Every growing brand hits this moment. The numbers are late, nobody agrees on them, planning lives in a spreadsheet only one person understands, and someone says we need to hire for this.

I've been that person, and I've made that hire. Most of the time it turns out to be the wrong move, and I want to explain why with the actual numbers.

01 / 04

The hire

A head of data in Oslo, Paris, London or New York is 100-150k USD a year once you add employer tax, holiday pay and pension. This is the easy part.

Then it takes four months to find them, and six to be fully up and running (if you are lucky).

And the job is a weird one. You need someone who understands a warehouse, a P&L, a planning cycle, an ERP, what your retail partners send you every Monday, and now AI. Those people exist, we have them. And the rest are either extremely expensive or hard to find.

Say you get them anyway. Now one person holds the numbers. And when they leave (and in this market, they generally do every 2 to 3 years), you start from scratch.

Employment brings a sense of ownership. They're on your payroll, so the work feels like your IP. But the reality is that the world has changed. You spend a year investing in talent you keep for two or three, and the knowledge you paid for leaves with them.

02 / 04

What you actually need

You need a function rather than a person.

The function is every system and channel in one set of numbers you trust, available to your people, your tools and AI, with someone accountable for using them to plan and run the business.

Doing it needs an engineer, an analyst, a planner and an operator, often in the same week. No one hire covers that. So either the head of data does all four badly, or your single hire becomes a team. And so the cost ladder begins.

03 / 04

How we do it

Telemyr is that function, on retainer.

We join your team, build the data foundation in your cloud on your accounts, and hand it over. We run planning, reporting and operations off it, in your meetings and on your objectives, and we stay accountable for the numbers the same way an employee would be.

You get the engineer, the analyst, the planner and the operator for less than one of them costs to employ. Everything we build stays with you, documented and running in your own accounts, so if you stop working with us you keep all of it.

Your team stays small while the business grows. The brands we work with are running several channels on several systems without a data department, because the function is covered and the headcount isn't.

04 / 04

When you should hire anyway

If you're past 500 million in revenue, if data is the product you sell, or if you want someone in the building five days a week, hire. We'll say so, and we'll help you find them and hand everything over.

For most brands the useful question is what the function needs to do and how fast you can have it running.