Why the Best Marketing Leaders Make Themselves Replaceable
I don't come in and tear everything down.
That surprises people. The assumption when a senior marketing leader steps into a new engagement is that the first move is a reset: new agencies, new plans, new everything. That’s true for some (I’ve witnessed it firsthand), but that’s not my style. What I actually do in the first 30 to 60 days is closer to taking inventory than staging a takeover. I get grounded in the facts, not assumptions: what is working, what is not working, what the team should stop, start, or continue, and I document all of it. 49% of CPG executives believe their current business model won't hold up for another decade, which is exactly why the goal of an engagement should never be to make an organization dependent on the person who walked in the door. It should be to leave something behind that holds up long after they leave.
What I'm Actually Looking For Early On
I assess every internal resource and every partner touching the business against what the business genuinely needs right now, not what the org chart assumed it needed a year ago. Agencies, contractors, packaging developers, anyone with a hand on the brand. I take stock of what already exists versus what is missing entirely: brand guidelines, documented goals for each team member, a clear way to measure performance. Sometimes those pieces exist. Sometimes they live in one person's head, or they have been sitting on a to-do list nobody ever got back to. I am also running a full brand audit through the lens of the buyer and the shopper, looking at what equity the brand actually has, and being honest about what is propping the business up versus what is draining resources without adding anything back.
Building the System, Not Just the Fix
None of this gets documented for the sake of documenting. The point is teaching the team how marketing leadership should be thinking about the work, not just handing them a finished plan. A lot of it comes down to questioning things people have been running on autopilot, sometimes for years, until asking those questions becomes a habit instead of an intervention. That is what makes it hold up past one campaign or one quarter: dashboards that people spend time updating without anyone asking for them get cut, and the growth plan itself becomes the filter every future decision runs through, instead of "this sounds fun" or "this is what we've always done."
A Foundation That Outlasted the Engagement
At Mary Mack’s, there was no formal creative brief or project process. If something needed to get built, someone would assign a creative resource or find a freelancer, and whether the deliverable met the objective came down to whether or not one or two people liked it. Purely subjective. There were no brand guidelines, and no process for evaluating the agencies and partners touching the brand. The guidelines we built are still in use today, updated as new items launch, but the foundation underneath them has not moved. The brand still looks like one brand, not like 15 different people took turns working on it, because the system we put in place did not depend on any one person being in the room, holding firm to the brand standards.
When the Stakes Are Different
For a transition-stage or PE-backed brand, this shows up differently. After my corporate tenure at Borden ended, I stayed on as a fractional resource specifically to help the brand maintain its value while the company courted private equity investors. The job was continuity: keeping the innovation pipeline moving, keeping programs and promotions active, making sure the brand never went dark while new leadership was still being built out. A brand that goes quiet during a stretch like this opens the door for competitors to take space it worked hard to earn, right when investors are watching closest. I stayed on through the transition once the new leadership team came aboard, because they needed someone who knew the history behind the portfolio, what had already been tried, and what still had a purpose even if it wasn’t obvious on the surface. That kind of continuity is what stops a new team from unknowingly killing something that still mattered to the company, brand, and consumers.
The Actual Job
The job was never to become indispensable. It was to build something that did not require me to stay in the room for the brand to keep working. That is the difference between advice that sits in a deck and leadership that leaves a system standing behind it.
What would your marketing function look like six months after you left the room?
PS. Building a marketing function that doesn't fall apart when you walk out the door is the whole job. If you want to talk through what that looks like for your brand, let's connect.