Managing The Best People for the Job, But Just Enough of Them

One of the great challenges of small to medium sized business is accomplishing all of the functions of the enterprise without an enterprise-sized staff. This is especially timely in today's business climate where every efficiency is paramount.

Fortunately, the entrepreneurial nature of smaller businesses usually results in an efficient process of doing more with less – with the most talented employees often wearing many hats. 

From a marketing perspective, this usually plays out with one or two key decision-makers and a staff of generalists – those who have a broad spectrum of marketing expertise and can aptly work with PR to advertising to interactive agencies.  Occasionally there will also be a specialist of some sort on hand, depending on the company’s area of focus.  This could be PR, direct marketing, social media, or interactive. 

Generally speaking, this would make for a pretty solid team who could execute key campaigns and meet the company’s needs in the first few years of growth.  However, when looking at a longer-term, more aggressive growth strategy, this structure does reveal its weaknesses.

What is oftentimes the case, due to workload and diversity of marketing initiatives, is a marketing executive becomes bogged down in the details of management and execution.  While this person’s leadership and perspective will often benefit the particular campaigns, what is compromised is his or her time to plan strategically for the company. When time is of the essence, this compromise does bear a cost.

An additional consideration is how specialists are hired and the potential lopsided emphasis this can create.  For example, in an organization with two generalists and one PR specialist, the PR function will reap the most rewards.  Where this leads us is striking the organizational balance between in-house managers and bringing in outside specialists to add capabilities and fresh thinking to the established marketing staff.

In the second installment we will also explore the need to manage pulses of activity in the marketing organization.