How to build a marketing team when you're the first hire

Being the first marketing hire at a company means the strategy, the budget, and the doing all land on you at once. In this episode of Content Amplified, Bronwyn Pope, Vice President of Marketing & Communications at St. Croix Hospice, shares what she learned doing it twice: first at Special Olympics Minnesota about 20 years ago, then at St. Croix Hospice, where she joined as the first marcomm hire eight years ago. She walks through her first 90 days, including handing a graphic designer $3,000 and asking for a year's worth of templates so one person could look like a whole department. She explains how she justified her first hires by targeting roles that would pay for themselves immediately, why she loves hiring people smarter than she is, and the question she asks everyone on her team: what is the job you want eventually? She also tells the story of how letting people pivot across the team turned a front-desk employee with a law enforcement degree into her head of internal communications. If you are building a marketing function from scratch, or leading one through fast growth, this episode maps the road ahead.

About Bronwyn

Bronwyn Pope wanted to be a reporter from the time she was a child. She earned a degree in print journalism, worked at newspapers, and spent a year at the Associated Press before joining a big PR agency, where she discovered she loved the variety of writing for different clients. She has spent most of her career in healthcare marketing and has twice been the first marketing communications hire at an organization, first at Special Olympics Minnesota and later at St. Croix Hospice. Today she is Vice President of Marketing & Communications at St. Croix Hospice, where she has spent the past eight years building the team through a period of rapid growth.

Show Notes

• Connect with Bronwyn on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bronwyn-pope-4528b44/