A Hampshire housebuilder waited twenty years to hire a marketing manager.

Bargate Homes builds high-end new developments across the south coast. It has just delivered its hundredth scheme, and it currently has planning applications in progress worth close to half a billion pounds. The business delivered around 230 homes in the last financial year alone.

It also holds a five-star rating from the Home Builders Federation, the industry's own measure of customer satisfaction. Yet somehow, until this month, nobody at the company had marketing in their job title.

That changed when Bargate brought in Natalie Williams as its first marketing manager. She spent close to a decade in media agency roles before this, most recently as an account director. The firm's sales and marketing director framed the appointment as a sign of growing investment in the brand. An actual person, with an actual budget, making sure the right buyers hear about the right homes.

Not a rebrand.

The pattern behind the twenty-year gap

No new logo, either. Bargate isn't unusual here. We see this constantly with growing businesses in construction, manufacturing and professional services, in pretty much any sector where the founder built the company on relationships and referrals rather than paid campaigns.

Sales carries the business for years, sometimes decades. Marketing stays a side project, something the operations director squeezes in on a Friday afternoon between everything else that actually pays the bills.

Then, suddenly, it's urgent. By the time a business calls an agency like ours about its first senior marketing appointment, the pressure is usually already on. A budget got approved in a hurry after a board meeting nobody wanted to sit through twice. And the brief is often vague, because nobody in the building has hired a marketer before and isn't entirely sure what good looks like on paper.

It happens more often than you'd think.

How do you know it's time to make that hire?

Before referrals stop being enough on their own, usually. If your pipeline still leans almost entirely on word of mouth and repeat clients, and growth has flattened even though the product or service hasn't changed at all, that's usually the moment.

It's rarely announced by a single dramatic event. A pattern we see across our own client base, over and over, in businesses that look nothing alike on paper but somehow arrive at the identical point, once a business needs a properly planned, multi-channel push rather than an occasional boosted post. At that point it needs someone senior enough to own the outcome.

Not a junior hire bolted onto an existing sales team as an afterthought, hoping they'll figure out strategy in whatever hours are left over. Waiting past that point is expensive in the slow, compounding way that a stalled pipeline is expensive. Nobody can quite point to the exact week things started sliding. But everyone notices eventually.

Getting the seniority right the first time

Most businesses trip right here.

They know they need marketing help, so they hire the cheapest, most junior version of "marketing person" they can justify on a spreadsheet. Then they wonder eighteen months later why nothing has moved. A junior hire can execute a plan well enough.

What they generally cannot do is build one from scratch, defend a budget in a leadership meeting, or push back when a founder wants three campaigns and one person's worth of hours. Bargate went the other way.

Williams isn't entry-level. By all accounts she was brought in specifically to own the strategy, not just the execution, the kind of remit that can eventually turn into a much bigger role than the one advertised. That's a very different brief. And a very different salary.

Should the first hire be a manager, a head of marketing or a director?

It depends on how much of the thinking you still expect to do yourself.

A marketing manager works well when a founder or commercial director is still setting direction and wants someone to build and run the plan underneath them. Heads of marketing and directors fit differently. That level suits a business that wants the strategic thinking handed over entirely, freeing up leadership time for whatever else is on fire that week, and in most growing businesses something always is.

Neither is automatically the right answer, whatever a job title template on the internet might tell you. Get the level wrong and you'll feel it fast either way.

Too senior too early and you're paying director money for tasks a manager could handle just fine. Go too junior, though, and you'll be back here again in a year, older, a bit poorer, and no closer to the marketing function you actually needed. There's no shortcut that skips this judgment call. Only the cost of getting it wrong.

What Bargate's decision says about timing

None of this is really about Bargate specifically.

Twenty years is a long wait, sure. But plenty of growing businesses are sitting in exactly that gap right now, telling themselves marketing can wait one more quarter. The market backdrop makes that a slightly riskier bet than it used to be.

KPMG and REC's UK Report on Jobs, published in August, recorded permanent placements stabilising in July after the longest run of decline the index has tracked, forty-five months of contraction ending in a single month. Employers who move first when confidence returns to a market like this one tend to get first pick of the best people.

The ones who wait tend to get whoever's left once everyone else has already been through the shortlist.

So if the brief for that first marketing hire still feels vague on your side, that conversation is worth having before the job ad goes live. Not after the wrong candidates have already started applying. And someone has to sift through them on a Tuesday afternoon instead of doing their actual job.

Talk to a specialist before you write the brief

Coburg Banks' marketing recruitment specialists work with growing businesses across the UK on exactly this decision.

Manager, head of marketing, or director, and what that person actually needs to inherit on day one to succeed rather than spend a year finding their feet. Send us your vacancy and we'll help you get the seniority and scope right before it turns into an expensive lesson learned the hard way.

And if you're weighing up your own next move into a senior marketing seat, our current opportunities are worth a look too. That's very much the secondary conversation here, though. The client one comes first.