You Don't Need a Unicorn! How to Know What Marketing Help You Actually Need

Every founder and marketing manager I talk to hits the same wall eventually. It's not budget. It's not trust. It's not even whether outsourcing is the right call. It's simply not knowing what's actually missing before they go and hire.

In this episode, I'm unpacking:

• Why "should I get help" is the wrong question, and what the real one is
• The difference between needing strategy and needing execution, and why most people can't tell which one they're short on
• Why hiring one person to do it all almost never works, and what to look for instead
• A real story from my own business, including the hire that taught me the hard way why senior and junior support need to be separated
• A simple gut-check for figuring out what your business needs before you write the next job ad

If you've ever felt like you have too much on your plate but couldn't put your finger on exactly what to hand off, press play.

Follow @coffeesandcontentpod for more, and find me at @loren.thesocialcollective.

Links:

• Follow on Instagram: @loren.thesocialcollective
• Find Loren on LinkedIn: Loren Tomlinson
• Visit us at: www.thesocialcollective.co.nz

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:08

Grab that morning cup of coffee, turn up those headphones, and let's talk marketing. This is the podcast where we get into the strategy, the numbers, and the conversations shaping the industry behind the scenes. Brought to you by the Social Collective. This is Coffees and Content. Hello, all of my amazing marketers and founders listening to today's episode. It is so nice to be back in your ears with another episode of the Coffees and Content Podcast. I am your host, Lauren, bringing you another wonderful podcast episode sponsored by the Social Collective, which is my, of course, my full stack digital marketing agency. I am so excited to be behind the microphone again today. And I feel like it's been a much needed break. I did come down with the delightful influenza, and I also just needed a minute to rest after the last event that we hosted, which, for those of you who have listened to the episodes by now, we've split it into a two-parter. The first part was the panel, the second part was the QA. And that was because there was just so much good juice that came out of that live panel. It was an experience, to say the least, when it comes to running events. And running events is not for the week. I will say that. However, it was also one of the most amazing nights that I have ever been part of in my business career. It was such an amazing open forum evening where we got to talk through so many different parts of marketing and AI and growth and what it means to be going into this new era where everyone's businesses have AI integrated with them. And also to answer some of your questions, because out of the amazing people that came, we had so many good questions to come out of the audience. And it was really nice to give that kind of reassurance, I think, to be able to share that I personally and my fellow panelists felt the same. We don't need to be worrying that AI is going somewhere. We don't need to be worrying that it's going to be taking our jobs anytime soon. But I do think it's really important that we continue to look at the privacy side of things. We look at how we're integrating it into the businesses that we run or the departments that we're managing. And I think just staying open and staying optimistic is the most important thing. And so that is my main takeaways out of the panel. But for those of you who have listened to the episodes, I would love to know what you think. Make sure you're also following us on the Coffees and Content Podcast Instagram, because that's where we're going to be sharing so many more resources and all the clips and more behind the scenes and all of that great stuff. I also want to start off this episode with a really exciting announcement. As of tomorrow, we will pretty much be ready to open the doors to TSC Studios, which is so flipping exciting. For those of you who have not yet heard of what TSC Studios is, it is my podcast and content studio that is opening up in Hobsonville. It is the only podcast studio and content studio on our side of the bridge, which is really exciting. So if you are in the West Auckland area, northwest Auckland area, or even your central and you're just sick of hanging out in the CBD and you want a bit of a break and you want to come over to Hobby, come over to Hobsonville and check it out. We are in the central part of Hobsonville, which is very exciting. All the details are gonna be popping up online very soon. So I'm just in the process of finalizing the website because tomorrow we are getting photos of the content studio taken and then it's gonna be open to the public, which is so cool. So this is, I think, probably one of the last episodes that I will record not in the studio for a while. And I'm really excited because I'm gonna be bringing some amazing guests into the studio with me. We're gonna be recording some more like face on camera content, which is really exciting. And it also means that there's a space that other people can use for their podcasts. So if you create content or if you have a podcast of your own, make sure that you go check out TSC.studios on Instagram because I would absolutely love to have you in the space. But anywho, turning to today's podcast episode, I'm changing the topic a little bit. We're moving away from AI. And I think what I really want to discuss in today's podcast is something that I see that almost every founder or marketing manager that I have spoken to, they really have the same common blocks. And it comes down to when it's time to outsource. And what I want to talk about in today's episode, it's not the budget, it's not a trust factor, it's not even knowing whether outsourcing is the right call, is you don't actually know how to figure out what is missing. And this is a question that I have posed to me quite often when it comes to whether someone is ready to book on a discovery call. But I think also just I've got so many friends that run businesses that have all faced this common decision. And I've also been in the same position. I've been in the same boat where I've had to decide, okay, I know I need to outsource