Growing businesses reach a point where the marketing is too important to wing and too much for the owner to keep running on the side. You need someone senior setting direction, but a full-time marketing leader can cost well over a hundred thousand dollars a year, which most local businesses cannot justify. So the role goes unfilled. The owner keeps making marketing decisions between everything else, or hands them to a junior person with no strategy above them. The reality is that the gap is not effort. It is leadership, and that is the most expensive gap to leave open.