The One Where I Built the Marketing Function

The problem: The company wanted to grow. The marketing department consisted of one person. (Hi, it was me.)

The remedy: Build a global marketing team, create the systems needed to keep everyone moving in the same direction, and somehow avoid becoming the bottleneck for every project.

The result: Grew marketing from a department of one into a global team spanning the United States, Colombia, and Nigeria while building the processes, partnerships, and operating structure needed to support company growth.

The details: When I joined the company, there wasn't a marketing department. There was a logo and brand colors and four websites. But no marketing leader.

As the company grew, it became clear that my plate was overflowing and I needed specialists, processes, and a way to keep projects moving without me being the bottleneck.

Over time, I built a globally distributed team that included content marketing, web design, and graphic design specialists located across the United States, Colombia, and Nigeria.

We established planning processes, documentation standards, project workflows, communication rhythms, and clear ownership structures that allowed the team to operate effectively regardless of where someone happened to be logging in from.

My goal was not to build a team that checked boxes and completed tasks: I wanted a team that understood the products inside and out, pushed creative boundaries in an old-school industry, and most importantly, delivered results that impacted the bottom line.

That meant connecting content to pipeline, design to positioning, websites to conversion rates, and marketing initiatives to business outcomes. Team discussions regularly focused on customer behavior, growth opportunities, and company objectives—not just what was due this week.

I also encouraged the team to experiment: Sometimes that meant testing new content formats. Sometimes it meant introducing AI workflows. Sometimes it meant collectively agreeing that a bad idea was, in fact, a bad idea.

As the department matured, I navigated hiring decisions, role development, shifting priorities, stakeholder management, and the occasional "everything is on fire" moment that tends to pop up at growth-stage companies. And as a scrappy startup, I still needed to execute tactics while owning the strategy.

As my content marketer noted, “Whitney is a hands-on leader in every way: she rolls up her sleeves and works alongside her team rather than directing from a distance. She was in the thick of every project, and the results show it.”

Building a team was one of my favorite parts of my last role. And I can’t wait to do it again.