and I know I need to hire, but what I need, I just don't know. And I think that's the real problem underneath outsourcing. And I mean, this speaks specifically to marketing. And so if you have ever been in a position where you're like, I have so much on my plate when it comes to marketing, or you know that you need to get things off your plate, or perhaps you've got it off your plate, but your marketing person is moving on to something more exciting and they're moving on to new ventures and you need to rehire for their roles. This is gonna be a really great episode for you because I think the real problem underneath all of this isn't, like I said, it's not, should I get help? We know that you need help. We know that as a marketing manager, you're responsible for juggling so, so much and you need to be at the high level of it all. You also know that as a business owner, we need to bring in some support. We need to bring in reinforcements because we cannot be the people that are running the whole show. It's not our responsibility to run everything, it is our responsibility to lead. And this goes for founders, this goes for marketing managers, this goes for general managers and beyond. It is our responsibility to lead. And if we are not leading and we are getting stuck in the weeds, this is exactly what holds our business back. And I know because I have been in that exact position. I have had staff, I have had contractors, I've had full-time staff, I've had part-time staff, I've had contractors that work five hours a month, I've had contractors that work five hours a day, I've had contractors that work basically full-time. I've had it all. And I think what I've really recognized is finding the right support and figuring out what support you need is actually a lot harder than a lot of people think. So whether it's junior support, senior support, someone to hold the strategy or someone to execute it, or maybe it's like a combination of both. Most people that I speak to can't actually clearly articulate that. And that is why they get stuck. And so today's episode is gonna be all about that. I want to talk through how to work through figuring out what's actually missing before you go and hire. Because once you hire, especially if you are hiring a permanent staff member, that's a pretty permanent thing. And I also think on the flip side, if you're hiring a contractor, it's also still a big investment of your energy and your time and your money. And so hiring isn't something that we should take lightly, but it's also not something that I want you to sit and stress over. So let's dive into today's episode. So when I think about where the mismatch usually starts, I think what typically happens is we obviously get to that point where we realize we need help. And the natural thing, and I have been there many, many a time. I think the natural thing for a lot of business owners is to go, you know what, I'm just gonna go with the cheapest option. I think a lot of the time as business owners or as managers, we think that the easiest option is to go with someone who can do it all. We go for the so-called unicorn. We're looking for someone that can do the strategy and the execution. They've also got the big picture thinking, but the day-to-day posting. They do the newsletters, they do the social media, they do the ad copy, they do the content. But think about what that actually costs. I want you to think about, so that's all really well and good if there was this unicorn that exists. And admittedly, there's a lot of people out there that say they can do all of that. However, I want you to think about it like this. So we're thinking about the strategy, we're thinking about the big picture. Paying somebody, like, say, for example, $100,000 salary to build your social posts and write your newsletters is basically like paying a law firm's director for paralegal work. It just doesn't make sense. But people do it all the time in marketing because they don't actually realize what they're doing wrong. And the same thing goes the total opposite way. We ask our junior people, we bring on somebody like I did, we bring on someone so junior and so new, and we expect them to hold the strategy and tell us where we're gonna go. And that's also not safe for the business direction either, because they might be able to execute really well. They might be really good at graphic design, they might be really good at the copy side of things, but it doesn't necessarily mean they're equipped to set direction. Now, I've been in situations like this, and I've had clients that have also been in this position. And one client that I had many years ago, they had brought on exactly this. They'd brought on a junior staff member, thinking that that would help them kind of alleviate their stress when it comes to social media content. They wanted to be posting on all the different platforms and they really wanted just to get it off their plate. And what they didn't realize until after hiring this person is it actually created so much more work for the director by having an assistant that didn't have any strategic knowledge because not only was this person struggling to come up with content ideas, they were also so new that they were having to ask the business owners approval every time. They were having to ask for approval on content, approval on ideas, approval on direction. And I don't know if you've ever felt like this, but I certainly have with staff that I've hired in so many five years gone by. Like my current team are absolutely fantastic. But when I very first started hiring, I would hire staff members thinking that, and this is particularly contractors that I'd bring on to do my social media content for for my team. So often I found myself in a position thinking it actually is just that much harder executing it with somebody's help than it is to do it myself because I know in my brain what I need, and I just want to execute it because I know how I have to do it. And so it was actually just easier for me to sit on the couch at like 10 p.m. on a Thursday night and design this stuff in Canva. It was taking so much of my effort to give feedback. And honestly, it was actually just creating more stress for me. And so I bought this junior person on thinking, and my client did the same thing, they bought on this junior