement. I work alongside the team — in the decisions, the briefs, the channel calls, the playbook drafts. The thinking transfer is direct and the output is specific to your business, your channels and your team's real capacity. Most engagements run 90 days and end with a written playbook your team runs on its own from week 13.
What should you work on first, second and third — given your real bandwidth, your best-performing channel and the one constraint blocking everything else? I build the priority sequence from your situation, not from a best-practice template.
I teach your team to use AI natively inside their actual workflows: briefing, content, data interpretation, competitive research. Not as a time-saving trick but as a structural upgrade to how the work gets done — so the output quality goes up without the headcount.
Which channels are worth owning for a team your size? Where does organic compound and where does paid return in reasonable time? We answer those questions with your data and your constraints in hand, not from a generic playbook.
KPI architecture for small teams is different: fewer metrics, tighter feedback loops, clear decision rules for when to hold and when to cut. I define the KPI set that reflects real business health and builds a reporting rhythm your team can run in thirty minutes a week.
What does a content strategy look like when one person is writing, editing, distributing and measuring? We build the editorial operating model around your real capacity — AI-assisted briefs, batch production, reuse loops — so the content engine doesn't stall when the week gets busy.
Every engagement ends with a written playbook: the channels, the KPIs, the decision rules, the AI workflows, the content cadence. Written so your newest hire can open it on a Monday morning and know what to do without calling you.
A senior peer for the decisions that can't wait for a board meeting.
The structured method for building a marketing operating system from scratch.
Editorial playbooks for small teams that want organic growth without an agency.
Attribution, reporting and insight for teams that can't afford an analyst.
My work is the thinking layer: sequencing, channel strategy, AI workflow design, playbook definition. When the work shifts to hands-on delivery — running campaigns, shipping code, managing the stack day-to-day — my partner studio intellix.one handles operations with the same standards.
A thirty-minute conversation is usually enough to see where the real constraint is and whether working through it together makes sense. The conversation is always without cost. No pitch at the end — just a direct read on what I see and what I'd do next.