$20 An Hour For Your Whole Brand. Make It Make Sense.
I saw about five postings between Indeed, LinkedIn and other job seeking sites this week alone.
Six marketing positions. $50,000. Or $20 an hour for a “creative communications generalist” who will run the social, write the newsletter, shoot the content, edit the content, post the content, manage the community, build the campaigns, and report the metrics. Work on weekends when needed. In person.
One person. All of it. For less than what a decent line cook makes in a real kitchen.
I have been in this work long enough to know this is not a salary problem. It is a perception problem. And until we name what is actually happening, founders (and established business owners) will keep posting these roles and wondering why the work never looks like what they imagined.
They Are Not Buying What You Think They Are Selling
Most businesses do not believe marketing is a discipline. They believe it is a chore.
Posting is a chore. Writing the email is a chore. Updating the website is a chore. So when they price the role, they are pricing the chore. Not the strategy. Not the positioning. Not the identity work underneath. Not the years it took us to learn how to make a stranger feel seen in a single sentence or single image.
They are pricing the keystrokes.
This is why the listing reads like a scavenger hunt. Run the IG. Run the TikTok. Run the email. Run the SMS. Build the funnel. Make the graphics. Write the blog. Pitch the press. Six channels. One person. Twenty dollars an hour.
They think they are hiring hands. They are actually trying to hire a whole brain and pretending they only need fingers. In their minds, anybody can do it.
Anybody Can Post. Not Everyone Can Build.
The reason marketing gets undervalued is because the output is visible and the work is not.
A caption takes ninety seconds to read. It took six hours to write. It took six years to learn how to write it in six hours.
The strategy behind the caption is invisible. The audience research is invisible. The identity architecture that decided why this brand sounds like this and not like that is invisible. The reason the color is that specific shade of crimson and not red is invisible. The reason the font is serif and not sans is invisible.
All the customer sees is the post. All the founder sees is the post. So all they want to pay for is the post.
This is the trap. The deeper the work, the less of it shows. The less of it shows, the cheaper they think it is.
The Math Ain't Mathing
Let me actually do it.
Six positions at $50K is $300K a year for a marketing team. Sounds like a real budget. Until you realize they want that team to produce content across at least four channels, manage paid spend, run email, build a brand (YOUR BRAND), support sales, handle PR and report weekly.
A single senior strategist costs that. One person. Not six.
So what they are really saying is that they want six juniors doing the work of one senior, supervised by no one, accountable to a founder who does not know what good looks like, measured against metrics no one defined.
That is not a marketing team. That is a content factory with no quality control.
And here is the part that makes it worse. I have watched it happen too many times to count. The founder (or owner) who could not afford to pay what the role is worth still will not let the person they hired do the job. Every caption goes through three rounds of approval. Every campaign gets second guessed. Every strategy gets watered down because the founder’s cousin saw something on TikTok and thinks that would work. The person they hired is the expert in the room and the only person in the room not allowed to make a decision.
And the help? There is no help. No budget for the photographer. No budget for the ad spend. No budget for the design tool. No assistant. No intern. No team. Just one person and the unrealistic expectation and a founder asking why the numbers are not moving faster.
They are underpaid. They are under resourced. They overrode them. And then the founder will say marketing does not work for their business. It worked. They just were not allowed to do it. And the cycle repeats.
Why Founders Default Here
It is not because they are cheap. Some are. Most are not.
It is because marketing is the only business function where everyone has an opinion, and no one has a number. Sales has revenue. Operations has margin. Finance has cash. Marketing has brand lift, engagement, awareness. Soft until it is not. Invisible until the brand is the only reason the business is still standing.
When you cannot prove the value in advance, you get priced last. And the founder who cannot articulate what marketing is for cannot justify paying for what marketing actually does.
So they post six roles at $50 thousand. Because that feels like a real commitment. Without ever asking whether one role at one hundred and fifty thousand would do more.
What This Means For The Rest of Us
If you are a brand strategist reading this, you already know. You charge what you charge because the work is the work. You do not negotiate against a twenty dollar an hour posting.
If you are a founder reading this, the question is not how cheaply you can staff marketing. The question is what you actually need marketing to do. Announce the business? Or build it? Those are different jobs. They cost different money. They produce different outcomes.
If you are the person who applied to that twenty dollar an hour because you needed the work, you are no the problem. You know how I know. I was that person. The market is the problem. And the market is the market because too many founders have not yet learned what it costs to build something that lasts.
The Real Cost of Cheap Marketing
The businesses that pay real money for marketing are almost always the businesses that already paid the price for getting it wrong.
They hired the twenty-dollar generalist. The brand drifted. The audience never showed up. The launch flopped. The investor asked the questions they could not answer. The competitor with the clearer identity ate their lunch.
Then they finally call me.
That is exactly what I built The Curated Misfits to be. Not the cheapest line item on your spreadsheet. The reason you do not need six of them. I come in as the strategist you tried to hire for twenty dollars an hour and could not find. The brain behind the brand. The architecture under the identity. The clarity that tells you waht to post, why to post it, and what it is actually supposed to do for the business.
You don’t need six juniors. You need one strategist who knows what you are building and why it matters. That is the work I do. I do it for founders (owners and executive directors) who are ready to stop guessing and start building something that holds.
Identity is architecture. You can frame it cheap. It will not hold.
That is the problem. TCM is the solution.
The Curated Misfits builds brand strategy and identity architecture for founders (and business owners) who are ready to stop guessing. Visit thecuratedmisfits.com to learn about working with us and how we will implement ad spending in your pricing.
