From Monoculture to Ecosystem: 7 Steps to Cultivating Your In-House Marketing Team
Do you have the right people in the right seats to achieve your goals?
There comes a point where every growing organization faces a choice: keep outsourcing their "seeds" or start cultivating their own internal garden.
Many companies treat marketing like a factory—trying to assembly-line social media posts and emails—only to realize they’ve created a "monoculture" that’s fragile and exhausting to maintain. They hire for tactical gaps (the "we need a TikTok person" trap) without understanding how those roles interact with the whole organism or help them achieve their goals.
If you want a marketing department that grows as naturally as a food forest, you need to stop thinking like a contractor and start thinking like a steward. Here is how to design a marketing ecosystem from the ground up.
1. Observe and Interact: Define Your Desired Yield
In permaculture, we never dig a hole on day one. We spend time observing the land. Before you hire, you must identify what "yield" you actually need.
The Philosophy: Don’t just set KPIs; define the health of the system.
The Strategy: Are you looking for immediate "fruit" (sales/conversions), or are you building "soil health" (brand awareness and trust)? Prioritize whether marketing needs to open new territories, nurture existing leads, or generate buzz for a new harvest.
2. Site Assessment: Inventory Your Existing "Species"
You likely aren't starting with a barren field when it comes to your internal marketing capabilities. You have "pioneer species"—team members who have been wearing multiple hats, running social media off the side of their desks, or managing events.
The Philosophy: Value the marginal.
The Strategy: Look at your internal talent. Who has the natural "succession" potential to move into a full-time marketing role? Understanding the assets you already have prevents you from wasting energy on redundant hires.
3. Design from Patterns to Details: The Strategic Masterplan
The biggest mistake brands make is hiring a "Gardener" (Marketing Manager) and expecting them to also be the "Landscape Architect."
The Philosophy: Patterns before details.
The Strategy: You need a high-level strategic design before you fill roles. Does your ecosystem require heavy irrigation in email outreach? Or do you need a dense canopy of content creation? I help you zoom out to see the patterns of your industry so we can design a team that fits the environment, rather than forcing a template that doesn't belong.
4. Create Niches: Team Structure & Guilds
In nature, plants work in "guilds"—groups that support each other. Your marketing team shouldn't be a collection of silos; it should be a web of interconnected roles.
The Philosophy: Integrate rather than segregate.
The Strategy: We’ll define roles not just by task, but by how they support one another. Does your Video Producer (the overstory) provide the shade and nutrients for your Social Media Manager (the understory)? I’ll help you craft job descriptions that ensure every "species" in your team has a clear niche.
5. Seeding and Transplanting: The Hiring Process
Hiring is the most delicate phase of the planting process. You aren't just looking for "skills" on a resume; you’re looking for a cultural fit that can survive your organization’s unique climate.
The Philosophy: Use and value diversity.
The Strategy: A resilient team requires a polyculture of perspectives. I assist in screening and interviewing to ensure you aren't just hiring clones, but a diverse group of experts who bring different "nutrients" to the table.
6. Build the Infrastructure: Swales, Tools, and Pathways
Even the best plants will wither without a way to move energy (information) through the system.
The Philosophy: Catch and store energy.
The Strategy: You need a "mar-tech stack" that acts like a swale—capturing the flow of data and effort and directing it where it’s needed most. From CRM databases to project management tools, we’ll build the framework that prevents "burnout" and "runoff."
7. Creative Response to Change: The Feedback Loop
Marketing is not a "set it and forget it" endeavor. Algorithms shift, consumer sentiment evolves, and the "climate" of the market changes.
The Philosophy: Self-regulate and accept feedback.
The Strategy: A successful marketing ecosystem is one that can pivot. We’ll establish a framework to measure performance against your goals, allowing the team to recalibrate and evolve. In permaculture, "the problem is the solution." If a campaign fails, it’s just compost for the next iteration.
