So how does this change? How do we respond in this world?

Let me just share a bit of a personal story, it’s something that has happened this week in the field. That’s why these short podcasts are called CMO Field Notes, because this is me in the field as a fractional CMO, working with businesses.

So, something interesting happened. We’ve just had a bank holiday weekend here in the UK, and over the bank holiday weekend, the CEO of a company that I’ve been working with emailed me because I wasn’t going to be able to make the Monday meeting. The Monday meeting that normally takes place at Monday at 12. It’s either with his marketing team or it’s with him. So, every other week, the meeting is different. This Monday would have been his day, and we had scheduled it for Tuesday at 12.

But the email that came in over the weekend was basically him canceling our contract, as we were due to talk about the renewal of it, because we’ve been working together for a year. I had submitted the results based invoice, because I operate from a results based perspective with my fractional CMO work, and he has decided that he wants to take the work that I’ve been doing and the tools that we’ve integrated, the reporting system and the way in which I’ve been leading the marketing over the last 12 months for him (and yet I’m getting a results payout, because we have increased and grown the company over the last year together) and he’s redistributing the tasks amongst his other C-suite employees.

I think this is a decision that a lot of businesses are making right now. I’ve recently read on Forbes that there is this trend to effectively take the CMO function out of the business and redistribute the different things that a CMO would do amongst the different C suite people.

From a perspective of budget and finance, that’s going to the CFO. From a perspective of things such as like operations and AI, that’s going to the COO. If it’s anything to do with sales, then it’s going to the sales division.

And, you know, there’s also newer roles that have been kind of created along the way. I’ve seen banded around a lot a Chief Brand Officer, and having worked with one for a few months last year, it was an interesting dynamic - because the Chief Brand Officer was more concerned about the message and the colour of things, rather than actually the results that were coming in.

This is where I feel like the role of a modern day CMO has changed dramatically.

The role of a modern day CMO is supposed to be about the campaigns and the numbers, looking at how is marketing activity directly correlated to the results that are being brought into the business. And it’s really difficult to measure for some companies because they have no idea. That’s why strategic leadership in their marketing is needed.

But in this new age of distributing the marketing leadership away from the role of a single CMO, I feel like there’s going to be a bit of a technology mess, because nobody’s really looking at it all. You’re going to have the marketing team operating at one level, the COO operating at another level, trying to bring in AI across the whole company, dealing with maybe an IT manager or an outsourced IT support. Plus, you’ve also got all the finance side of things, and the financial reporting. There’s nobody really looking at it all. There’s no executive oversight around the entire martech structure and the budgets associated with it.

I feel like if there’s nobody leading the marketing from a perspective of quarterly sprints, which is how I would operate, then who’s actually taking the way in which we should operate campaigns and build in the right way? Is it just going to be down to the different teams choosing to do what they want?

It’s not just about colouring it and making things look pretty. It’s about seeing what works, what doesn’t work, doubling down on what does, and stripping back and simplifying by removing the stuff that doesn’t work.

I think for me, my plea to any founder, any CEO, any entrepreneur who is operating at a level that does not have this integrated marketing leadership in place... the human judgment that comes from being able to see from experience what’s working, what’s not, how we test, how we measure, how team fits into all of that... that’s never going to ever be something that you can replace by taking the role of a CMO and splitting those tasks and putting additional pressure on other C suite members of staff. And it’s certainly not fair on them.

I truly believe that there is a role for a CMO that should be present in every single business, no matter how big or how small. If you’re just an entrepreneur, you’re a solopreneur, having someone who is assisting and working with you from an accountability perspective about your marketing is the kind of thing that I offer, right through to working with my largest client who is running at around $110 million a year right now. It’s that strategic work around a marketing team. It’s that strategic work around the conversations in the boardroom and how that filters down and how projects are managed and how results are measured.

I really feel like there is this generalist kind of view - that the CMO is a marketing generalist, not a specialist in certain areas, but a CMO taps into the specialisms of those who are focused on their task, and brings it all together. It’s about that cohesive marketing leadership. If you distribute marketing leadership across different functions, you end up with something that’s just completely dysfunctional.

