The Marketing Department Designed to Disappear

There is a small paradox hiding inside the phrase “Department of Growth.” A department belongs to a company. It sits on the org chart, learns the peculiar habits of the sales team, knows which customer complained last Tuesday and remembers why a promising campaign was killed last spring. An agency, by contrast, belongs to itself. Department of Growth is an agency attempting the first condition while accepting the second. Then, at the moment the arrangement starts working, it proposes to leave.

Brian Dema founded the Chicago company in 2023 after moving through startups, corporate marketing, sales management and agency work. Before all of that, he was an archaeologist. The old occupation survives in the new one. Archaeologists infer a system from scattered evidence. Dema's firm does something similar with a market: customer language, campaign results, CRM records, sales calls, competitor positioning and the untidy clues buried between them.

The company says it has helped more than 50 organizations, from venture-backed startups and investment funds to middle-market firms and Fortune 500 businesses. Its public client roll includes Lighter Capital, Union Labs, Clearbit, Fountain, Tractable, Retail Zipline, SurePayroll and Microsoft. But the revealing part is not the logo parade. It is the verb the company uses for its work: build.

The first failure is usually the org chart

The standard startup solution to marketing is to hire one impressive generalist and hand over a list of unrelated problems. Position the company. Run paid media. Fix HubSpot. Write the launch. Coach sales. Find a designer. Explain attribution to the board. This is less a job description than a cry for help.

The other solution is a constellation of agencies. One buys ads, another handles public relations, a freelancer writes copy, and somebody on the founding team tries to make the pieces agree. Department of Growth argues that both arrangements fail at the same place: management. Specialists without an operating system optimize their own corners. A senior CMO without operators underneath becomes an expensive source of slides.

In Dema's public account, the change of mind is cumulative rather than cinematic. He points to short CMO tenures, misaligned agency incentives, constant recruiting and campaigns that produce activity without institutional learning. The lesson he draws is that adding another tactic does not repair a missing management layer. The system has to come before the shopping list.

Its answer is to pair fractional CMO or CRO leadership with the working layer - project managers, content people, designers, paid-media specialists, sales operators, martech practitioners and data scientists. The team joins executive meetings, runs stand-ups, installs measurement and does production work. For younger companies, the go-to-market accelerator is aimed specifically at the Seed through Series B interval, when ambition tends to outrun both headcount and runway.

“When you're ready, we hire ourselves out of a job.”Department of Growth

The product is management, with specialists attached

This is where the business separates from a conventional creative shop. It sells fractional management, but not management alone. It also sells strategy and execution across positioning, launches, content, design, events, public relations, paid media and market research. On the sales side, it builds prospecting teams, trains organizations and connects marketing activity to complex B2B selling. The engagement is custom-priced; there is no public menu.

The economic pitch is risk pooling. A young company may need excellent judgment from six disciplines without needing 40 hours a week from six senior people. Fractional staffing makes that odd bundle purchasable. The less obvious trade is intimacy. For the model to work, the outsiders need access to the meetings, numbers and awkward internal truths normally reserved for employees. “Embedded” is doing a lot of work in the proposition.

The operating rhythm is concrete enough to copy. Dema has argued for making an initial plan within a month, revisiting it every quarter, tracking KPIs weekly and hiring a manager before assembling a loose bag of junior specialists. He treats marketing as a changing system rather than a stack of campaigns. A plan is useful because it can be corrected, not because it will remain right.

Data science enters through the side door

Many firms describe themselves as data-driven when they mean that someone checks a dashboard after the campaign ends. Department of Growth has made the data group part of the creative and positioning process. Led publicly by neuroscientist Han de Jong, the team builds custom models for attribution, market mapping and prospect discovery.

Its “Client Twins” service begins with a company's best customers, studies how those organizations describe themselves online, and looks for prospects with similar patterns. The promise is both a list and a clue: who resembles the buyers you already value, and which language may open the conversation? The firm has also used transformer embeddings to map competitive positioning. In one published project, it examined more than 1,300 venture firms and reported that 74 percent clustered around familiar claims such as being founder-first or backing transformative industries.

Through a partnership with Vibe Analytics, the company also tests creative work using measures of viewers' emotional response. The practical sequence is appealing: test the positioning before making the advertisement, test the cut before buying the media, then compare the emotional signal with market performance. It does not abolish taste. It gives taste something to argue with.

Then the archaeologist starts a magazine

The oddest part of Department of Growth is also the most persuasive expression of its culture. Alongside sales systems and lead lists sits The Cultural Layer, an editorial and film practice named for the archaeological stratum where evidence of human activity accumulates. The subjects wander well outside marketing: a Chicago punk institution, a brain-computer interface, a hidden Kansas cocktail bar, community-led coding and the new beverage companies of Chicago.

This is not merely a content funnel wearing a leather jacket. The company has made documentaries and sponsored local events; its distributed creative roster includes writers, artists and filmmakers. In 2026, a 19-person team built RichieBot, an experimental documentary and art project trained on the records of Dema's late father, J. Richard Dema. The public description lists 17,500 scanned pages, psychological testing, two gallery exhibits, more than 40 hours of footage and a four-foot interactive hologram. For a marketing consultancy, it is a startling amount of room to give a question that has no tidy conversion event: what remains human when a person can be approximated by a model?

The cultural work explains the commercial work. Department of Growth's thesis is that marketing is simultaneously science, art and language. Remove science and there is no honest feedback. Remove art and nobody cares. Remove language and the company cannot make itself understood. Plenty of agencies claim some version of this mixture. Few publish a long history of a punk shop next to an open-source Mandelbrot script.

A good fit requires an open door

The model has conditions. It depends on leaders who will let a fractional team into the room, share useful data and tolerate iteration. It makes less sense for a buyer who wants a single commodity deliverable, a campaign detached from operations or a vendor kept safely downstream. It also asks the client to value capability transfer. A founder who prefers permanent dependence may find the planned exit less charming than it sounds.

The public evidence is promising but compact. Rivet CEO Anj Fayemi says the company's user base rose nearly 60 percent in its first six months with Department of Growth, alongside new messaging and acquisition work. Other testimonials praise positioning and cross-disciplinary execution. Those are client-reported outcomes, not a controlled experiment. Growth has many parents. The most useful claim to test is therefore not that this team can summon it on command, but that it can leave behind a better instrument for finding it.

That final instruction is the one worth stealing. Most professional-services firms optimize for renewal. Department of Growth has made departure part of the product. The gamble is that a client remembers the team that taught it to walk alone, then calls again when the terrain changes. It is not a bad way to turn an ending into a referral.