Foundations founders forget

Why marketing isn’t working—and what to do before you waste your next dollar

Most founders don’t set out to sideline marketing. It just happens.

You start by hiring for speed. A few contractors here, a demand gen person there. Someone spins up a few campaigns. Sales starts asking for leads, then materials, then events. And before you know it, marketing is a service function—chasing requests, plugging holes, filling gaps.

That’s how it looked when I joined MIR3.

The company had one full-time marketer—a designer. Engineers had written the website. Sales ran lead gen. And the “strategy” was scattered across binders of printed collateral, each with its own tone, branding, and story. Thousands of dollars in printing costs for assets no one used.

They didn’t have a marketing department. They had a production arm.

So I started where I always start: by asking the questions no one had paused to ask.

• What objections are we hearing on sales calls?

• What barriers are keeping prospects from converting?

• Who are we really competing against, and why are we losing—or winning?

• What story are we telling, and does it resonate with the people we actually want to reach?

It wasn’t glamorous work. It was foundational.

We built a messaging platform. We rewrote every piece of collateral. We redesigned the website—not for aesthetics, but for clarity. We standardized how sales talked about the product, giving them what they needed and giving me space to build something real underneath it.

Then we tackled demand gen. Lead qualification. Sales enablement. Eventually, we rebuilt Salesforce itself—not just the tech, but the handoffs and workflows that finally made marketing and sales feel like one system.

That’s the work.

It’s not a Fiverr logo.

(That’s a real story, by the way. A founder I spoke with—newly appointed CEO, stepping into a turnaround with investors watching every penny—told me she needed to relaunch fast. I shared a roadmap that included messaging, positioning, and a plan for scale. She appreciated it, but ultimately said it was more than she could take on. Under pressure, she opted for a quick fix—a new logo from Fiverr.)

And here’s the thing: she wasn’t wrong to want fast progress. But she was wrong to think marketing could be treated like a task to check off.

Because what founders are really doing—under immense pressure to show momentum—is hiring for output instead of outcomes. They’re making the best decisions they can with limited time, budget, and support. But often, that means mortgaging future growth to solve short-term discomfort.

And when the leads don’t come, when the message doesn’t land, when the market doesn’t bite—they think marketing isn’t working. When really, marketing was never given the chance to lead.

Where Founders Go Wrong (and Why)

The problem isn’t that founders don’t value marketing. They do. They’re juggling impossible priorities, doing what it takes to get the business off the ground—or back on track. It’s that they misunderstand what kind of problem marketing is.

They think it’s an execution problem:

• We need leads.

• We need a rebrand.

• We need a deck, a site, a campaign.

But what they actually have is a structure problem. No clear positioning. No hierarchy of messaging. No system to connect strategy with execution. So they keep hiring tacticians, churning vendors, and reacting to pain points.

"Most companies build marketing like they furnished their first apartment—piecemeal, rushed, and just good enough to get by."

They mistake execution for leadership. Marketing is the only department where everyone else feels entitled to call the shots:

• Sales says what assets they need.

• Product decides what features get spotlighted.

• The CEO rewrites headlines.

• Investors weigh in on logo colors.

"Everyone tells marketing what to do—often. But no one holds the vision for how it all connects."

The result? Marketing becomes the output machine. Not the strategic driver. It delivers what people ask for, instead of what the business actually needs.

Until it doesn’t. Because eventually, things stop working. Sales stalls. Pipeline dries up. CAC spikes. Conversion tanks. The brand feels off. Nothing scales.

And now, instead of tweaking a campaign, they’re facing a deeper truth: They didn’t build marketing to scale. They built it to serve sales.

What to Do Instead

Reframe marketing as an ecosystem, not a department. A growth system, not a task list.

If your marketing isn’t working, ask:

• Do we have clear, differentiated positioning?

• Does our messaging reflect our buyers’ real objections and priorities?

• Is marketing embedded in product, sales, and customer conversations, or responding to them?

• Can we track how marketing efforts contribute to revenue?

• Are we reacting to noise or building for scale?

If the answer is no, you don’t need a new campaign. You need a new foundation.

Final Thought

Marketing isn’t support. It’s the structure that growth rests on. If you built it as an afterthought, of course it’s struggling to lead.

Ready to stop filling gaps and start building momentum? Start with the foundation.

If you’re in that moment—between what got you here and what’s going to get you there—this is the inflection point. You don’t need more noise. You need a plan that can grow with you.