Commit to a genuine integration of a CMO in your company. You might celebrate the fact that you are without your CMO, because you’re saving a few $100,000 a year because you’re not employing somebody at that level, and then those short term wins mean that maybe people are excited that they’ve got a bit more autonomy around things. But what’s likely to happen is underperforming marketing over the next few years.

Transformation in your marketing will come with definitive marketing leadership.

If you’re asking the question of CMO or specialists right now, keep your marketing leadership in play, and then allow them to work with the specialists. It takes all of the weight off your shoulders as the CEO and as the founder of your company, so you haven’t got to be worrying about it. And that’s the whole point of having either a fractional CMO or a CMO employed.

If it’s something that we can talk about, how I can really show you how that marketing leadership will work, the best thing for us to do is just jump on a call. Head over to www.anthodges.com, book a call with me. Just click the “Work With Ant” button, and then you can just fill out the details and book a call.

Let’s get on a call, and let’s see how we can transform things for you by keeping that marketing leadership in a centralized space, and you focus on growing the business with what you do as a founder and CEO.

Go ahead and book that call over at www.anthodges.com.

And for those not dabbling in AI, it’s no different. You’ll subscribe to dozens of newsletters, sat through seminars and webinars, bought the courses, stacked up the books. You’ve even jumped into some lifetime or annual high ticket program that gives you access to a mentor at an unprecedented level.

Information on marketing is not something you need more of. What you’re short of is implementation that actually fits your business.

What worked for that bro marketer, or that course creator, or the guru that you followed for the last decade, it won’t drop into your business and work out of the box. Their audience is different. Their offer is different to yours, and their context is different to yours.

So how do you take what you’ve learned and actually use it?

Because I’m a trainer, I’m a coach. I do a lot of this, and I want people who listen to me to actually implement some things and get things working. So what I tell them to do is three simple things.

1. Test whether it’s even relevant for their business or not, because actually, most strategies aren’t, and you only need one or two strategies for your business to actually make things work well.

2. You run a simplified version of it to see if your market responds, and you can do that through your email list or your already existing audience.

3. And then you measure success based on the sales that you make, not on the metrics that make the strategy look good on paper, like likes or comments or clicks or something like that. You actually need to count the money.

I see this all the time. When running strategy sessions with business owners to create a simplified strategy for growth, they’ve followed the mentor’s playbook for the last 90 days and seen nothing move, and then blame the marketing, not the strategy.

Their ego is so great they can’t admit that what they’ve bought into is the wrong person, who operates a business that is totally different from theirs. But they still keep plowing on because they think they’re going to get a result eventually.

Let me tell you, if over 90 days of maintained visibility you keep the calls to action sharp, you’ve communicated your message consistently and shown up, the marketing didn’t let you down. The strategy was wrong for your business.

The strategy should always be the thing that gets tested first, not the execution.

That’s why I do the work inside of a strategy session with clients. Before we even get into implementation, we map out four 90-day sprints across 12 months, built around what will work for you in your business. And as your fractional CMO, I can work with you over the next period of time to help you implement, or you can keep them and work on them yourself with your team.

If you want to understand strategies that will work for your business right now, then simply book a call with me over at www.anthodges.com and let’s see what we can do to actually make a plan that will work for your marketing efforts in your business, not just on paper or from the horse’s mouth of that mentor or coach that you’re listening to thinking, “Will this work?”

Let’s find a strategy that will work for your business. Book that call over at www.anthodges.com.

When marketing is seen as a cost center, it’s because marketing has not been linked to revenue.

I was on a call a few months back with a founder who said something that stuck with me all weekend. He said, “I need to cut my marketing budget by 30% because revenue is down.” I asked him, obviously the right kind of questions, “what’s the return on your current marketing spend?” and things like that - I was trying to dig into the challenges. But his response was, “I don’t know the answers to these questions, but it just feels like it’s too much at the moment”,” and that’s the moment I knew we had a bigger problem than just marketing budgets.

