The team in the invoices

Ask how big a marketing team is and you get the org chart. Ask the purchase ledger and you get a different company.

Two salaried people. Then a freelance editor who cuts everything, a photographer booked by the day, a media buyer on a monthly fee, a developer who is the only person allowed near the website, an agency junior who is in practice the community manager, a printer, a translator for anything going into Arabic. Eight or nine invoices a month, most of them small enough that nobody senior reads the line.

That is the department. The two names with desks are the visible part of it.

Nobody decided this. It is what happens when a headcount request takes a year and a purchase order takes a week. Every time the answer to a gap was a supplier rather than a hire, the shape of the function moved slightly, and every one of those decisions was defensible on the day it was taken.

Which means the person deciding what marketing can actually do is whoever approves the invoices. Not the marketing director, who asks. Not the chief executive, who approved the plan. The finance manager holding a payment run against a cash position, deciding this month that the editor waits and the media fee goes out, because one of them chases and the other does not.

Suppliers are also the easiest thing in the building to stop, and stopping one removes a capability without a line moving on any chart. Nobody in the room calls that a restructure. It reads as prudence, and it is recorded as a saving.

So the structure gets set once a month, by a payment run, and nobody in the company thinks of a payment run as structure.