Redha Alayesh

The work

What I actually do.

I start with the org chart, not with campaigns. Who owns which number. What that person is allowed to decide without asking. What gets reported, to whom, on which day of the month. Most companies I walk into have a marketing team and no marketing department, and the difference is not headcount. It is whether a number has a name beside it.

Then the unglamorous part. One definition of each metric that everybody actually agrees on. One reporting rhythm nobody is allowed to skip. A hiring order that does not begin with whoever is easiest to hire. Usually a smaller agency roster than the one I found, because an agency cannot own a number it does not control.

Under that there is an order, and it does not change much. Understand the market first. Write the strategy, and the plan that sits under it. Get the company aligned on both, because a plan nobody agreed to is a document. Build the analytics until the number is knowable rather than arguable. Then implement, and keep implementing, because a number only moves while somebody is moving it.

I do this through BMD. I have worked with 40+ marketing departments, across the Gulf and outside it. Alyaseen Agri, Ithra, IBM, the Saudi Esports Federation, Withgrowth, Riyadh Combat Club, and others. In each case the work was on the marketing function itself, some of it from the ground up.

The record

I started three companies. I closed all three.

That is the part people leave out of a bio, and it is a part that actually qualifies me.

Rwab6

The first one. A freelancing platform, and we tried several business models on top of it, looking for the one that would hold.

Slaysel

A marketing agency, with an F&B holding attached to it. I was selling other companies the growth engine I had not yet built for myself.

Business Nokhbah

A Saudi EdTech, and the last of the three. It started where every Saudi student starts, in Qudurat and Tahsili prep. That worked, so we built the platform underneath it: an LMS, then we experimented with a marketplace where other teachers could sell, then with academies and HRDF-backed training, then with technical skills assessment for employees, to say whether somebody could actually do a given job or not. Three different businesses wearing one name. By then I had stopped being surprised.

Together they cost more than $300,000 of my own money. I am not romantic about it and I do not recommend the tuition.

Here is the part I did not expect. Product played a part in all three, but it was never the biggest part. What closed them was growth and sales. There were always distractions and details to disappear into, and underneath those the real problem was accountability: there was a growth number, and there was never a person whose name sat next to it. Everyone was busy. Nobody was accountable. So the number moved on its own, and it did not stay on the way up.

So when I started consulting I did not start with campaigns. I started with the org chart. I build the thing whose absence closed my own companies.

The book

I am writing one book, and it has one subject.

It is called Building Marketing Department, and it is the argument on this page at full length: what a marketing department is for, what it is made of, and the order you build it in. It is not finished, and I am working on it. When there is something to read, it will be at bmds.sa/resources.

Positions

What I think about marketing.

A department is a structure, not a headcount.

Four people with defined ownership beat nine people who all take requests. When somebody tells me they are "building the marketing team", I ask which number each hire will own. The pause tells me what I am walking into.

Marketing that cannot be measured is decoration.

Not worthless. Decorative. There is a real place for decoration, and it is not in a line item that has to be defended to a board next quarter.

Ownership sits with a person, not with a team.

"The team owns pipeline" means nobody owns pipeline. A number owned by four people is a number owned by none of them, and everyone in the room already knows this.

An agency cannot own a number it does not control.

Agencies are good at the thing you hired them for and structurally unable to own the outcome, because they do not control pricing, product, sales follow-up or the response time on a lead. Give them the input. Keep the outcome.

The org chart is a marketing document.

You can predict most of a company's marketing output from its reporting lines without seeing a single campaign. Where marketing reports, what it is allowed to decide, and who it has to ask, produce the work far more reliably than talent does.

I am wrong about timing more often than about direction.

That is the honest version. I have been early on more calls than I have been wrong on, which is its own kind of wrong, and it is worth knowing about somebody before you take their advice on a quarter.

Disclosures

Who pays me, and for what.

• BMD is my company. Consulting engagements are paid, and BMD invoices them. Every link on this site to bmds.sa is a link to a business I own.
• The newsletter is free. It carries no advertising, no sponsorship and no paid placements, and I am not planning to add any.
• I take no affiliate commissions, and I have never been paid to mention a tool, a platform or a company. If that changes, it will be said in the sentence where the mention happens, not in a footer.
• I hold no equity in any client today. I am open to equity as part of how an engagement is paid, and where that happens it will be said here.
• The companies named on this page are named because BMD publishes them on its own site. The work was on the marketing function, some of it from the ground up.

Elsewhere

Where else I publish.