In businesses where marketing is treated as a cost center, the first thing that gets cut when revenue dips is marketing. The logic goes, revenue’s down, costs need to come down, marketing is a cost, so let’s cut marketing, let’s even chuck AI into the mix and reduce headcount.

There’s all kinds of different things that happen, and what happens then is when revenue drops further because the one engine that was bringing in new customers got throttled. Then there’s a bigger challenge!

In businesses where marketing is treated as an investment, the conversation is completely different. When revenue dips, the question becomes, which marketing activity is producing the best return, and how can we double down on it - together with and how can we simplify and strip back the activity that isn’t producing revenue?

The difference between those two conversations is not the size of business, it’s not the industry, it’s not the budget, it’s whether the CMO has done the work to prove that marketing is an engine, not an expense. That is on us as CMOs.

If the CEO and CFO see marketing as a cost, it’s because marketing has presented itself as a cost, campaigns, creative agency fees, video studio time, platform subscriptions, headcount, all of it shown as money going out, but there’s no clear picture of money coming back in.

The modern CMO has to flip that switch. Every dollar of marketing spend needs to be tied to revenue, outcome, a pipeline, contribution, a customer lifetime, value, not as a post event report, but as a live view that the finance team can see at the same time we see it.

When marketing is an investment the CFO becomes your ally, not your enemy. This is because the CFOs job is to align capital to the highest returning activities, and if marketing is one of those, the CFO will fight for your budget harder than you will.

So if you’re a founder and you’re about to think about cutting marketing because revenue’s down, just pause for one moment ask the question…

“What’s working? What’s not? And what could happen if we doubled down on the things that were working and stripped back the things that weren’t?”

That’s a very different conversation to let’s cut 30% of the marketing budget.

If this resonates with you and you want your marketing to turn from just a cost center to an investment with measurable returns, email me cmo@anthodges.com or find me on LinkedIn.

We need to make sure that we’re stepping into the right situation, the right conversations, with the right numbers to show a return on investment, not just showing our pretty graphs and campaigns, which all just really talk about the costs that are going out.

Please share this with colleagues who also need to hear this message.

The CMO froze - not because she didn’t have the data, she had tons of data. She had a 40-slide deck full of it ready to present impressions, reach, engagement, stats, follower, growth, email, open rates, website sessions, bounce rates, top performing posts, all of it, but she couldn’t answer the one question the CFO actually asked.

Here’s what’s going on in so many businesses right now. The marketing team is producing beautiful reports. The CMO is presenting dashboards from six different platforms, and none of it rolls into one single number that CFO can drop into a spreadsheet and work with.

When the board is making decisions about where to put the next dollar of investment, they’re not weighing up reach against pipeline. They’re weighing up marketing against sales, hires against product development, against R&D, and marketing loses the argument every single time when it can’t speak in a language of finance, the modern CMO has to learn to translate.

That’s every campaign, every channel, every activity - it has to have a traceable revenue number that sits in the same system the CFO is using not a marketing attribution tool that produces its own version of the truth, the actual finance system.

And if you can’t answer the CFOs question about the cost of acquisition, lifetime, value, payback period and contribution margin to your top campaigns, you’re not running marketing. You’re running a content operation, there’s a difference.

If you’re a CEO or you’re watching your CMO present dashboards that don’t connect to the P&L it’s a warning sign. The fix isn’t more dashboards, the fix is rewiring the measurement so that marketing activity and revenue are in the same conversation.

Email me cmo@anthodges.com, or find me on LinkedIn. Let’s have a conversation about how to simplify the measurement and get marketing speaking the language of finance. Step away from vanity metrics and into the numbers CFO actually cares about.

If you’re a CMO realise that we’ve got a different job to do today than we did yesterday. As a CMO in the modern marketing world, it’s about connecting revenue to the marketing activity that’s being produced. That’s what’s going to keep your job longer than the average one and a half year position.

