DIRECTOR OF MARKETING
Relentless Brands | ISI® Elite Training + The Plunge House®
Charlotte, NC (Tyvola Rd) | On-site 4 days/week | Reports to the Executive Team
We're looking for a marketer who can set the vision, guard the brand, and build the asset. If you need a $3M budget, a five-agency roster, and six weeks to launch a campaign, this is the wrong job.
WHO WE ARE
Relentless Brands is the parent company behind two fast-scaling franchise systems.
ISI® Elite Training. 60+ locations of boutique strength and conditioning. Not a gym. Not a studio. A facility where coaches run sessions on turf and members get measurably stronger.
The Plunge House®. Contrast therapy and recovery, built for the fastest-growing category in wellness.
Both brands are scaling nationally, which means we run two marketing engines at once: consumer acquisition (fill the facilities) and franchise development (sell the territories). This role owns both, for both brands.
THE ROLE
You own marketing for Relentless Brands. The brand, the P&L, the vendors, the channel mix, the creative direction, the calendar, and the results. You'll lead a team of four: Brand Creative Manager, Brand Content Manager, Marketing Associate, and Marketing Operations Manager, all reporting directly to you.
This is a player-coach seat, not just an oversight seat. You'll direct the strategy and then get in the ad account, rewrite the hook, fix the landing page, and ship the campaign alongside the team. Being a young company, our budgets are lean and our expectations are high. Resourcefulness is a job requirement, not a personality trait.
You are Franchise Partner facing, but not their day-to-day contact. Operations owns that. You build the strategy, programs, and playbooks that make Franchise Partners successful, then jump in when a market needs it.
WHAT YOU OWN
• THE BRAND. Both brands, top to bottom. Visual identity, voice, creative standards, and the discipline to keep 60+ locations from drifting into 60+ different brands. You're the final word on whether creative is on-brand and good enough to ship.
• NATIONAL + HYPER-LOCAL. National builds the brand and drives franchise development. Hyper-local fills the facility on Tyvola Rd and the one opening in Kenosha next quarter. Most marketers can do one. You have to do both, across two brands, at the same time.
• CONSUMER ACQUISITION. Lead volume, CPL, close-rate support, member growth, and retention marketing across 60+ locations. You own the number.
• FRANCHISE DEVELOPMENT MARKETING. Candidate lead gen, portal and broker performance, the ownership funnel, discovery day conversion support. Different avatar, different funnel, different economics.
• THE TEAM. Four people. You set the standard, protect the calendar, unblock them, and raise their ceiling.
• THE OPERATING SYSTEM. We run on Monday.com. Every campaign, project, and deliverable is documented, assigned an owner, given a due date, and measured against a defined outcome. If it isn't in Monday, it doesn't exist.
• THE BUDGET. Spend, vendor selection, and agency performance. Every dollar is accountable to a number.
THE NON-NEGOTIABLES
1. YOU OWN THE BRAND AND YOU HAVE REAL CREATIVE JUDGMENT
You can look at a piece of creative and know within five seconds whether it's on-brand, whether the hook works, and what specifically needs to change. "Make it pop" is not in your vocabulary.
2. YOU START WITH THE OUTCOME AND WORK BACKWARD
Every project begins with a defined result: the number, the behavior, the response you're driving. Then you reverse-engineer strategy, creative, channels, and timeline, and get the team bought into the vision so they understand WHY before they execute.
3. YOU ARE OBSESSED WITH DEADLINES AND CHECKPOINTS
Grand openings don't move. Presales don't wait. You build real checkpoints into every project, not a status meeting where everyone is "on track" until the week it's due. You catch slippage early and hold the line without being asked.
4. YOU BUILD WITH AI, YOU DON'T JUST USE IT
"I use ChatGPT for first drafts" isn't what we're talking about. We want someone building AI-native systems: automated content pipelines, agent workflows, custom prompts and skills that compress a two-week production cycle into two days. We will ask you to show us.
5. YOU'RE CURIOUS ABOUT DOING MORE WITH LESS
You're the person who keeps asking: why does this take four days? What can we template? Automate? Kill entirely? You want your whole team delivering at a level that shouldn't be possible with four people.
