I spent 12 years running growth teams. Now I find the people who run yours.
Series A money, a hiring plan, and a recruiter who has never run a paid budget is how a $200k mis-hire happens. I have sat in the CMO seat, the VP seat and the field-marketing seat. I scope the role you actually need, interview candidates for the craft itself, and send you three people worth your time instead of thirty resumes.
Most growth hires go wrong before the job post is written.
A generalist recruiter can match keywords. They cannot tell whether someone really scaled paid past $200k a month or sat next to the person who did. I can, because I have been both the hiring manager and the person getting hired.
You post for a CMO when you need a performance lead
At $1M to $5M ARR the job is getting one or two channels to actually work, not building a 20-person org. Hire the strategist too early and you pay a VP salary for someone who will not open the ad account.
Nobody on the loop can interview for the craft
Founders interview for energy and culture, which is fair. Someone also has to ask what the CAC payback was, how attribution was set up, and what they would cut first. I ask those before you ever see the candidate.
Title, comp and scope do not line up
A Head of Growth title with a manager's budget and no hiring authority loses the good candidates and attracts the ones who want the title. I help you set the offer so the person you want says yes.
Three steps. You only show up for the last one.
Scope the real role
A working session with you and whoever owns the number. We look at your channels, your pipeline and what the next 18 months need, then write a role a strong candidate would recognize as honest. Sometimes the answer is a different role than you walked in with. I will say so.
Source and vet
Hand-sourced from my own network and direct outreach in your city. No job board blast. Every candidate does a craft interview with me first: the numbers they owned, the calls they made, what broke. You get three to five with my notes on each.
Interview and close
You interview for fit and ambition. I run the reference calls, structure the offer against the market, and stay in the conversation through the first 90 days so the hire sticks.
Narrow on purpose.
A tight niche means I already know the people in your city who are quietly looking, and I can move faster than a firm with forty open reqs.
I have been the hiring manager, the candidate, and the guy cleaning up the wrong hire.
I started at Red Bull, where the job was making a market move with a small crew, a van and whatever you could talk your way into. That taught me more about growth than any dashboard since. From there I built the marketing team at Premier Group from nothing to eight people and stayed through the acquisition, then spent four years as VP Marketing at Swipejobs, a venture-backed workforce platform. We went from a handful of U.S. states to the whole country, then the UK and Germany, the user base passed a million, and I was running a team across three continents. Most recently I have been CMO at Built By The Trades, an early-stage SaaS company, building the growth function from the first hire.
Along the way I hired, managed and occasionally let go of growth marketers at every level. I know what a great performance lead sounds like in the first ten minutes, and I know the red flags that only show up when you ask about the numbers twice. That is the whole edge, and it is why I only take searches in the discipline I actually ran.
Plain terms.
No retainer to start, no exclusivity clause buried on page four. You pay when the person starts. If they leave early, the search is on me.
Tell me about the role you are trying to fill.
A few lines is plenty. I will get back to you within a business day and tell you straight whether I can help. If I cannot, I will point you to someone who can.
or skip the form: david@archnemesis.us