Your intern is not your marketing director.

I'll be blunt, because the subject deserves it. I think this is one of the biggest silent wastes in French business, and almost nobody talks about it: communication, online presence, image, everything that makes a customer find you and trust you, is handed to the least experienced person in the building. Often the only one. Often an intern.

The scenario I see everywhere

I've worked for a lot of companies, as a contractor and from the inside. The pattern repeats with a regularity that ended up stunning me. You ask who handles the website, the social accounts, the newsletter, the campaigns, the visuals, the message. The answer: our intern. One person, still training, who is learning the trade by practising it on a real company, with real customers and real money.

And above all: nobody above them. No marketing manager. No communications director. The intern doesn't report to someone from the field, they report to the owner, who is usually the first to admit they know nothing about it. Which means that in this company, nobody is able to judge the work being produced. Nor correct it. Nor teach it. You've put a beginner in a strategic seat, and removed the one thing that made it acceptable: someone looking over their shoulder.

The striking part is that this intern genuinely becomes the most competent person in the company on the subject. Not because they're good, but because they're alone. They become the reference by elimination.

No other trade would accept this

Take a pastry shop. Nobody leaves an apprentice alone to run the kitchen. They weigh, they mix, they fail, they start again, and a chef checks behind them. Nobody would sign off the weekend menu by handing the desserts to someone still learning to whip cream.

Take construction. Nobody hands the entire electrical installation of a building to an apprentice electrician. They pull cables next to a journeyman who checks every single point, because a mistake here ends with a failed inspection or a fire.

In those trades, the apprentice's mistake is visible. Immediately. The cake is ruined, the panel fails inspection, the wall is crooked. The penalty is visible, physical, undeniable, and that is exactly what protects the company: the mistake is caught before it leaves the workshop.

In communication, the mistake is invisible. A badly designed website doesn't explode. A badly targeted campaign makes no noise. A confusing message triggers no alarm. Everything looks like it's working: there is a website, there are posts, there is activity. Except nothing happens. And since nobody in the company knows what a good result should look like, the mistake can run for two years, three years, without anyone naming it.

A communication mistake breaks nothing. It only costs you customers you'll never see, and whose existence you'll never even know about.

The problem isn't the intern

Let's be clear: I have nothing against interns. I've met excellent ones, motivated, curious, sharper about digital than plenty of senior managers. Apprenticeship is even one of the best ways to learn a trade, and I believe in it deeply.

But apprenticeship rests on one condition, and it's written into the contract in black and white: the master. Someone who knows, who demonstrates, who corrects, who passes it on. Remove that master and all you have left is a young person you pay little to do work nobody can evaluate. That's not apprenticeship. That's internal outsourcing to a beginner.

And an intern left alone, however talented, structurally cannot do what you're asking.

• They can't arbitrate. Choosing not to do something, refusing the boss's idea, saying a spend is pointless: that takes a legitimacy you don't have at twenty, as the newest arrival.
• They can't hold a strategy over time. An online presence is built over years. They're here for twelve or twenty-four months, and they know it.
• They can't correct themselves. You improve by being corrected. Alone, they repeat their mistakes diligently, and draw the wrong lessons from them.

You handed them the keys to a car without teaching them to drive, then wonder why the company isn't moving.

The saving that isn't one

When I raise this, the answer is always the same: "yes, but it doesn't cost us much." True. The contract is cheap, subsidies exist, and on a spreadsheet line it looks great.

Except the maths is wrong. You're comparing the cost of the intern to the salary of an experienced manager you were never going to hire anyway. That's not the right comparison. The right comparison is the cost of the intern against what you lose while they learn on you.

A website that doesn't convert for two years isn't zero euros. It's every customer who looked at it and went elsewhere. A badly spent advertising budget is money burned every month, quietly. An incoherent image is trust you won't win back: someone who found you amateurish once doesn't come back two years later to check whether you've improved.

And then there's the worst part, the one nobody mentions. After a year or two, the intern leaves. That's normal, it was planned, it's even the point. They take everything with them: the logins, the passwords, the campaign history, the reasons behind the choices, what worked, what failed. You hire the next one, who starts from zero, with their own ideas, their own tools, their own taste. And you start over.

Communication isn't a task, it's capital. Yet it's the only part of the business you reset every twelve months.

You don't change accountants every year. You don't rebuild your production line every year. But the voice of your company, what your customers see of you before they've even met you, that you restart from scratch every school year. That's why so many companies feel like they've been "doing communication" for ten years without moving an inch: they never accumulated anything, they just started over ten times.

Nobody's guilty, and that's the problem

At this point you expect me to name a culprit. I don't have one, and that's exactly what makes this so hard to fix.

Schools do their job: they sell training, and training is a very good business, it always has been. The apprenticeship model suits them perfectly, since a host company means an enrolled student. So every year they graduate thousands of young people in digital marketing, communication, community management. I'm not saying they teach badly, that's not my point and brilliant people come out of them. I'm simply saying that no diploma manufactures in two years the experience that takes ten to acquire, and that a school will never replace the field.

Companies do their job too: they try to contain costs, and a strategic position was sold to them as an optional budget line. As for the young people, they sign: it's their way into the trade, and they're right to take it.

Everyone acts rationally. But put end to end, it produces a country where company communication is massively held by its least experienced people, unsupervised, with an annual reset. It isn't anyone's fault. It's a system, and it costs everyone dearly.

What I'd do in your place

There are only three honest situations, and none of them involves doing nothing.

You can't afford a real manager

That's the case for most small businesses, and it's perfectly legitimate. But then don't hire an intern to plug the hole: it doesn't plug it, it hides it. Have the foundations laid by someone experienced (the message, the site, the measurement, what you do and what you don't), then run it with light means. Communication that works doesn't require a full-time role. It requires having been designed by someone who knows what they're doing.

You still want an intern

Good, and it's even a good idea. But give them a master. Internally if you have one, externally if you don't: a contractor who supervises, validates their choices, corrects their mistakes and passes on a craft. The intern executes and progresses, someone experienced decides. That's the model that has worked in every manual trade for centuries, and there's no reason it wouldn't work here.

You handle it yourself

Respectable, on one condition: actually decide. The worst case isn't the owner who runs their own communication, it's the one who believes they're running it while having delegated every decision, by default, to the person with the least seniority in the building.

The rule I apply fits in one sentence: never hand a decision to someone whose work you're unable to judge. If you can't tell whether what's being done is good or bad, that's not delegation, it's a gamble. And nobody bets their revenue on an annual roll of the dice.

You'd never leave an apprentice alone on your accounts, your production, your building site. Your communication is the front door of your company: it's the first thing a customer sees of you, often the only thing before deciding whether to call. Treat it at least as seriously as the rest.