Side note… You know, a CFO, on average, is around 4.5 years in tenure. The average CMO is a 1.5. Start talking the language of finance, and you’ll keep your job.

I acted as an interim CMO for a period of about 6 months while they were really looking at recruitment for a new full-time CMO in their business. It was as a direct result of somebody leaving the company. So, they needed somebody interim while they recruited and give like a 30 day handover and all of those kind of things.

For the project itself, we started in the same way I do with all of my clients. We had a full one day meeting, it started with the CEO and his co-founder, and then it progressed to working with the marketing team, and then the sales team and then the sales team and marketing team together. That was the whole day in their office and it was an amazing time.

We, I gathered so much information, we worked out so many different things, we looked at what we could subtract and simplify. As a direct result, the next week I delivered a full strategy for the next 6 months containing 2 different identified sprints and simplified KPIs that we would measure for the direct implementation of simplified campaigns - and we hit the ground running. There was really no kind of delay or anything like that.

I got asked questions like, do you think we should simplify our brand? Do you think we should change our logo? What about this? And none of that came up because what I was focussed on were the numbers. It’s about, for me, a CMO is about connecting activity to revenue. What’s the return on investment for the activity that you’re producing?

That was the first 6 months we had less than a 30 day handover because the person who was due to be starting as their new CMO was recruited, and they were delayed by starting by a week, and my contract was ending within 3 weeks - it was okay, the CEO was cool with this.

In hand over. I focussed on what we were doing, the KPIs that we measured, the simplification that we brought into the business. I the call I just got off with was the CEO of the same company.

It’s been 2.5 months of the new CMO in place and he called me up and he said, have you got capacity to take us on again? And I’m like, “Oh what’s happened?” And what’s happened is the typical thing that a CMO will do when they come in.

They did a brand audit, which took the 1st month. And that brand audit was, is everybody compliant around messaging? Do we need to change it? They did a survey of customers. They did an internal survey and then month 2 was the start of a rebrand project.

The CMO’s focus From the moment that they started was not necessarily around. The campaigns and the measurement of things, they basically just let the marketing team run with those things. But the focus was on brand, on colours, colouring in, and logos, and how pink and fluffy things looked.

(Their brand is not pink and fluffy, but you get what I mean!)

It’s the things that really don’t matter too much when a business is wanting a CMO to come on board to really focus on how the marketing is performing. In my mind, this role of a CMO, as I’ve said, is to connect marketing activity to revenue. That’s got to be the number one priority.

But the number one priority in so many CMOs is, are we positioning the brand right? Do we change who our target audience is? Is our messaging right? Do our logos match? Is our stock photography? Is our video? All of this, all of the positioning elements, is that right?

This is not a wrong thing to focus on, but when you’re getting into the new role of a CMO, you want to make a big difference. You want to improve the bottom line and actually, fundamentally, this is why I start with a simplified day. One day to get all of that kind of strategy nailed, to see what we can simplify so that we can hit the ground running where we jump into a retainer. When we jump into a retainer, we focus on those elements that need to be worked on, that will connect revenue to activity. Once those systems are working well, and you’ve got a well oiled machine, that’s where you can start to redefine what you’ve got and ask the question, do we need a rebrand? It’s not the 1st question you ask when you’re coming in because you need to understand and work from data. Do these campaigns work? Does this activity work? All of that kind of stuff.

If you’re coming in new as a CMO to any kind of organisation or business, you need the data to be able to make those judgements. So, run the campaigns for at least the first month, 60 days, 90 days even, before you even get into making things look pretty, changing the colour of the logo, putting the pink and fluffy elements to everything.

Step away from the crayons and step into the data. That’s my big thing.

Connect revenue with marketing activity.

If I can help, if there’s something that, you know, has resonated with this and you’re a founder or CEO, of a company, where you need strategic marketing leadership, where you find that you’re the de facto marketing officer for the business and you’re involved with all of the marketing decisions. Let’s have a conversation, just email me, cmo@anthodges.com, or find me over on LinkedIn - let’s have a conversation.

