Companies Got Leaner. Marketing Didn't.

The shape of business is changing

For most of the last century, a "company" meant a group of people: founders, managers and staff organised into departments. That picture no longer describes most businesses.

Globally, the World Bank estimates that small and medium-sized enterprises make up around 90% of all businesses and account for more than half of employment worldwide [1].

In the United States, the picture is sharper still. The SBA Office of Advocacy reports that there are about 36.2 million small businesses, and that 82.3% of them, about 29.8 million firms, have no employees beyond the owner [2]. The number of these "nonemployer" firms has nearly doubled, from 15.4 million in 1997 to 29.8 million in 2022 [2].

In the United Kingdom, the Department for Business and Trade estimates there were 5.7 million private-sector businesses at the start of 2025. Of these, 4.3 million, or 75%, employed no one other than their owners [3].

In the European Union, Eurostat counted 33.1 million active enterprises in 2023, of which 99.8% were SMEs [4].

Different countries measure it differently, but the direction is the same everywhere: the typical business is small, and increasingly it's just one or two people.

New companies are starting smaller

The trend isn't only about older, established small businesses. New companies are also starting leaner.

Data from Carta, which tracks equity for a large number of venture-backed startups, shows that the share of new startups with a single founder rose from 23.7% in 2019 to 36.3% in the first half of 2025 [5]. Carta's data covers companies on its platform, not every startup, but it's a strong signal: more than a third of new venture-backed companies now begin with one person at the helm.

The tools behind this shift are familiar. Cloud software, no-code platforms, payment providers and, increasingly, AI assistants let small teams do work that once needed whole departments. Building a product, launching a store or shipping an app is far easier than it was a decade ago.

Marketing didn't shrink with them

Some business functions compress well. Accounting has been largely automated for small firms. Hosting is a click away. Payments are handled by platforms.

Marketing hasn't compressed in the same way. To grow, a business still needs to:

• Find customers: choose channels, set budgets, buy media, and move spend to what works.
• Make the ads: create and test messages, formats and images, and refresh them before they stop working.
• Keep customers: bring people back, encourage repeat purchases and reduce churn.
• Measure what's real: separate real growth from misattributed or fraudulent results.

Each of these takes skill, time and constant attention. In large companies they're handled by teams of specialists. In a one-person company, they're handled by the founder, usually late at night, or outsourced to an agency.

The cost of doing it properly

Hiring even a small marketing team is expensive. Using median US pay as a benchmark, a marketing manager earns about $166,790 a year and a market research analyst about $78,760 [6][7]. A minimal team of one manager and two analysts costs more than $324,000 a year in salaries alone, before agency fees, tools or media.

For most of the businesses described above, that's out of reach. Many have annual revenues well below the cost of the team.

Finding the people is also hard. ManpowerGroup's 2024 global survey of more than 40,000 employers in 41 countries found that 75% reported difficulty filling roles [8]. The survey isn't specific to marketing, but it shows the wider hiring environment small businesses compete in.

What lean businesses do instead

Faced with that cost, lean businesses usually choose one of three imperfect options.

1. The founder does it. This is cheap in cash and expensive in time and focus. Founders learn marketing platforms by trial and error, often spending heavily before they learn what works.

2. They hire an agency. This buys expertise, but agencies are usually paid on spend or retainer, not on results. As our research on ad-tech incentives shows, that model rewards more spend rather than better outcomes.

3. They use point tools. Software can automate individual tasks, such as scheduling posts, generating an image or setting a bid. But someone still has to decide the strategy, connect the tools and judge the results. The tools help a marketer; they don't replace the need for one.

None of these gives a lean business what a large company gets from a full marketing department: an integrated function that acquires customers, creates the ads and keeps customers, all working towards revenue.

Why this matters now

Two trends are converging.

Businesses keep getting leaner. Nonemployer firms have doubled in the US over 25 years [2], three-quarters of UK businesses have no employees [3], and solo-founder startups are rising [5].

Advertising keeps getting more complex. Digital channels account for most global ad spend [9], spread across many platforms, formats and intermediaries, with meaningful fraud and waste along the way [10][11].

The result is a widening gap. The businesses that make up most of the economy have the fewest resources to handle one of their most complex and expensive functions.

What would close the gap

For a lean business, a solution has to meet a demanding standard:

• Run the whole function, not just individual tasks: acquisition, creative and retention together.
• Work without a marketer to operate it, so a founder can set a goal and let it run.
• Optimise for business outcomes such as paying customers, retention and return on ad spend (ROAS), not impressions or installs.
• Be priced on results, so the cost scales with the value it creates rather than with spend.

This is where AI agents come in. For the first time, software can plausibly take on the judgement-heavy, always-on work of a marketing team: deciding where to spend, what to say and when to change course. We look at that shift in detail in a separate article.

The takeaway

The typical business is now small, and often a single person. That's a triumph of modern tools. But marketing, the function that decides whether those businesses grow, still assumes a team most of them can't afford. Closing that gap is one of the largest opportunities in business software today.

Lean teams still need marketing. They just can't hire a marketing team.

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References

[1] World Bank. Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) Finance. https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/smefinance

[2] US SBA Office of Advocacy. Frequently Asked Questions About Small Business 2026. February 2026. https://advocacy.sba.gov/2026/02/03/frequently-asked-questions-about-small-business-2026/

[3] UK Department for Business and Trade. Business population estimates for the UK and regions 2025. October 2025. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/business-population-estimates-2025/business-population-estimates-for-the-uk-and-regions-2025-statistical-release

[4] Eurostat. Structural business statistics overview. September 2025. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Structural_business_statistics_overview

[5] Carta. Solo Founders Report 2025. December 2025. https://carta.com/data/solo-founders-report/

[6] US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Occupational Outlook Handbook: Advertising, Promotions, and Marketing Managers. May 2025 wages. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/management/advertising-promotions-and-marketing-managers.htm

[7] US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Occupational Outlook Handbook: Market Research Analysts. May 2025 wages. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/business-and-financial/market-research-analysts.htm

[8] ManpowerGroup. Global Talent Shortage 2024. https://go.manpowergroup.com/talent-shortage

[9] WPP Media. This Year Next Year: Midyear 2025. June 2025. https://www.wppmedia.com/thought-leadership/this-year-next-year/tyny-midyear-2025-research

[10] ISBA / PwC. Programmatic Supply Chain Transparency Study, executive summary. December 2020. https://www.isba.org.uk/system/files/media/documents/2020-12/executive-summary-programmatic-supply-chain-transparency-study.pdf

[11] AppsFlyer. State of Fraud for Marketers, 2026 edition. April 2026. https://www.appsflyer.com/resources/reports/state-fraud-marketers/