
In my 1st job in Marketing, I ‘managed’ a marketing budget of less than €5.000 a month (mainly paid acquisition spend), eventually growing it to about €20.000 a month. A few jobs later, my budget responsibility has grown significantly, while now responsible for a yearly eight-digit figure ($)💸. This creates a need for more accuracy, accountability, and diligence into what you’re spending resources on and the return on investments.
Operating Expenses versus Compensation versus Other
Often you’ll roll into a role or organization that already has a set strategy and aligned budget plan. The same applied to my role at RVshare, which I joined almost four years ago. It’s rarely the case that you get to build a budget out from $0/scratch. Instead, I joined on a budget plan that already had some essential buckets (that we remain to invest in). This often also predetermines the organization’s path and how a budget will be divided in the short term.
- Operating Expenses/OpEx: All expenses tied to regular marketing activities, campaigns, and the operations of the business. I can’t describe it better than Investopedia does here.
- Capital Expenses/CapEx: For most businesses or functions, there is a more strong capital element for investments that they’re making. As we’re a very asset-light business, we don’t own any inventory and don’t have any actual physical marketing assets (at least not to make a dent in a budget plan). This is not a thing for us. And probably with us many other marketing organizations.
- Compensation: Salary, Bonuses, etc. Basically what you get paid every two weeks.
Direct Return versus Non-Direct versus Supporting
There is no one right way to set up a budget plan, as it can be divided in many ways. Our Marketing one contains three big buckets:
- Direct Return: Channels that directly can drive a return on investment and can be measured on this basis. Examples of that are Paid Acquisition, SEO, and Marketing Partnerships. It doesn’t have to be a scientific method, but you can predict your spend > revenue pretty well often.
- Non-Direct Return: Other channels, for example, more focused on driving awareness or reach like PR, Social Media (Organic) and Brand Marketing.
- Supporting: Marketing Analytics, Technology, Education, Consultants, etc.
Categories like travel, meals/entertainment, and education are not directly coming out of our marketing budget. But it is realistically also a tiny allocation of a total multi-million dollar budget (considering we have a relatively small team, we do invest in them, don’t worry). Which doesn’t mean that it’s low in itself as you always want to make business travel possible, as well as training & education.
Internal versus External
On ‘who’ do you spend your resources, and how is the decision made. In most cases, this is not a finance/budget-driven decision, in my opinion. As it’s mainly tied to what functional/strategic expertise you need to make an impact in a specific area. Before a year’s start (financial years exist for a reason), we plan out our expected spend on internal versus external resources. At that point, we often already have an idea of what we’d like to add headcount for and what might be better to hire external support for.
→ Also read, Deciding between who to hire: an Agency versus a Contractor versus Hiring?
Misconceptions
Unlimited Resources
The narrative around this is often that you always need to scale. It applies to most startups, and overall I’m a fan of it. But it’s not realistic later on. A business with 90% of its marketing expenses is not healthy at scale. Scaling an unlimited budget might work well for you, but at some point, Finance will start knocking on your door as you’re ruining their cash flow positions.
Unplanned Costs
“A good leader can plan for any type of cost well ahead” – Nobody said ever. New ideas and costs always come up; I’m a firm believer in making sure that you keep a flexible mind and can adjust plans. For example, when we hit the pandemic in 2020, all our (preplanned budget) plans were useless as it would have ruined RVshare if we had continued on that spending level. Two months later, it turned out that we needed to spend way more aggressively than we ever expected and we ended up ‘overspending’ according to budget plans by many millions.
Brand versus Performance
“You should always invest in the long-term by building a brand” versus “Performance Marketing is key, Advertising can’t be measured”. If you’ve heard both, welcome to the club! If you lean one way, you might be able to learn a bit more about the other side. It’s a misconception that you can’t measure a brand. The comparison that I keep bringing up to people is the one of Booking.com versus Airbnb, one very well known for its performance marketing and the other one for its amazing brand building. However, that doesn’t mean that Airbnb spends over $400+ million on efforts that I would mainly categorize as performance marketing. Initiatives don’t always belong in a bucket, although I just described as they do. Both sides are just as important and not your budget but your overall marketing strategy should guide you on what to spend money on. Ours has guided us in multiple ways but we’ll remain to invest heavily in both buckets, in the future.
