Marketing succession planning: lessons from Next

Next retiring its group marketing director after 40 years isn’t just retail gossip. It’s a reminder that marketing rarely fails because of a single bad campaign — it fails when the person holding the strategy together leaves and nothing is ready to replace them.

For UK solopreneurs and tiny teams, this hits even harder. You don’t have a “bench”. You have… you. If your marketing lives in your head (or in a jumble of tools you set up two years ago), a holiday, illness, family emergency, or simply getting too busy can stall growth overnight.

Next’s transition — Jane Shields retiring in May 2026 and Matt Barnes moving into a wider sales-and-marketing remit — is a clean case study in how to protect momentum, especially when budgets are tight and accountability is high.

What Next’s leadership change really signals

A marketing leadership transition is never “just a person leaving”. It’s a test of whether the business has:

• A repeatable growth system (not a string of one-off ideas)
• Clear ownership across channels and customer touchpoints
• Commercial discipline — the ability to invest, cut, and re-invest without panic

Next is unusually explicit about the commercial side. According to the report, the business looks to generate at least £1.50 of incremental profit for every £1 spent on marketing. That’s not a fluffy “brand awareness” target. It’s a hurdle rate.

For a small business, you can translate that into a simpler rule:

If you can’t explain how a channel pays you back, you don’t have a marketing channel — you have a hobby.

This matters in January 2026 because it’s the point in the year when many UK businesses reset budgets, review performance, and plan spring campaigns. If your marketing is going to be stable this year, the stability needs to be designed, not hoped for.

Internal succession vs hiring: the small business version

Next promoted from inside: Matt Barnes (previously online customer service director) takes on a broad remit including e-commerce, brand marketing, retail stores and online customer services.

That internal move is a clue: modern marketing isn’t a separate department. It’s connected to customer experience, fulfilment, service quality, returns, reviews, and the website.

Why internal succession often wins (even for solopreneurs)

Most solopreneurs assume succession planning is a “big company thing”. I disagree. It’s a risk management thing.

Internal succession in a micro-business often looks like:

• Your VA can publish a blog post and schedule social without you
• Your freelancer can run your Meta/Google ads with your rules and limits
• Your web person can fix basic issues and report what changed

In other words: you’re not replacing yourself; you’re making sure the machine keeps running.

When hiring externally makes sense

External hires (or agencies) work when the job is genuinely specialist, such as:

• Google Ads account restructuring
• Technical SEO fixes and site speed work
• Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) testing plans
• Proper email deliverability and automation rebuilds

A useful stance: keep strategy and standards close to the business, and outsource execution and expertise with tight guardrails.

“Profitable marketing” isn’t a buzzword — it’s a system

Next is described as cautious with spend, yet it credited marketing investment with driving a 38.3% increase in international sales. It also increased international marketing spend sharply during 2025 (including a 50% rise in Q3), but is now preparing to slow that pace in 2026.

The interesting bit for small businesses isn’t the scale. It’s the approach:

• Invest while returns clear the hurdle
• Slow down when marginal returns drop
• Treat marketing budgets as adjustable, not sacred

Your solopreneur version of a hurdle rate

You don’t need £1.50 incremental profit per £1 spent (though it’s a nice target). You do need a threshold that stops you from buying clicks forever.

Here are three simple options:

1. Payback window: “Any campaign must pay back within 30/60/90 days.”
2. Contribution rule: “I need at least 40% gross margin after ad costs.”
3. Lead value rule: “A lead must cost less than £X given my close rate.”

If you sell services, the lead value rule is usually the cleanest.

Example (service business):

• Average project: £1,200
• Close rate from qualified leads: 25% (1 in 4)
• Gross margin after delivery costs: 70%

Expected gross profit per lead = £1,200 × 0.25 × 0.70 = £210

So your marketing can spend up to £210 per qualified lead and still be rational. Spend less and you can scale. Spend more and you’re funding platforms, not your business.