Let’s see how we can simplify, subtract, and start connecting the marketing activity to the revenue produced.

I work on a performance basis with my retainer because I want to put skin in the game. And the focus is on growth, the focus is on not just making things look pretty. So let’s have a conversation. Email me cmo@anthodges.com.

Oh, and just to finish the round up the conversation, I am engaged with that company again, and they’re letting the other CMO go. It’s not ideal. I don’t want people to lose their jobs over these things, but when the focus is in the wrong direction, and it’s affecting the results that the company want to see, you’ve got to be in line with what the results of the company want to see in the first place. So let’s focus on the right things.

If you’re listening to this as a CMO, start focussing on where the results are coming from.

Focus on data, focus on simplification, and step away from the crayons like I’ve said.

Fractional CMO work is one of the things I absolutely love, because it’s about connecting marketing activity to revenue. And it has to be that way round.

It’s not about spending the first 90 days on vision, mission, values, messaging, branding, and positioning. That’s not what a fractional CMO should be doing. A fractional CMO comes in and connects revenue to activity. From day one.

The right time to hire a fractional CMO is when you as the CEO and founder are running ragged. Every marketing person in your business is coming to you for answers. You’re the one who has to come up with the ideas. You’re stuck in that 11am Monday marketing meeting every week - and you need to get out.

Because your job is to lead and steer the whole company. Not run the marketing.

There’s a number showing up in several pieces of research that I think is worth explaining. The argument is that the point at which hiring a full-time CMO makes more economic sense than a fractional engagement is around $25 to $30 million in annual revenue.

Below that, the maths are almost always different for fractional. A full-time CMO in 2026 is carrying a base salary of between $245,000 and $500,000, plus benefits, plus equity, plus recruitment costs, plus the six months it typically takes before they’re producing at full capacity. A fractional engagement at the same strategic level runs at a fraction of that - and it should start delivering in weeks, not months.

Above $30 million, the business usually needs a dedicated full-time leader. I do work with clients up to $50m, but at that stage I’m often there to provide leadership while they bring the full-time person on board. The decisions are too frequent, the team too large, and the function too complex for a part-time engagement to carry it properly.

But the number itself is less interesting than what it implies. A business between $1m and $25m that doesn’t have a marketing leader of any kind - where the founder is still doing it, or someone on the team has been given the title without the authority or the experience - that’s a real problem.

I worked with a family business last year doing around $8 million. The wife of the founder had been given the CMO title because she had a marketing degree. I was brought in as a fractional CMO because she needed pointing in the right direction. No disrespect to her - she was the first to admit it. But it’s a typical story. You’ve got a solid business, a solid offer, you want to grow and scale it - and the de facto marketing person is well-meaning but not equipped to lead from that level of experience.

Marketing should run without the direction of the CEO and founder. It should run with clarity, with reports that produce real accountability, and a team that knows where it’s going because it’s being led properly.

The business should grow in spite of the CEO and founder not being involved in the marketing. That’s the goal.

The fractional model exists to solve a specific problem. The business has reached the point where founder-led marketing is no longer enough, but a full-time executive is either too expensive or too much of a commitment given where the business is currently at. That gap - between doing it yourself and hiring full-time - is where the model earns its value.

The mistake I see most businesses make is waiting too long to fill it. They wait until the marketing is visibly broken. Until campaigns aren’t converting. Until the team is wandering from AI tool to AI tool without direction. Until the founder is exhausted from carrying both the business and the marketing function at the same time. By that point, the cost of the gap is already significant.

The better question to ask isn’t whether you can afford senior marketing leadership.

The better question is: what is the absence of it already costing you?

For most businesses between $1m and $25m, that number is greater than the cost of the engagement.

And that sweet spot around $25m is also where the fractional role starts to look different - where it shifts from ongoing leadership to helping you bring a full-time person in properly. Some fractional CMOs will have my guts for saying that. But the reality is, if you’re still hanging around as a fractional at $30m, $40m, $50m without moving toward a full-timer, you’re doing the business a disservice. They need someone in full-time at that stage.

