The default founder move at $2M to $10M revenue is to hire a "Head of Marketing" or "CMO". The instinct is correct: marketing is the bottleneck. The execution is wrong: the right first hire is the operator, not the strategist.
Here's why CMO-first fails at this stage.
A CMO's job is to design the system. At $2M to $10M, the system isn't the bottleneck. The execution is. You don't have a strategy problem, you have a "nobody is shipping daily output" problem. A CMO arrives, runs a 90-day discovery, builds a strategy deck, hands it to a team that doesn't exist, and asks for budget to hire that team. Now you've burned 90 days, paid $250K loaded for a year, and you still don't have a single piece of content shipping.
The right first marketing hire at this stage is a producer. Someone who can write copy, edit short-form video, run a Meta ad account at small scale, manage the social calendar, and ship daily for 90 days while you keep the vision in your head. Loaded cost is roughly half a CMO. Output is 10x the CMO in the first 90 days because they're shipping not deliberating.
The strategy you need at $2M to $10M is in the founder's head. The producer's job is to execute the founder's instincts at scale and then refine the instincts as the data comes in. The founder is the de facto CMO until the system is too big to fit in one head, which is usually around $20M revenue.
When does the CMO hire become the right move? Three signals.
Signal one. Marketing has more than 4 contributors and the founder is spending more than 10 hours a week reviewing creative. The system needs an operator-of-operators.
Signal two. The brand is approaching multi-product or multi-segment expansion and someone needs to think about portfolio architecture. This is genuine strategy work the producer can't do.
Signal three. The board wants a senior marketing voice in the room. Real reason to hire a CMO. Just be honest with yourself that this is the reason.
For everyone else: hire the producer. Better yet, hire two producers and one analyst who can read the data and tell the producers what to do next. That's a marketing function for half the cost of a CMO with 5x the throughput.
Or: skip the build-the-team-from-scratch problem entirely and bring in a partnership that drops a fully-shipping team in week one with the producer + analyst + brand layer already wired together. That's the model Ignis runs against. The maths versus the in-house build favours the partnership for almost every business between $2M and $30M revenue.