person thinking that they could hold the strategy. And then when they realized that they couldn't figure out the direction of the posts, no matter how much feedback was given, they just could not understand it all. It was actually creating so much more work. And then, same on the flip side, I've also seen clients who have marketing managers or they have senior level experts, like, say, for example, like a paid ads expert, where that's their actual specialty and they're really, really good at it. And they're asking them to do things like put put a post up on social media or go out and create some reels for me. And why are you asking your senior level strategist to do your junior level work when their job should be analyzing the data? It should be looking at things with a sort of more wide step back lens. It really should be looking at how your business can grow and scale and looking at every piece of content that goes out there and analyzing it. Granted, that's not the position that we all start in. We do need to get that junior person on so we can eventually get the senior level person on. But I think it's really important to recognize where you need that support. Because if you have someone already on your team that could do the execution, they just need some direction, it might be time to bring in that person. I did that about this time last year. I hired Morgan, who is our essentially our client lead. I bought her into the business because I realized that I had people on my team that were doing the execution of the ads, they were doing the socials, they were doing the email marketing. But what I needed was someone to take the strategy and the oversight off my plate so that I could focus on things like sales and growth of the business and not get stuck in the weeds like when a social media person on my team would come and say, Hey, can you approve this post and can you review the copy and the captions and give me any edits before it goes to the client? I started to realize that I needed to bring in that more senior level support. And typically that's how it goes. But I think it's really important to recognize the difference between what a junior person and what a senior person can do. And obviously then you've got your kind of your mid-level people in the middle because people go out looking for someone who can do both. We put up these marketing management listings on Seek or on Trade Me or LinkedIn, and we're looking for a marketing manager. But what we're actually really looking for is this so-called unicorn that doesn't exist. It's the person that can do this the hands-on execution, but they can also do the strategic thinking, and they can do it for one really reasonable kind of salary. And that person, more often than not, barely exists. And if they do, they're actually costing you more than splitting the roll wood. So what happens instead is I see founders try and kind of patch it all together. They get like a part-timer here and they get a contractor over there, and maybe they get a friend who they're like, ah, they know what to do and I can pay them cheap as chips. And what you actually find is that no one is dedicated to the business and no one is overseeing the strategy. There's just fragments of help that are spread far too thin. And I've seen this show up in a couple of ways consistently. The two patterns that I see happening a lot when it comes to hiring. The first pattern is the business that has that junior or that mid-level person who is really, really good at the execution. And like I said, they keep getting pulled into strategic conversations that they were never set up to have. And slowly what happens is the business owner or the person that's pulled them in to do this realizes that what's missing isn't actually more hands, it's the direction. And they're not actually looking for more hands, like bringing on another social media person or bringing on another junior or another assistant or another person that can do a few emails and maybe a bit of account management and also do a bit of social media. That's actually not what's missing. What's missing is the overarching direction. It's the approval of the content, it's the strategic component. It's someone that can hold and own the strategy because that component of your marketing is actually a way bigger piece than I think a lot of people give it credit for. The strategy is something that needs to be constantly reviewed and monitored to make sure that everything holistically across the business actually aligns. And the second pattern that I see is the opposite it's that senior person, more often or not, it's the founder or the director or the marketing manager, and they're holding all of the strategy themselves together. But usually it's because either staff have left or the business grew faster than the team did. And then what happens is they are not only becoming the lead strategist, as they should be, they are also almost the entire execution team because either someone's left and they've gone, oh, it's just easier if I just do it myself rather than rehiring. Or they never had anybody there in the first place to begin with. They were bought on to lead the strategy, but somehow they've also ended up in that space of execution. Now, there's a lot of instances where a marketing manager is also really great at doing the execution. And that is in those initial stages of growing your marketing department. But what I want you to realize is this is not something that is sustainable in the long term. It is also not something where their skill set will fully thrive. And I think what happens is we see, I see, that business owners are trying to hire a marketing manager or somebody that is in the more senior level position and then actually essentially wasting their resources by getting this person to also do all of the execution. Because if you think about it, if you're paying a marketing manager 80, 90, 100, 110, 120K a year and you're asking them to do a social media post that someone who realistically works at almost half that salary, like a 60 to 70K employee or somebody part-time, you're actually just paying a lot of money for social media posts. Your social media posts have then become very, very expensive. Because if you look at the amount of time that this person spends on it and look at their hourly rate, I