Smartfix
Building a marketing function inside a growing trade business
Smartfix's marketing needs changed significantly as the business grew. What could once be handled through freelancers, suppliers and individual marketing activities eventually needed a proper internal function connecting brand, digital, search, content, campaigns and reporting.
Over four years, I helped build that function from the ground up, and then helped restructure it as the business itself changed.
Context
Marketing had to change as the business changed
Smartfix started as a small trade business with one van. In the early years, marketing didn't need to be complicated. Work could be supported through referrals, external suppliers, individual campaigns and people stepping in where needed.
But the business didn't stay small. New services were added. The team expanded. More customers meant more communication. The website became larger. Search visibility mattered more. Different parts of the business needed their own campaigns, collateral and support.
Marketing had gone from something the business did to something it increasingly needed to manage.
- 20181 vanSolo operation
- 20207 staff$1.3M revenue
- 202224 staff$6.3M revenue
- 2024130+ staffAround $30M, the peak
- 202650 staffRefocused on two core services
The growth itself was the work of the wider Smartfix team. The marketing challenge was making sure the function behind it could keep pace with a business becoming significantly more complex.
The problem
The old way of doing marketing had reached its limit
Before there was an internal marketing function, work was spread across external providers, freelancers and people inside the business handling individual tasks when they could.
That can work when a business is smaller. As Smartfix grew, it created bottlenecks.
There were more services to market, more campaigns to coordinate, more website content to maintain and more people relying on marketing support. Decisions that once could be made informally now affected a much larger operation.
The problem wasn't simply that Smartfix needed more marketing. It needed someone connecting the pieces, deciding priorities, creating consistency and building systems that could support the volume of work.
My role
From marketing support to an internal function
I initially worked with Smartfix as a freelance designer before joining the business internally and eventually becoming Brand & Marketing Manager.
My responsibility expanded alongside the needs of the business. Rather than owning one channel, I worked across the marketing function: brand, website, SEO and AEO, content, campaigns, reporting, systems, suppliers and eventually the internal marketing team.
The goal wasn't to bring every marketing task in-house. It was to build enough internal knowledge and structure that Smartfix could make better decisions about what should happen internally, what should stay with specialists and how everything connected.
The work
Building a marketing function that didn't rely on one person
As the workload increased, the priority shifted from simply getting marketing done to making the function repeatable.
Creating the operating system
Processes that had previously lived in conversations, individual files or someone's head were documented and turned into practical systems. That included SOPs, playbooks, templates, planning processes, reporting and clearer ways of managing recurring marketing work.
The aim was simple: routine marketing shouldn't need to be reinvented every time it happened.
Building the team
As the function grew, additional marketing support was brought in and trained around those systems.
Instead of handing over isolated tasks, the focus was on giving people the context behind the work: how the brand operated, what good looked like, where information lived and how their work connected to wider business priorities.
Connecting internal and external specialists
Not everything needed to sit inside the marketing team.
Agencies, contractors and specialist suppliers still had a role, but internal ownership meant there was someone setting the brief, challenging recommendations, connecting external work to the broader strategy and making sure knowledge stayed within the business.
Adapting as the business changed
The marketing function couldn't be built once and left alone.
As Smartfix added services, changed direction and eventually refocused the business, priorities, systems, content and responsibilities had to change with it.
That became an important principle behind the function: marketing infrastructure should support the business you have now, not preserve the business you used to have.
Outcomes
What changed
The result wasn't one campaign or one marketing metric. It was a business that had a functioning internal marketing capability where previously there hadn't been one.
A marketing function was established
Brand, content, website, search, campaigns and reporting had clearer ownership rather than operating as disconnected activities.
Knowledge became documented
Processes, standards and recurring work were captured in systems the team could continue using rather than relying on individual memory.
Internal capability increased
Marketing team members could be onboarded, trained and given increasing ownership instead of every decision flowing through one person.
External support became easier to manage
Agencies and specialists could work from clearer briefs, with someone internally responsible for connecting their work to the business.
In their words
Aisha was great to work with and really helped the team build their skills and confidence. She was always happy to talk things through and explain the reasoning behind the work, which made a big difference for the less experienced team members. Her feedback was clear and helpful, and she was easy to approach if you had questions or needed a bit of guidance.
She worked with us to get clearer on priorities, who was responsible for what and how to keep things moving. When there were lots of competing tasks, she was good at breaking things down and helping the team work out where to focus. She helped put together clear, practical SOPs so people had something to refer back to instead of having to ask how to do things each time. That made everyday tasks and handing work over much easier.
I'd happily recommend Aisha to a business that has someone looking after marketing but needs a more experienced person to help guide them. She's patient, generous with her knowledge and good at helping people get to a point where they feel comfortable taking things on themselves.
How it shapes my work
Why this shapes how I work now
Building marketing from inside a business changed how I approach consulting.
A strategy can make perfect sense on paper and still fail if nobody has the time, skills or systems to execute it. A new tool doesn't fix a broken process. Hiring another marketer doesn't automatically create direction. And outsourcing everything doesn't remove the need for someone inside the business to understand what's happening.
That's why my work now goes beyond recommendations. I look at the strategy, the people responsible for delivering it and the systems around them.
Sometimes the answer is a new marketing strategy. Sometimes it's better processes, clearer priorities or support for the marketer already there.
Often, it's a combination.