Working with Finance
Understanding Finance & Their Concerns
As part of the misconceptions, I touched on unlimited resources, and money isn’t unlimited for a company. If you’d spent all of your marketing budgets in the first month of the year, you likely would go bankrupt because your Finance team wasn’t aware of you doing this and ran out of cash flow. They also have a lot of their worries around financing and accounting, which makes it so that you need to be aware of what they care about and help.
Actually Understanding Finance & Accounting
Pick up a couple of books that can give you a high level of what finance and accounting terms mean so that you know how to speak the language of your finance team/CFO.
→ The HBR Guide to Finance Basics for Managers is a good start. After that, you’ll easily figure out what other books you might find interesting and how deep you’d like to go into the topic.
Being able to prove ROAS accurately
Invest in (marketing) analytics so that you can more accurately predict the return on your investments. We have spent the past two years getting good at this to ensure that we can ensure that our investments are returning value for the business. This is not just important for budgeting, but also a direct way to give Marketing a seat at the table as we can provide good answers to questions about how much money every additional 1M of (direct) marketing spend could be.
Martijn Scheijbeler
April 18, 2022

This blog post was written in partnership with Ian Hoyt, who’s RVshare’s Marketing Project Manager.
While you pass through the growth stages of departments, things start breaking. Teams become less efficient. There is more work and often less accountability. In a small startup, everyone shares the responsibility because there is no one else to blame or lead initiatives. While you grow to a marketing team of 5+, it becomes clear that there are owners for channels (social, SEO, creative, email, to name a few). At 10+, you’ll undoubtedly have the first manager, and you can see how things evolve from there (multiple managers, managers managing team leaders).
At RVshare, I hired a Marketing Project Manager to help manage scale. We had too many ongoing initiatives and team members late last year. Unfortunately, it became too much for one person to manage (welcome to me partially failing as a leader). In many startups/scale-ups, I’ve noticed similar roles, and people show up to help manage the growth and support leaders (often in the form of a Chief of Staff, which we’ll talk about later).
What this role is (for us).
There are plenty of different titles and nuances to the role of a Marketing Project Manager in a marketing operations structure. And it comes down to the lifecycle of your company. The role can wear many different hats, and often, they do. At RVshare, we had a choice to make when we hired for this role. We could either hire a project manager FOR marketing (think SCRUM master, JIRA wizard) or a well-rounded marketer who knows how to manage projects. We chose the latter.
The difference is subtle, but context is key.
As a department going through a growth phase, it isn’t always the prettiest, most neatly tied bow of an existence. You try your best to stay organized, but there is no perfect “hey, we have a campaign idea,” let’s set all the requirements and execute the project at perfect timing (or hand it off to an agency), always. Instead, growth can be messy because better (or bigger) opportunities come up, priorities shift, and then you’re left with a team that needs someone to help fill those gaps and navigate the tides of the unknowns in the project all at the same time.
Kind of like someone sitting in the haul of a sinking boat with a rag and some wax ready to fill punctured holes as they traverse rough waters, all while screaming up to the captain what the heck their plan is. Except, our marketing project manager has never been in a haul of a boat, and no marketing campaign is ever that life or death.
What this role is not.
It’s not an executive assistant (EA), period. This person shouldn’t manage the team’s calendar, transport, or travel expenses. You can manage these activities way more efficiently by hiring an EA or putting enough processes/tools in place to manage them.
You’re lazy. You should have just {fill in the blanks}…
- Hired more interns or more Virtual Assistants
- Build more technology to avoid overhead
- Created less bureaucracy and processes, to begin with
- Hire more agencies or contractors
Your thought process is likely correct, and there is a place and time to think about all these areas, especially before starting the hiring process and figuring out how to avoid needing more headcount. But a VA or intern isn’t usually the right pick to lead strategic initiatives as they lack experience and seniority in an organization. Technology supports initiatives but doesn’t lead them.
Also read: Deciding between who to hire: an Agency versus a Contractor versus Hiring?
Chief of Staff roles?
