A senior marketing hire can look like proof you’ve made it, when it’s really proof you’ve moved faster than your company can support.

In July, WHOOP hired Dirk-Jan van Hameren, Nike’s former chief marketing officer, to run marketing for the wearable-tech company. On paper, it looked like a typical senior marketing hire. In practice, van Hameren walked into a company that had just closed a $575 million funding round at a $10.1 billion valuation, crossed 3 million members and was already cash-flow positive.

He didn’t build a marketing function. He inherited one: a 65-person team already in place, reporting directly to him from day one.

That’s the part founders miss when they look at a hire like this and think, “We’re ready for that, too.” I’ve spent years placing marketing talent inside growth-stage companies, and the mistake I see most often is making a senior hire before the infrastructure exists to support it.

Here’s how to tell whether your company is actually ready to hire a marketing VP or CMO, and what to do if it isn’t yet:

These signs usually mean the infrastructure isn’t there yet for a VP or CMO, even if the ambition is: There’s no repeatable way leads or customers come in yet, the marketing budget depends on whoever’s cheapest that quarter rather than what’s working, and no one on the team could tell you which channel actually drives revenue.

I worked with one founder who got excited about a strong résumé, made the hire and then wondered, six months in, why nothing had changed.

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