advisory seat.
One day a month. In the room where it’s decided.
Not a consultant who reports in. Not an agency you brief. A marketing director who sits at your
leadership table, knows your numbers and has been doing this for twenty-nine years.
You don’t have a marketing problem. You have a marketing leadership problem.
You’ll recognise some of this:
- There’s someone doing your marketing. They’re capable, they’re busy and nobody senior is checking whether the busy is pointed anywhere useful.
- Or you promoted your best doer into a job that’s actually about deciding and you’ve watched them struggle with a set of judgements nobody has ever taught them to makes.
- Or marketing sits with you, on top of everything else you carry and it gets thirty minutes on a Sunday.
- Or you’ve cycled through three agencies in four years and each one started brilliantly.
None of these get fixed with more activity. They get fixed with someone senior enough to say stop doing that and stay in the room long enough to see it through.
how it starts
The Diagnostic Day. £1,500 and half of it comes off your first month if you take a seat.
Nobody should commit 12-months to someone they’ve watched present for an hour. So we start with a proper day, on site, doing the actual job and by five o’clock you’ll know exactly how I think and whether you want me in the room again.
Before the day, you send me the numbers: last twelve months of marketing spend, wherever it went, and whatever you measure. In the morning I’ll sit down separately with three or four people – whoever runs marketing, someone from sales and at least one person with no stake in marketing at all, because that’s usually who tells you the truth about how the business is really seen. I’ll go through the spend line by line and the last year’s activity alongside it.
In the afternoon I give it back to you and your leadership team, out loud, in the room. Not a report three weeks later that arrives after the moment’s passed. You’ll get the honest version: what to stop, what’s being avoided, what’s costing you money quietly and where the actual constraint sits, because roughly half the time it isn’t marketing at all, it’s a pricing decision or a sales handover nobody owns.
You’ll have a short written summary within forty-eight hours, no more than two pages and it’s yours to act on with or without me. If a seat isn’t the right answer, I’ll say so on the day and tell you what is. That happens often enough that I’d rather you heard it here than felt sold to.
THE SEAT – what actually happens
Morning – your team. One-to-one with whoever’s running marketing. What’s working, what isn’t, what they’re avoiding, what they need permission to stop. Half of this job is unblocking a good person who’s been left to guess.
Middle – the work. Campaign reviews, agency and supplier scrutiny, pricing conversations, the pipeline, the numbers behind the numbers. I’ll tell you which of your marketing spend is doing nothing. There’s always some.
Afternoon – the leadership conversation. Your board, your senior team, or just you and me and a whiteboard. This is the part that matters. Marketing decisions made without commercial context are how businesses waste six-figure sums politely.
And the bit that isn’t on the agenda. The conversation on the way to the car. What your operations director says when the MD leaves the room. The reason the rebrand keeps getting deferred. That’s usually where the actual problem is and you cannot get at it over Teams.
BETWEEN THE DAYS
Email, phone and WhatsApp between visits, weekdays, 8am-6pm. I answer the same working day, usually faster. There’s no cap on how often you get in touch and I don’t keep a tally.
the maths.
A marketing director is £75,000. Plus National Insurance, pension, recruitment fee, car and eight months before they’re any use.
For most businesses that’s either unaffordable or unjustifiable so the role goes unfilled and the work drifts down to whoever has capacity. A seat is a fraction of that, for the part of the job you actually need: the judgement, the direction and someone answerable for whether it’s working. You don’t need a marketing director five days a week. Almost nobody does. You need one on the days the decisions get made.
why in person?
Everything that can be done remotely is already being done by something cheaper than me.
The strategy document isn’t the valuable part any more. You can generate a competent marketing plan for your business this afternoon, for free and it’ll be about 70% right.
What it won’t do is notice that your sales director doesn’t believe in the plan. Or that the reason your best campaign died is political, not commercial. Or that the person you’re about to promote isn’t ready and everyone knows it except you.
Twenty-nine years in marketing, fifteen of them running my own business and hands-on inside other people’s businesses, teaches you to read rooms as accurately as spreadsheets. That’s the bit I’m selling, the life experience and relationships AI can’t deliver.
“I’d already put the whole thing through ChatGPT and got a perfectly sensible answer. Jean read the same brief and asked why we were doing it at all. That’s the difference and it’s worth paying for.”
who it’s for?
A seat is right if you:
- Turn over roughly £2m+ and marketing genuinely moves your numbers
- Have a marketing person or small team or are about to build one
- Have a leadership meeting I can actually sit in
- Want someone who’ll disagree with you in front of your team, tactfully, with justification
It isn’t right if you:
- Need the marketing doing rather than directing – that’s Done-For-You Marketing
- Are a solo operator or small consultancy – Mentoring is built for you
- Want a strategy document and then to be left alone
- Are looking for someone to validate a decision you’ve already made
terms
£1,750 per month. twelve-month initial term.
The term isn’t a lock-in tactic, it’s how the job works. Marketing decisions take two to three quarters to prove themselves. Anyone who sells you this on a rolling monthly basis is delivering something else. I won’t sit at two leadership tables in the same market at the same time.
“Jean was instrumental in developing our Strategic Marketing Plan, the benefits to our business have been way above our expectations. Jeans style of working fitted really well with my vision and our development is due in no small way to Jean, always willing to listen and offer sound advice are two great qualities be prepared for a direct straight comment!“
SAM JENKINS
Honestly? She just tells you the truth. That sounds like a small thing until you’ve paid a few people who didn’t.
MIKE PFISTER
I’d got a quote for a new website and I’d more or less decided. Jean asked me about six questions and then told me flatly that I’d be spending eighteen grand to fix a problem I didn’t have. Nobody else was going to say that, the agency certainly wasn’t. We spent about two thousand on the thing that was actually broken instead.
sophie jones
I’d been running marketing on my own for two years with nobody to check my thinking. Having Jean once a month made the job possible. She never made me feel like she’d been brought in because I wasn’t good enough.