Marketing leadership for founder-led companies that refuse to sound like everyone else.
Eleven years operating in marketing. $40M+ in attributed revenue across nine companies and five industries. Now seeking the next operator role at a founder-led company between $10M and $75M in revenue.
Marketing Leadership At
What I do.
Five disciplines I lead with personally, not theoretically. Every one of them with documented outcomes from real companies.
Brand Strategy & Positioning
Find what's actually true about a company and make sure every marketing decision reinforces it. The strategic core that everything else compounds against.
Performance Marketing
Direct revenue accountability across paid social, search, and programmatic. CAC and ROAS results documented across five verticals.
Creative Direction & AI Production
Concept to delivery, end to end. AI-assisted production where it makes the work better. Taste and judgment where the work is generic without it.
Analytics & Board Reporting
Attribution modeling, dashboard development, and reporting that connects marketing activity to revenue outcomes. The work either drove the number or it didn't.
Team Leadership
Hiring, building, and managing in-house marketing teams. Agency oversight. Cross-functional alignment with sales, product, and the founder's office.
The work that moved the number.
Engagements where I owned the marketing function and was accountable to the P&L.
The companies I work best with usually have one of these problems.
Product-market fit is real, but the brand is invisible. The product works. Customers love it. Nobody outside that circle knows you exist.
Marketing is functioning, but isn't compounding. Campaigns ship. Numbers are okay. But the brand isn't building equity that pays off in year three.
The founder is doing marketing because no one else can. You have product instinct and customer instinct. You don't have time to also be the marketer.
An agency or consultant relationship isn't getting you there. You need someone in the chair, accountable to the outcome, not selling you their next retainer.
You're approaching an exit and brand equity affects the multiple. The next 18 to 36 months matter more than the last five years. Marketing leadership compounds the exit value.
You're in a fragmented industry with no brand infrastructure. Trades, regional services, mid-market manufacturing. The category has no obvious leader. The opportunity is to become it.
A bit more about me.
I'm McKinnon Mitchell. I'm a marketing executive based in the Pacific Northwest, currently looking for my next operator role.
Eleven years in the work. Nine companies. Five industries — heavy equipment, tactical gear, supplements, education, and pet wellness. The common thread across all of them: founder-led businesses where the product was real and the brand needed someone to build it.
What I look for now: founder-led companies between $10M and $75M in revenue, with product-market fit, conviction, and an honest belief that the company should be a category leader. I don't take on companies whose products I don't believe in. The premise of my work — and the only reason it actually moves a number — is that marketing can only amplify meaning that already exists.
If that sounds like your company, my email is at the top and bottom of this page. Tell me about your situation and what the next 12 months need to look like. I'll give you a candid take on whether I'm the right hire — and if I'm not, I'll help you understand who is.
Let's talk.
Tell me about your company, your situation, and what you're trying to accomplish in the next 12 months. I read every email.
mmitchell@mckinnon.marketing