really want you to ask yourself, is that actually the best use of this person's time? Or could I also insert a junior level staff member so that they can take a little bit of work off that person's plate, whether that be contractor, part-time, or full-time? And then also look at how that marketing manager can then continue to grow and expand the strategy. What can they be doing to really add that value to the business and be looking at how it needs to grow? Because I think that's where I see so much of it being held back, is when the marketing managers never get out of those weeds, they are constantly stuck in the comms, they are constantly stuck making edits, they're constantly stuck creating social media content, that they never actually get to the point where they can sit and breathe with a strategy. So once you know which pattern you're in, pattern one, which is obviously having that junior level person but trying to get the strategy out of them. Or if you're in the second pattern space where you have that senior level person, but you're trying to expect them to do all of the little tasks and spend less time on the things that you've actually hired them to do. Once you know what that looks like, here are your options. I think if you've got a junior or a mid-level person who can execute it really well and they know how to do things, but you're finding I'm just really struggling because I have to be the one that is constantly overseeing the strategy, you need to bring in a strategist. You need to bring in someone a bit more senior, doesn't have to be, and I want to just preface this too by saying these hiring decisions don't all have to be full-time. And I'm gonna talk through what that looks like in a second, but they could be part-time, they could be a contractor, they could be a consultant that you work with on just a few hours a week or a month, or they could be going to an agency like the social collective to jump in and give you that consulting kind of support. So what you need here, if you've got that junior or that mid-level person or people who are really, really good at the execution, but you know to take the business to that next stage, you need someone to have set that strategy. We want to look for that senior person who can set the direction and then they can let your existing team run with it whilst still overseeing it all. Because I think that's a really important component of having a senior strategist or having someone that is holding the strategy, is that they are also managing those team members to execute it effectively. They are making sure that the things that go out are in alignment with the strategy they've set, because that is where I find there's so much friction for so many businesses because they've got someone that's come up with the strategy once upon a time. You might have brainstormed it in Claude and maybe you chucked it in Notion or you printed it out on a piece of paper. And then you just let your junior team run with things. And if they don't have that person that is giving them that strategic direction, it's kind of inevitable that they're gonna go off the course. Then on the other side, if you've got that senior person that is holding all of the strategy, maybe it's time to start looking at outsourcing just the execution. We work with so many clients where our clients are the marketing managers or the general managers, and their job is to run that entire department. We come in because we partner with them on the strategic side of things, but our main responsibilities are executing the socials or executing the ads or executing their email marketing so that they've actually got time that's freed up to do things like growing the business and growing their departments. They shouldn't be stuck sitting in the weeds of sitting in the back end of meta ads manager, putting different ads together and sitting in Canva creating different pieces of social media content or trying to scrape together an email and mail chimp. That's just a waste of their time. So instead, keep the direction in-house and just look at hand off handing off the doing. And I think sometimes the roles actually already exist in your business. They're just essentially misallocated. And I think that's also really important to check in on before you do hire someone new or bring in anyone new or change the status quo is look at the resources that you currently have, look at the skill sets within your current team, and then just look to hire people to fill in those gaps. And sometimes, especially if people have left and you're looking to rehire, the better move isn't actually even to replace at all. Sometimes outsourcing the whole spread instead, so junior through senior as one whole team is actually the better solution. And this became really clear to me when I was talking with a new client of ours a few weeks back. And they had essentially been in a position where I've been before, where a couple of their staff members were moving on to the their newest adventures and they're really excited for them. But it's left them thinking, okay, I really need someone to do the execution and I need someone to do the strategy. But to be honest, I'm exhausted. I need a break. I need to just not train anybody for five minutes. And that is one of the things when it comes to hiring in the marketing department, is that we become responsible. And I mean, I guess not even just the marketing department, it's the business in general, is that we become responsible for hiring and training all of these people. And sometimes as business owners, and I know this from being in this position a couple of years ago, sometimes when staff leave, you just don't necessarily want to retrain someone in that role. And that's where what we offer at the social collective has come in. Because I was able to go to this business owner and say, look, basically, for the price of not quite a senior level strategist, you get a strategist, you get an account manager who is your one singular point of contact. You also Specialists in the social media realm, the paid ads realm, and the email marketing realm and content creation. And we come as a bundle deal. And this is, I think, where I love being able to support businesses because rather than having to go through the process of rehiring and retraining, this business owner