The Bureau of Digital Inquiry
A marketing team of five has the same strategic decisions to make as a team of fifty — and a fraction of the budget, the bandwidth and the institutional knowledge to make them with. I work with small teams and solo marketers who need a senior peer to think alongside, not another vendor to manage.
The people I work with don't lack energy or effort. They lack a senior peer — someone who's run marketing at scale, knows which bets compound and which drain, and can sit in the decisions with them rather than advising from the outside. I've built and led marketing at GetYourGuide, ZenMate, ProSiebenSat.1, FinCompare and beyond. Small teams are where those patterns matter most, because the margin for error is smallest.
Most marketing advice is written for teams with specialised roles, dedicated budgets and months of runway. A small team runs on different constraints: one person is doing strategy and execution simultaneously, the budget has to justify itself in weeks not quarters, and there's no team to delegate to when the plan hits reality. The frameworks built for large teams don't scale down — they need to be rebuilt from the constraints up.
You can't specialise when you're a generalist by necessity — Enterprise marketing runs on separation of concerns: brand here, performance there, content its own function. A team of five can't work that way. You need a sequenced approach — which lever to pull first, which to build later, what to buy and what to build in-house — tailored to the stage you're actually at.
The decision cycles are faster and the stakes are higher per decision — A large team can absorb a bad channel bet or a failed campaign. A small team can't. The cost of thinking about the wrong things isn't waste — it's existential. Getting the prioritisation right the first time requires senior pattern recognition, not another framework from a course.
AI changes the math, if you know how to apply it — A team of five with the right AI workflows can produce the output quality of a team of fifteen. But only if the workflows are built around your actual work — not generic templates from a tool's landing page. I help small teams rebuild the operating model around AI natively, so the leverage is real and the quality holds.
A small team that operates with precision beats a large team running without one.
I don't produce strategy for someone else to implement. I work alongside the team — in the decisions, the briefs, the channel calls, the playbook drafts. The thinking transfer is direct and the output is specific to your business, your channels and your team's real capacity. Most engagements run 90 days and end with a written playbook your team runs on its own from week 13.
Sequenced prioritisation for constrained teams — What should you work on first, second and third — given your real bandwidth, your best-performing channel and the one constraint blocking everything else? I build the priority sequence from your situation, not from a best-practice template.
AI workflows for solo and small-team marketers — I teach your team to use AI natively inside their actual workflows: briefing, content, data interpretation, competitive research. Not as a time-saving trick but as a structural upgrade to how the work gets done — so the output quality goes up without the headcount.
Channel strategy without a channel budget — Which channels are worth owning for a team your size? Where does organic compound and where does paid return in reasonable time? We answer those questions with your data and your constraints in hand, not from a generic playbook.
Measurement that a three-person team can actually run — KPI architecture for small teams is different: fewer metrics, tighter feedback loops, clear decision rules for when to hold and when to cut. I define the KPI set that reflects real business health and builds a reporting rhythm your team can run in thirty minutes a week.
Content and demand for teams without a content team — What does a content strategy look like when one person is writing, editing, distributing and measuring? We build the editorial operating model around your real capacity — AI-assisted briefs, batch production, reuse loops — so the content engine doesn't stall when the week gets busy.
The playbook document your team runs without you — Every engagement ends with a written playbook: the channels, the KPIs, the decision rules, the AI workflows, the content cadence. Written so your newest hire can open it on a Monday morning and know what to do without calling you.