What I Look at First When I Take Over a Company's Marketing

The temptation when you join a company is to arrive with ideas. Owners often expect it — there's a quiet assumption that a marketing executive shows up with a campaign in their back pocket. I've learned that recommending anything in the first few weeks is usually a mistake.

Here's what I actually look at, roughly in this order.

1. Where the money is going

Every dollar leaving the business under the heading of marketing. Media, retainers, software subscriptions, sponsorships, production, contractors, trade shows. Not the budget document — the actual transactions. This exercise alone almost always turns up spend nobody has looked at in a year.

2. Who is responsible for what

I write down every marketing activity and put a name beside it. The gaps and the duplicates tell you most of what you need to know about how the function is running. Where two names appear, decisions stall. Where none appear, the work is happening because someone is being kind about it.

3. Which agencies and partners are involved

Contracts, scopes, term dates and what each partner has produced in the last six months. I want to see the reports they send, not a summary of them. How an agency chooses to report tells you what it believes it's being judged on.

4. What marketing is currently producing

Leads, inquiries, quotes, bookings — whatever the business actually counts. Then the harder question: how many of those became customers, and what were they worth? A surprising number of companies can produce the first number and not the second.

5. How leads move through the business

I follow one all the way through. Form submitted at 9pm on a Tuesday — where does it go, who sees it, how fast do they respond, what do they say, what happens if there's no answer? I've found more revenue in this exercise than in most campaign optimizations. Marketing spend is often fine; the handoff after it is where value leaks.

6. What leadership thinks marketing should accomplish

I ask the owner, the sales lead and the operations lead the same question separately. When the three answers don't match — and they frequently don't — that misalignment is the real problem, and no campaign fixes it.

7. What the data actually says

Analytics configuration, tracking, CRM hygiene, source data. Not to build a dashboard yet, but to establish how much of the existing reporting can be trusted. Making decisions on broken data is worse than making them on no data, because it feels rigorous.

8. Where activity isn't connected

Finally I look for the disconnects: ads driving to a page that doesn't answer the question, a content program with no distribution, a CRM nobody updates, a brand refresh that never reached the sales material. Individually each is fine. Together they're the reason marketing feels busy and slow at the same time.

What experience has taught me

Nearly two decades in marketing, including running New Wave Marketing, taught me that companies rarely suffer from a shortage of ideas. They suffer from too many started, too few finished and nobody senior deciding what matters. The first job isn't creativity. It's clarity.