They have things in common. They’ll often lead strategic initiatives and have the autonomy to operate parallel with the rest of an organization. But this role is usually the right hand of a C-level executive and more often than not focused on cross-organizational initiatives. The role that we’re talking about is more supportive of a team, and its primary goal is to keep the team operating as best as possible.
The role of (Business) Operations in the High Growth Handbook
If you want to read more about the role of business operations, I recommend reading the specific chapters on that in the High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil. It gave me the first glance a few years ago into what a team like that can do and how they can support the overall organization by being a ‘gap-filler’. To a large extent, the role of Marketing Operations fits into that as well.
The background of Operational roles in for example Design & Business
- Design: In bigger design teams (>15 people), you’ll often find people focused on design ops. They’re helping the overall team design more and be better at their job by creating tools, workflows, and processes that eventually will help the team create more output.
- Business: Filling gaps, exploring projects, and chasing ideas that could help make an impact on a company. Meanwhile, helping out to operate the business better by leading the way on cross-functional projects. That’s often what the role of business operations is all about.
Working through inefficiencies & why you need this role
As described earlier, nothing is perfect, and things will be inefficient. In a growth marketing organization, you’ll miss certain skill sets once you go through certain levels. With a marketing team of 5 people, you will not have channel specialists or functional leaders for everything. At 20 marketers, you might need more bandwidth temporarily somewhere based on seasonality. With this role, we’re providing a way to work through those inefficiencies, and it’s a reason this role could be helpful.
Want to read more on this topic?
Martijn Scheijbeler
August 5, 2021

I’ve worked with many companies who’ve shown exceptional growth, triple digits year over year that brings them to the next levels in their industries (music, education, marketplaces, etc.). But… in some cases, it wasn’t as good as it should have been. Because the main channels that they were using were vastly too big for what they should have been. So let’s dive a bit deeper into what that means.
When 80-90% becomes a problem
For some of these top performers in their space, they all had one fundamental problem: They were far too much relying on one specific channel that was driving their growth. If one channel (which is/was often Social Media or Organic Search) is driving over 80% of your traffic and/or revenue you might be growing but you’re also in immediate danger. As you can see in the following graph, this company was growing greatly for years before this. However what they weren’t realizing is, that they were not particularly setting themselves up for SEO success. They weren’t doing anything wrong, but they also weren’t doing anything in a way that I would consider a world-class SEO program. Then Google decided to change their approach to certain sites in their algorithm and this happened in the span of a few months. They lost over 40% of traffic and with that approximately 20-30% of their business.
So ask yourself, does your site/business have a healthy divide in traffic? Have you looked at the difference in channels for new and returning visitors? Looking at it the wrong way (combined) will likely skew your approach.
What channels this applies to
- SEO: If the majority of your traffic is coming in from SEO you have a serious problem. Remember the company that I was talking about at the beginning of this article. They saw their traffic drop with over 90% overnight! I repeat: overnight! This meant that their revenue streams itself crashed with over 80% (they weren’t solely relying on SEO at their revenue driver at the time).
- Paid Search & Social: When you’re thinking about this channel you’re likely thinking about Google AdWords, Bing Ads and for the social channels; Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. It makes sense, I do the same and because of that, I can’t blame you for it. But most companies aren’t even using Bing Ads, or only look at one of these channels. Even with, for example, Bing just being a few percents of your spend it will help you diversify your strategy a lot and protect you from Google changes that might hurt you in the long run. In addition, there are also tons of other networks out there which you could combine that could easily drive a few percent of your PPC spend. We looked into this recently and decided to move part of our display budget over to another platform/vendor just to ensure this, they were able to drive the same ROAS metrics and it felt safer to move a few percent of traffic to a smaller player.
- ‘Email Marketing’: In most cases, I don’t think this is really an acquisition strategy at all. Because from what source are these people actually signing up to be on your newsletter/mailing list? Likely one of the other channels that have been mentioned in this article.
- Social Media: Think about all the publishers who doubled down on social media a few years ago (Vice, Buzzfeed, etc.). Social media was a great driver of engagement, branding, and traffic for them. But have you noticed that trend over the last two/three years? Most of them have for sure not seen a traffic increase over that period. The reasons why: the social networks decided to change the way they ranked content and are likely less interested in sending more clicks to publishers instead of keeping them on their own platform.
