You are not under-resourced. You are running lean.

Michelle Geere of Adbot quotes the global statistic on the podcast: 78% of marketers say their team is one to three people. Locally it feels truer still, and we keep meeting heads of marketing whose full department answer is "just me."

If that's you, the first thing to change isn't your workload. It's the story you tell about it. Lean is not the apology version of a big team. Done right it's faster, closer to the business, and with today's tools capable of output that used to need ten people. Here's the operating system, drawn from the marketers who run lean on purpose.

Solo isn't lonely, but it must never be siloed

The question everyone asks Amy Hopkins, who ran the entire marketing function of Africa Padel alone, is "isn't it lonely?" Her answer flips the whole disadvantage:

"Not at all. I don't see marketing as a siloed function. I work extremely closely with operations, sales and business development. If I'm not working with teams internally, I'm working with partnerships externally."

The solo marketer's supposed weakness, having no marketing colleagues, becomes the advantage. There's no marketing corner to hide in, so the business itself becomes your team. Amy tracks occupancy with the ops team the way a hotel marketer would, because that's the number Africa Padel lives on. Big-team marketers spend years learning to escape the silo. A department of one never gets to build it.

Borrow the colleagues you don't have

A one-person department stands on four legs:

1. Business-first metrics. Your dashboard is the company's number (occupancy, revenue, signups) rather than marketing's numbers. Report in it, plan against it.

2. Borrowed colleagues. Ops, sales and the general managers are your execution team, and a good brief is your force multiplier.

3. A sparring partner. The genuinely missing piece is a marketing peer to sanity-check your thinking, which Amy solves with an LLM briefed to argue back: "Think like a critical creative director. What am I missing? Where could I work harder on this concept?" Not for the answer, for the argument.

4. External partnerships. Other brands' budgets and audiences, traded fairly.

The role has un-bundled, and that favours you

Amy is blunt about what she looks for when hiring, and it doubles as career advice: "Gone are the days of 'I'm a designer, I don't do that.' These roles aren't so enclosed anymore, because tools are more efficient." She lives it, being a words-and-content person by background who now ships her own design work.

Her framing of what actually changed is the most honest we've heard: "The workload doesn't necessarily get less, but you're able to output at a much higher rate." The job didn't shrink. The gap between one person and a department did.

Try this week: write down the one business number your company actually lives on. If your weekly report doesn't lead with it, rebuild the report. Then set up a standing "sparring partner" prompt for your next campaign concept, and instruct it to find the holes rather than to flatter you.

Borrowing the colleagues you don't have means knowing where they gather. Start with the best marketing communities in South Africa.

Sourced from recorded, on-the-record interviews on the South African Digital Marketing Podcast. Every practitioner quoted above is named in the text.

First published on the SA Marketers' Circle.