The overlooked risk: marketing knowledge trapped in one person

Jane Shields joined Next in 1985 and moved through sales, store management, marketing, online, and HR. That kind of tenure creates an enormous advantage: deep customer intuition and organisational memory.

It also creates a hidden risk:

• Why certain messages work (and others flop)
• Which audiences are profitable
• Which channels look good on dashboards but don’t convert
• What “brand” actually means in day-to-day decision making

If that knowledge isn’t written down, it walks out the door.

Build a “marketing operating system” (MOS) for your one-person business

This is the practical heart of marketing succession planning. Your MOS is a set of documents, dashboards, and routines that make marketing repeatable.

Start with these five assets:

1. Positioning one-pager

   • Who you’re for (and who you’re not)
   • What you do differently
   • Proof points and customer outcomes

2. Channel playbooks (one page each)

   • Posting cadence, offers, and CTAs
   • What to measure weekly
   • What “good performance” looks like

3. Content bank

   • Your top 20 FAQs turned into post ideas
   • Case study bullets and testimonials
   • Seasonal angles (e.g., January planning, spring refresh, summer lull)

4. Lead handling SOP

   • Response time target
   • Qualification questions
   • Booking link, follow-up sequence, and handoff

5. A simple monthly scorecard

   • Website sessions
   • Leads
   • Cost per lead (if running ads)
   • Close rate
   • Revenue attributed to marketing

If you can hand these to someone else and they can run “marketing week” without you, you’ve reduced risk dramatically.

Customer service taking over marketing is a smart move

Next putting a customer service leader closer to marketing is on-trend for 2026, and for good reason: the line between marketing and experience has basically disappeared.

For solopreneurs, this is a competitive advantage hiding in plain sight.

The cheapest marketing you’ll ever do is fixing friction

Before you spend more on ads, tighten the journey:

• Your homepage should say what you do in one sentence
• Your offer page should show prices or clear ranges (where possible)
• Your booking/contact process should take under 60 seconds
• Your first reply should arrive same day (next day at worst)

If you improve conversion from 1% to 1.5%, that’s a 50% uplift without buying a single extra click.

Turn customer service into content

If Barnes’ background tells us anything, it’s this: customer questions are not an interruption — they’re a content strategy.

A simple weekly routine:

• Collect the 5 most common questions you answered
• Write one short post answering one question
• Add a call-to-action to book, buy, or join your email list

Over a quarter, you’ll publish 12–13 highly relevant pieces that match real intent — ideal for SEO for small business and for social.

A practical succession plan you can set up in a weekend

If you’re serious about UK solopreneur business growth, here’s what works without creating bureaucracy.

Step 1: Choose a “marketing deputy”

Pick one person (VA, freelancer, agency contact) who can keep basic marketing moving.

Step 2: Make your marketing calendar boring on purpose

The goal is consistency, not constant reinvention.

• 1 blog post or case study per fortnight
• 2–3 social posts per week repurposed from that content
• 1 email per week (even short)

Step 3: Put money rules in writing

If you run paid ads, document:

• Max monthly spend
• Target cost per lead
• What triggers a pause (e.g., CPL rises 30% week-on-week)
• What triggers a scale (e.g., CPL under target for 14 days)

Step 4: Track one growth metric that matters

Pick one primary KPI:

• Leads per month
• Qualified calls booked
• Ecommerce conversion rate
• Email list growth

Everything else supports it.

Marketing gets simpler when one number is allowed to be the boss.

The real lesson from Next: protect momentum, then scale

Next’s story combines three truths: long-term leadership matters, internal handovers can be cost-effective, and marketing spend should rise and fall based on returns.

For a solopreneur, the takeaway is straightforward: you need a marketing system that survives your absence. Not because you’re planning to leave, but because you’re planning to grow.

If you want to sanity-check your current setup, do this: imagine you’re offline for two weeks. Does your lead flow slow a little… or stop completely? That answer tells you whether you’re running marketing, or marketing is running you.