SCALING YOUR BUSINESS WITH NO MARKETING TEAM
For the past five years, the majority of the brands I’ve worked with have one thing in common - they have lean - or in some cases NO - in-house marketing resources.
These aren’t startups - as a matter of fact, one has been in business for centuries, and on average, these businesses are over 10 years old. These companies successfully reach $40-$100mil in annual revenue with remarkably little marketing.
People are often surprised when they hear of companies growing so significantly with limited in-house marketing resources. So here are key learnings on how to scale your beauty or wellness business with a lean team.
Note, this is not a how-to on hiring contractors or freelancers.
The focus of this post is on steps you can take to optimize your company internally.
I’ve broken them down into 4 areas.
On Leadership
On Roles & Responsibilities
On Communication
On Process
1. LEADERSHIP
Scaling your business with a lean team means operating from a strong foundation. That means leadership must take the reins with confidence - or more specifically, to be decisive and act cohesively.
Being decisive may seem like an insignificant attribute - but a ten-year study published in the Harvard Business Review discovered that high performance CEOs make decisions earlier, faster, and with greater conviction. Taking this a step further, being consistent will help you build trust with your internal team, and ensure that communication with your vendors is strong in order to deliver consistent outcomes.
2. ROLES & RESPONSIBILITIES
In order for your team to be efficient, it’s important to start with clearly outlined roles and responsibilities for each person. When your team is “small” (which is relative), in leu of building out an org chart and simply define job responsibilities for each individual, it can be helpful to create a list of business needs and assign each responsibility to a team member.
To be clear, it’s nearly impossible to predict all of your business needs - so willingness to collaborate and embrace grey areas will help your team build traction. There’s a common operational flaw I see with teams, which I like to call the “not my problem” syndrome😬. This needs to be nipped in the bud asap in order to establish a positive sense of team effort.
Willingness to roll up your sleeves to get the job done is an A+ in my book when hiring for a lean team.
3. COMMUNICATION
One of the most common challenges that I find with high-growth 8-9 figure businesses is a sense of disorder that transpires from business expansion. This disorder is never intentional - but rather symptomatic of a company that has scaled too fast and hasn’t grown operationally in parallel with the business. When you go from $5mil to $50mil in a short period, this can be a problem. At the crux of this disorder are often complications due to poor communication.
Specifically, two areas of communication will help accelerate your team’s effectiveness.
A) Establishing and using the same internal language, from product names and communication tools, to structures and processes.
B) Aligning on key business objectives so that all teams are working towards the same goal. You’d be surprised how often cross-functional teams have different ideas of “success”.
4. PROCESS
It’s quite common for small and mid-sized companies to lack processes - but don’t be discouraged. Establishing processes for frequent or cyclical activities will make everyone’s life easier.
A few examples are:
Opening a new retail account
New product launches
Re-ordering inventory
Making changes to packaging artwork
Pricing changes
When I was at Hourglass Cosmetics, one of the first things I tackled was establishing an artwork approval process that included Sales, Marketing, Regulatory, Operations and the CEO. This resulted in establishing a routing sequence for all stakeholders and creating forms that would allow us to track all artwork being routed internally.
IN SUMMARY
These key learnings are a starting point - and will allow you to lay the groundwork for working lean.
Remember that there is no “right” way - but more often than not, there is definitely a better way ✌️