Common marketing patterns / The Headless Horseman
The Headless Horseman
The team is running hard. Nobody’s steering.
You have good people doing a lot of marketing. Posts go out, campaigns launch, the calendar is full. But nobody senior is deciding which work matters most, so everyone is busy and the business isn’t moving much. The energy is there. The direction isn’t.
You might be a Headless Horseman if
Sound familiar?
- Your team or vendors stay busy, but results don’t follow.
- Everyone has a different answer for what marketing is supposed to do.
- Priorities change based on the latest request or the loudest voice.
- Your marketing person is buried in tasks with no time to think.
- Leadership asks what marketing is producing, and nobody has a clear answer.
Why it happens
You hired doers. Nobody hired the head.
Headless Horsemen usually made a reasonable choice: hire capable people to get marketing done. A coordinator, an agency, a freelancer or two. They do the work well.
What’s missing is the senior person who decides what work matters, in what order, and why. Without that, the team fills the calendar with whatever comes in. Requests pile up. Good ideas compete with each other. Nothing gets cut.
The team isn’t the problem. They’re running without a map.
Your strengths
- You already have people who can do the work.
- There’s momentum and real output every week.
- You’ve committed budget to marketing.
- Adding direction can change results fast.
What it’s costing you
- Payroll and vendor fees spent on work that doesn’t move revenue.
- A team burning out on busywork.
- Leadership losing faith in marketing.
- Your best people leaving for places with clearer direction.
What changes when someone’s steering.
The same team gets a lot more done.
Everyone knows the goal
One clear set of priorities the whole team works toward.
The right work gets done first
Every task has an owner and a date, and low-value work gets cut.
Results show up
Effort lines up behind what moves revenue, so output turns into outcomes.
Your team looks good
Leadership sees clear results, and your marketing people get credit for them.
Start this week
Three things you can do without us.
- Ask everyone what marketing is supposed to accomplish this quarter.Write down each answer. If they don’t match, you’ve found the problem.
- Pick one goal and make it the filter.Every request gets checked against it. If it doesn’t help, it waits.
- List what the team did last month and mark what drove revenue.Do more of that. Stop at least one thing that didn’t.
How we fix it
We give your team a head, and extra hands.
Mike is a CMO and has worked as a fractional CMO for years. We set the strategy, decide what matters, and take work off your team’s plate. Your people keep doing what they’re good at, with clear direction behind it.
At Berry Law, a veteran-led national law firm, we set the brand strategy, built a content system with recurring series, and created editing standards, interview guides, and handoff tools the firm’s team still uses.
The Headless Horseman: the complete breakdown
The full pattern, the cost, and the fix as a PDF. Free, no form.
Not quite you?
The Headless Horseman is often mixed up with these two.
Great team. Who’s steering?
We reply within one business day.
Or start with a two-week Focused Audit