now actually has brought us in as their full marketing team where we liaise with the business owner on the strategy, or in some cases we liaise with the marketing manager on the strategy. And then we as a team take responsibility for the execution so that that is entirely removed from their plate. So they can focus on the growth of the business and what comes next for them. And we can take care of the things that we are really great at. And we're already, my team are pre-trained in all of these things. And that's what we take off their plate. And it's actually such a satisfying thing to be able to do for business owners because I know from being in this position a few years ago, I had an amazing staff member move on to their next journey. And I honestly really just didn't feel like training anybody up. And I thought to myself, in my naive little brain, I thought, you know what's going to be easier? Is I'm actually just going to split this role, which that part was very smart because it is something I've continued to do through TSC. But rather than having one generalist on my team, I had one account manager at the time that was running things. I decided to split the role. So I split the role into I took back the account management. I had someone working in the paid ads department, someone in the email department, someone doing content and someone doing socials. And I split everything. And to be honest, it was a fantastic decision in terms of allowing me to realize that for my business, the best direction is to have a team of specialists and of course somebody then managing all of the strategy and all of the client management side of things, but it was absolute and utter, complete and utter chaos managing so many different people. Not only did I have to train four, I think it was almost five new staff members that I bought on, I bought on a series of contractors. I not only trained up so many different people, I then had to manage all of these people. And as the business owner who was already tired, already burnt out, I almost put myself in hospital. I didn't have anything left to give. And in hindsight, I probably shouldn't have outsourced it to all of these different people. But like I said, moving forward, it's been one of the best decisions I've made for my business. However, it did make me realize by the time I, I guess, got myself better and out of that position where I was sick and almost in hospital, I realized the importance of having a difference in your team between senior and junior, whether that is in-house, outsourced, or it's a combination of both. And so now moving forward, I will always move forward. And I've received this advice from some of the best marketing agencies in the world, is having your senior leadership team and then supporting the juniors by having the seniors hold that strategy. Because you don't need one person who can do everything. You just need the right person doing the right level of work. It is financially smarter, it is smarter for your energy, it is smarter for your time training these people up. And it is also the best direction for your business. So before you hire, the next time that you go around to hiring, before you post another job ad, because the expensive mistake was never actually asking for help. That was the good thing. It was the guessing what kind of help you needed that put you in this tricky position in the beginning. So let me leave you with this for today's episode. When it comes to deciding what you need, look at these things. Do you need strategy? Do you need execution? Do you need somebody in-house in the room with you? Do you need a team that can do it all? Or can you pull on the current skill sets of your current team members and then just fill in some gaps? And if you ever have questions, you're always welcome to write into the podcast. You're welcome to drop me a message on Instagram, or you're welcome to pop around to the TSC studios and we can have a coffee and chat through your next marketing decision. Because if you're listening to this episode and getting that feeling, like, you know what, I just need to not have the permanent staff and I just want to have an agency that can see me through this next phase of my business. Look, my goal with TSC is we are the stepping stone agency. We are the agency that help you as marketing managers and founders to get on your feet, grow the business, and then it grows so much where you actually need to bring in permanent staff members because things are so big. Or if you love us, you just never leave us. But that is everything for today's episode. I hope this has helped give you a little bit of clarity for the next time that you go to make a hiring decision. But like I said, my DMs are always open. And I'm gonna spend the next few weeks over, I guess just while we're going through spring, really looking at what parts of our business and marketing decisions we need to make, what things we can be tidying up and changing and adjusting so that we roll into 2027. Roll into 2027, feeling really good about the direction that we're moving in. I don't want anyone to be feeling stressed. I don't want anyone to be feeling overwhelmed. I also don't want anyone to be making the same hiring mistakes that I've made before and burning themselves out. I want you to all love what you're doing, love marketing your business, love showing up for yourself and your team and just having fun while you do it. So let's make the rest of 2026 a really good time to do a bit of spring cleaning and get everything ready so we can roll into a brand new year with such a good structure in place. So stay tuned for future episodes. I'm gonna go through a lot more about systemizing your business when it comes to your marketing, looking at how you grow and scale, figuring out which levers to pull, and so much more. So stay tuned. But that is everything for today's episode. Thank you so much for joining me again. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. And I look forward to seeing you with a cup of coffee in hand, same time, same place next week. So as always, you can go find me on Instagram. I'm Lauren.the Social Collective. You can find the agency at the Social Collective Official. You can find coffees and content at coffees and content pod. And you can find our brand new studio at TSC. Bye guys.