In all these cases, still focus on these channels, they’re great drivers of growth for your business. Don’t rely on just one of them!
Why not other channels?
In my opinion, the problem doesn’t apply in most cases to referral traffic, affiliate marketing, and multi-level-marketing. As the majority of traffic from these is spread (it should) across many different partners and sites.
Valid Traffic Model
To marketers and founders, I would say, think more about the divide of your traffic and what is bringing in the actual revenue. Explore other channels, it’s not bad to kickstart growth on one channel (social/community, SEO, paid acquisition), in most cases I would encourage founders & startups actually to focus on this. It’s better to take a leap of faith and double down on a channel then to suck at a few channels.
Martijn Scheijbeler
February 27, 2019

Recruiting, Hiring and building out marketing teams has been what I’ve focused on for the last years. While starting at RVshare in June 2018, my latest role, I wanted to have an impact right away and read into how to best onboard myself in a new environment. But it was also important to provide a direct impact on the rest of the organization, I was their marketing leader after all.
On the flip side, I also spend over the years a lot of time onboarding marketers on my teams and obviously have learned a lot of lessons on that front as well. That’s why today I wanted to spend some time talking about this and provide a framework for how to onboard marketers and what to look for when you’re the newest marketing hire to a team. For this blog post, I’ve only looked at the first month, in the end, you can make a lot of impact in the first 30 days on the job if you approach it the right way!
Before getting started & Day 1
- Hardware/Software: Depending on if your newest hire will be in an office or will be hired remote it’s going to be important to figure out what they need.
- Order a laptop
- Order a screen and all the needed cables
- Accounts: What kind of tools does your company use, what can you set them up with so they can immediately hit the ground running with the software and SaaS tool that your team is using on a daily basis. Some of the examples of that could be:
- Google Account/Google Drive
- Communication: Slack, Email, Outlook?
- HR & Expenses: Too many vendors in this space to mention
- Google Sites/Atlassian/Confluence/JIRA/Github
- Video Conferencing: BlueJeans/Google Hangouts/Zoom/etc.
- Productivity: Calendly, Grammarly, TextExpander, Monosnap, 1Password/LastPass, etc.
- HR, Paperwork & Introductions: In most bigger companies you’ll spend a significant amount of time on the first day filling in all your paperwork, receiving your laptop and getting onboarded on the company’s IT systems and an introduction/class into the company(‘s history).
Month 1: The first 30 days of a new marketing hire
The first month is important, a good beginning will help support the future success of a new hire. That’s why I started listing out the things that I try to help out with once somebody new starts.

- In the first week, you can only get this started, but you want to make sure that you meet as many of your direct colleagues as possible. In our case, as part of the company is remote (including myself) we try to get somebody new out to one of the offices (Ohio/Texas) to meet the teams there.
- Plan in a regular one on one with your direct report/manager.
- Explore all the content that is already out there in your function. Read what you need to know, but also don’t feel bad about skipping things that are likely not going to help you right away.
- Prioritize: After 2-3 days in the first week you have an overload of new information landing in your lap. Can you figure out what information is urgent (you need to know it right now!) or what is a priority (it’s important but nobody will die if you don’t touch it today) in the short term.
- Introduce yourself to the rest of the company and meet with other teams to get to know them and learn what they’re working on.
- Make your first improvement/change: As a manager, I really like to make sure that in the first week a new hire has made a change that has an impact to the business. Usually, it’s a small thing that can be done, but often it’s great to show it to the rest of the organization.

- Vendors: Time to start connecting with the vendors that you might already have in place for this function. If this is a new role it’s unlikely that you already have figured out what tools & vendors you would need in your role.
- Industry research: Potentially you have already done a bit of research into what the industry looks like, but nothing is more interesting than getting to know the big players and all the industry facts then reading industry reports. The more context you have about the space that you’re operating in, the better.
- For most marketers, it’s going to be important to get familiar with the Analytics infrastructure (Google Analytics, Mode Analytics, Looker, etc.) to get a good understanding of how they should be measuring their own performance, and that of a channel when they manage that.
