A $180,000 salary doesn't cost $180,000. Add benefits, payroll tax, recruiting fees, software seats, and onboarding time, and that marketing hire lands closer to $240,000 a year. And that number buys you exactly one person — with one skill set.
The empty chair problem
Before your new marketing lead ships anything, you have to find them. The average senior marketing search runs about five months. That's five months of the roadmap you wrote in January sitting untouched — the website redesign, the video content, the paid campaigns — while you screen résumés and run interview loops.
Then the chair gets filled, and a quieter problem starts: websites, paid media, video production, SEO, and analytics are different disciplines. The strongest generalist you can hire is still going to be excellent at one or two of them and adequate at the rest. So the next conversation is about headcount two and three — and the math above runs again, each time.
You're not buying expertise. You're buying a seat.
Here's the part nobody puts in the budget: a full-time hire is a fixed cost that doesn't flex with the work. In a quarter where you need a website rebuilt, you're paying a video specialist to wait. In a quarter that's all product launches and paid spend, your web developer is idle. The seat gets paid every month either way — whether or not it's the right seat for what the business actually needs right now.
A bench, not a seat
That's the model we built Chasing Creative around. Instead of one chair, you get a bench: senior web designers, video producers, photographers, paid media managers, and analytics people — scoped to whatever the goal actually needs this quarter. Website this quarter, launch video the next, conversion work after that. Decades of combined senior marketing experience, zero added headcount, no five-month vacancy in front of any of it.
The chair stays empty on purpose. The work ships anyway.
When in-house is the right call
To be fair about it: if you have a single channel that needs full-time, year-round attention — a demand-gen machine that never stops, a content operation publishing daily — an in-house owner for that channel is worth every dollar. The bench model wins when the work is varied, project-shaped, and senior: exactly the profile of most B2B marketing roadmaps we see.
Run your own numbers
Take the role you're about to post. Multiply the salary by 1.3, add five months of vacancy against your roadmap, and ask how many of this year's priorities that one skill set actually covers. Then talk to us about what the same budget buys from a bench.
