Marketing Programs Manager
Marketing Programs Manager
MARKETING PROGRAMS MANAGER The Pendulum Series · Raleigh, North Carolina Full-time · Base salary plus program participation · Founding hire
Can you take a diagnostic that tells a business owner something uncomfortable and true about their company, and turn it into a room of people who paid to be there?
Have you built an acquisition motion from nothing - not optimized someone else’s, but decided the offer, the buyer, and how a stranger becomes a customer?
Then read on.
What we’re building
Most business owners cannot tell you where their business actually is. They know their revenue and headcount, and neither answers the question. So they buy the wrong help, hire the wrong people, and build on a foundation that was never finished - often for years, while working harder than anyone around them.
The Pendulum Series fixes that. Five Stations of growth, each with a gate a business either passes on evidence or doesn’t. It comes out of thirty years of operating - seven companies founded, five exits, $200M in exit value - published across five books.
The framework exists. The books are written. The commercial engine is not built, and that is this job.
A leader runs the locator and discovers their Station - frequently not the one they assumed. That diagnosis places them in a mastermind cohort with owners carrying the same unfinished work, where each takes a hot seat and is held to evidence rather than intention. A few go on to one-to-one coaching.
Diagnostic, to cohort, to coaching. You own the whole of it.
Why this is unusual
Most marketing roles hand you a funnel and ask you to improve it. This one asks you to decide what the funnel is.
The hook is differentiated. Not a free lunch and a discovery call - a specific, evidence-based answer to where is my business actually. Our most potent finding: many businesses that look established never finished an earlier stage. We call it False Station 4, and telling a $4M owner that, credibly, earns attention a webinar never will.
Raleigh is the proving ground, not the ceiling. What you build here is the template for every market after it.
No inherited channel mix, no legacy CRM, no agency retainer to defend. Also no playbook - which is the trade, and you should want it.
What you’ll do
First ninety days: turn the diagnostic into a front door. We have a roadmap and a locator. We do not have the thing a person attends. You’ll design and run the entry event - format, offer, follow-up, room - and prove it can be filled twice. That becomes the asset the business runs on.
Then, the acquisition motion. Decide which channels earn their place and kill the rest. Referral relationships with the advisors owners already trust - bankers, CPAs, attorneys, fractional CFOs. Content that makes the framework findable. Paid media only where justified. You’ll be asked what you killed, not how busy the calendar looked.
Then, the cohort machine. Applications, placement, intake, onboarding, and the rhythm that fills the next room while the current one runs. Cohorts are placed by Station, so a wrong placement costs six other members their quarter.
Throughout, the numbers. Cost per locator completion, application and enrollment rates, fill rate, retention, contribution per member. You’ll build the instrumentation because nobody has yet, and sequence five book launches against cohort intakes.
The scoreboard: qualified owners seated in the right cohort, at full price, repeatably. Everything else is a means to it.
Who this is for
You’ve built something from nothing - a program, a launch motion, a community. It doesn’t have to have been big. It has to have been yours.
You’re comfortable with owner-led businesses between $1M and $12M and the people who run them: competent, skeptical, time-poor, allergic to being sold to.
You can write. Not manage copywriters - write. This framework’s appeal is precision of language, and marketing vaguer than the product will kill it.
You’d rather have a number than a compliment, and you can hold a strategy while running the details, because for a while nobody else will.
Useful but not required: a Triangle network, cohort or mastermind experience, marketing automation fluency.
You probably shouldn’t apply if
You need an established playbook to execute against.
You’ve managed agencies but never run the motion yourself.
Your instinct with a new offer is to buy traffic and see what happens.
You want to own one channel and hand off the rest.
You’d be uncomfortable telling a successful owner something true and unwelcome about their company.
You measure a month by activity rather than by what you learned.
You want a title now rather than a business later.
You may be exactly right if
You’ve read this far and are already forming an opinion about what the entry event should be.
You’ve watched good frameworks fail because nobody built the path to them, and it annoyed you.
You’d rather build the thing that produces revenue for ten years than hit a number this quarter.
Compensation
Base salary plus participation in the programs you build.
For the first six months your job is to build the machine, not close deals - so we won’t pay you mostly on enrollments and then wonder why the infrastructure never got built. The base is real.
The upside should follow what you create, not what you close. Participation is structured against the programs you stand up and the revenue they produce over time, including after you’ve handed off the day-to-day. Equity is on the table for the right person, discussed openly rather than dangled.
Bring your number to the conversation.
About the founder
Nigel Elkan has founded seven companies, exited five, raised over $40M in venture capital, and taken companies through IPO, with exits totaling $200M. He held roles at IBM, Lotus and Cisco, and has coached hundreds of business leaders. You would be the first commercial hire, working directly with him.
How to apply
Send a resume, then answer these. We read the answers first.
1. What is the first event or experience you’d build to turn a Station diagnosis into paid cohort enrollments in the Triangle? Be specific: format, who’s in the room, what makes someone say yes.
2. Describe an acquisition motion you built from nothing. What did you try, what did you kill, and how did you know?
3. How would you market the claim that many established businesses never finished an earlier stage of growth - without it reading as an insult to the person you need to reach?
4. Owner-led businesses between $1M and $12M: where do they actually pay attention, and how do you know rather than assume?
5. What would you need to see in ninety days to conclude this isn’t working?
Question five matters as much as the rest. We want someone who sets their own falsification conditions - that is what the framework asks of every leader we work with.
Specificity separates candidates. Generic answers won’t.
Location: Raleigh-Durham, hybrid. You need to get in a room with business owners in the Tri
Job Overview
Category: Business Development
Experience Level: Mid Level
Salary: $2,000 - $7,000/monthly
Location: Raleigh, NC preferred
Requirements
Enthusiasm, attention to detail, self starter, persistence, creativity.
You have probably worked in an entrepreneurial environment. You enjoy talking with ambitious business leaders. Familiarity with CRM and collaboration tools and commitment to ensure that these are kept current at all times
Required Skills
program_managerbusiness_developmentcold_callingself_starter
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