- Deep dives: If there was an existing team, start doing deep-dives on the work that they’ve already been doing. Otherwise, do deep dives with the other channel managers on the team.
- Customer understanding: Have your new marketer talk to the right people internally that know everything about the customer journey and the biggest pain points that your customers are facing. At RVshare, for example, we have multiple experts that most new people talk to, to get a good understanding of how the product works in detail.
- Your first 1-1: You’ll have your first actual one on one with your (new to you) manager. In the first weeks, it’s the right time to get any questions answered and get a better understanding of how the team around you will operate. For the manager, it’s a great time to make the goals for the role clear and guide you around the people that you need to work with.

- Meet with the rest of the team: Depending on the size of the Marketing team you likely haven’t met the people that you won’t be working too closely with. As an example, it’s likely not the top priority for a PR manager to meet the PPC manager in the first hours of the new job.
- Meet with all your important stakeholders: What other teams is this role working on, in most companies there will be at least overlap with roles in Product, Design, Engineering, Communications, Sales and/or Customer Service.
- Meet with vendors, part 2: After you have spent a couple weeks on the job and have met your existing vendors you likely have a better understanding of what you would need and what you’re currently missing. That means, that it’s likely time to find some additional vendors to fill in the gaps.
- Customer research: Have you had a chance yet to talk to customers. We’ve previously talked about the deep dives with other teams and getting a good insight into the pain points of customers. But set yourself up in some meetings/calls with customers and you likely will get a totally different insight into what goes on in the market and what their approach is to your business.
- First results: Think about the hands-on work that you’ve done so far and the approach that you have followed. Has it brought some early results that can help drive growth for the business (short/long term)? Evaluate what you have done and make sure that you always keep this in mind, it’s a great win if you early on can show the results of your work.
- Create a plan: After your first 30 days, you should have a better insight into what you can influence, what impact you have and what needs to be done. This plan shouldn’t be static at all and should constantly evolve over the next months on the job. But after 2-3 weeks you should have a good idea on what the low hanging fruit is to pick up.
- Start rolling out your ideas and set everything in motion to start picking up your projects. Create a 60-90 day plan of what you’ll be working on for the longer term. It will provide the basis of what you’re doing in Month 2 & 3.
- Write a job ‘profile’ with your manager: Something that I like to do after 30-60 days is to sit down with a new hire, and write down the responsibilities, goals, and support that they’re getting. Think of it as a longer & more detailed version of a job description in which you lay out what is expected of the role. After these many days on the job, you have a better idea because of early insights into what you.
What you have accomplished in Month 1?
A few things are important in the first month of a marketer:
- Do they feel comfortable talking to you and their new coworkers about the problems that they face? In the end, it’s your job as a manager to make sure they feel OK with what they’re doing.
- Do they have a better insight into how your business is operating and what your industry looks like? Have they explored the content that you can provide them with the business itself and the industry that you’re operating in?
Execute, Execute, Execute! That’s what likely the main topic will become after your first 30 days on the job. You have picked up enough knowledge to start to become useful for the organization and you can actively contribute to projects that are already running or that you will start up yourself.
Overall, this list isn’t complete yet. I’d like to keep it up to date with all the new learnings that I see with my new hires and myself over the next years. With that, I’ll try to update this post as much as possible to hopefully provide a useful resource for other hiring managers and/or marketers.
What happens after Month 1?
You’ve done a great job so far and already made real progress that will help the team. Time to keep on doing what you’re doing and have an even bigger impact on our progress/growth! Many things on the role will change and you will more continuously evolve. Hopefully, in a future blog post, I’ll shed some light on the second and third month in a new role. As you’re likely not fully ready to operate independently and understand the organization in that period. Food for thought for another blog post in the future!
Other resources
Some books that I have read over the last years that I think are great in this specific use case.
- The First 90 Days: It’s a classic book, but does its work.
- The CMO Manifesto: It’s focused on higher level marketing executives, but at the same time it also touches on a lot of areas that are applicable to people that are starting in a new role.
Martijn Scheijbeler
February 15, 2019