6. YOU UNDERSTAND AVATARS
The 34-year-old mom who hasn't trained in six years is not the same buyer as the 28-year-old who already lifts. The franchise candidate with $500K liquid is not the same buyer as the multi-unit operator adding a third brand. You define each one and build a message that lands.
7. YOU CAN TELL A STORY
Our brands are built on transformation: physical, mental, and financial. Fitness marketing is drowning in before-and-afters and countdown timers. Make people feel something, then make them act.
THIS JOB IS NOT FOR YOU IF...
Read this part carefully. We'd rather lose you here than in month four.
YOU WAIT TO BE TOLD. If your first instinct when something breaks is to document it and wait for direction, this will be miserable for both of us. Nobody is handing you a task list. See the gap, close it, then tell us it's closed. "It wasn't on my plate" is not a sentence that survives here.
YOU'RE NOT CURIOUS. If you're not listening to marketing podcasts on your drive, saving ads that made you stop scrolling, or opening some new AI tool at 10pm to see what it does, you're going to get lapped. Fast. We're not asking you to be a workaholic. We're asking whether this stuff is interesting to you. The marketers winning right now can't help themselves.
YOU NEED CONSENSUS TO MAKE A CALL. You'll never have complete information. If your default is one more meeting, one more round of feedback, one more week to "align," you become the bottleneck for four people and two brands. Make the call. Own the result. Adjust. Being wrong quickly is recoverable. Being slow isn't.
YOU'RE WAITING FOR PERFECT. Shipped at 85% beats perfect next month. Every single time.
YOU THINK WORK ETHIC MEANS LOOKING BUSY. We don't count hours and we don't care about your Slack status. We care about output. But let's be honest with each other: a grand opening on Saturday means somebody is checking that campaign on Saturday. If that made you tense up, this isn't the seat.
YOU'RE A LONE WOLF. Brilliant work, terrible teammate. Hard pass. You've got four direct reports and you're shoulder-to-shoulder with Operations every week. If you hoard information, quietly take credit, or treat other departments as obstacles between you and your idea, it won't work.
YOU'RE NOT INTO HEALTH AND WELLNESS. This is the one we won't flex on. You don't need to deadlift 400 pounds or take an ice bath at 5am. But you have to care about how people feel in their bodies. Our members trust us with something personal. Our Franchise Partners bet their savings on it. If this is a category to you, a fitness gig between a SaaS gig and a beverage gig, everybody will know inside 30 days. This should be EXCITING to you because you have a deep conviction of health & wellness.
A FEW MORE QUICK ONES...
• You need a big agency to execute your ideas
• "Brand strategy" means a deck to you, not a revenue number
• You start with tactics and hope an outcome shows up
• You track work in your head, your inbox, or a spreadsheet you update on Fridays
• You think AI is a threat instead of a multiplier
• You've never torn apart a process you built to make it faster
• You've only ever worked on one brand at a time and liked it that way
WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
Required:
• 5+ years in marketing leadership with real budget and team ownership
• Performance marketing chops. You've owned CPL, CAC, and ROAS, not just "brand"
• Strong brand and creative instincts, with the ability to direct designers, videographers, and content producers
• Hands-on execution across copy, creative direction, email, paid social, and landing pages
• Proven AI system-building, with work samples
• Disciplined project management. A real system, not a mental list
• Direct people management. Hiring, coaching, and holding a line on quality
• Comfort with lean budgets and imperfect information
Strongly preferred:
• Franchise, multi-unit, or multi-location background
• Fitness, wellness, recovery, or consumer health experience
• Marketing to two audiences at once (consumer + franchise development)
LOGISTICS
• Location: Charlotte, NC. Tyvola Rd office
• Schedule: On-site Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. Wednesday is currently hybrid
• Travel: Occasional, maybe 10%
• Direct reports: Brand Creative Manager, Brand Content Manager, Marketing Associate, Marketing Operations Manager
Relentless Brands is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate candidates on ownership, judgment, and execution.