If you’re between $1m and $25m, or even up to $50m and in transition - let’s have a conversation. We can have a short chat to see where the gap is and how a fractional role could help. Head over to www.anthodges.com, hit the chat button, or book a call.

Let’s start connecting your marketing activity to your revenue.

I’m Ant Hodges. Let’s simplify.

It’s a fair question. But I think it’s the wrong question.

And most of the answers being given are defensive. Lists of things AI can’t do. Arguments about human creativity. Reasons why the role is safe. That defensiveness is very telling. Why would you get so defensive about something if you weren’t a little worried yourself?

AI won’t replace judgment. That’s the one thing it can’t do. It amplifies whatever is already present.

In a business with a clear strategy, a well-understood customer, strong offers, and a team that knows what it’s doing - AI is genuinely powerful. It accelerates execution. It reduces friction. It produces more output.

But in a business without those things? AI produces far more noise, far faster.

I’ve been watching this play out in real time inside businesses I work with. Teams are adopting AI tools enthusiastically. Output is going up. In some of those businesses, results are moving with it. In others, they’re not.

What’s happening in the ones that aren’t moving? Everyone’s getting lost in the activity - doing things, making movement - without building momentum. We don’t need movement and action. We need momentum and results.

That’s the real mistake in the ‘AI versus marketing leader’ framing. The right question is whether AI running on top of good strategic leadership produces better outcomes than AI running without it. The answer is consistently yes.

Harvard Business Review published research this year on where senior leaders are struggling with AI adoption. The core finding was that the problem isn’t the tools - it’s the clarity gaps underneath them. When leadership hasn’t made hard decisions about positioning, offers, audiences, and priorities, AI surfaces those gaps rather than filling them.

It’s like boiling a pan - all the imperfections come to the surface. That’s what AI is doing. You end up with sophisticated output that doesn’t convert, because the strategy it’s executing was never clear to begin with.

What AI is genuinely replacing is the execution layer. The tactical work. Content at scale, campaign variations, data analysis, reporting, automation. A lot of what junior marketing teams spent their time on is now being automated. And that’s fine.

What it isn’t replacing is the decision-making layer. What to say, who to say it to, where to prioritise, what to stop, how to read a market that’s shifting. That layer still requires someone with experience and accountability.

You can’t build a house on sand. Build AI on weak foundations, and when the storms come, it washes away.

The fractional CMOs who should be worried are the ones operating at the execution layer anyway - the ones calling themselves CMOs while doing the work of a marketing manager. Those carrying genuine strategic authority? AI isn’t a threat. It’s about to become the best productivity tool the role has ever had.

So to answer the question at the top: will AI replace the fractional CMO? In some cases, yes - it will weed out those who aren’t actually performing at a true CMO level. Those who are connecting marketing activity to revenue, doing the real leadership work, they’re going to win. AI will amplify what they’re doing and make it even better.

Everything I do as a fractional CMO starts with simplification. We start with a Simplify Day before any retainer. Then 90-day sprints over 12 months. We get into work straight away - subtracting, focusing, simplifying - to bring revenue in as quickly as possible. No pink fluffy dice. No crayons in the first 90 days. Just revenue.

Head over to www.anthodges.com if you want a conversation. There’s a chat button or you can book a call. Wherever you’re listening to this - subscribe, comment, let me know what you think. Three of these a week. Short, bite-sized, straight to the point.

I’m Ant Hodges. Let’s simplify.

Today I want to talk about why the CMO market, whilst it seems to be growing fast, has a real problem for founders and CEOs.

Some of the stats I’ve seen show that the fractional CMO market has doubled in the last two years. There are now around 120,000 people carrying that title, up from 60,000 in 2022. The market itself is valued at over a billion dollars, and it’s forecast to nearly double again by 2031.

On the surface, that sounds like good news for founders. More supply means more people, more choice, and better access to senior marketing leadership - without it costing a full-time hire.

But in reality? I think what we’re seeing in this marketplace - and from working with companies who’ve had previous CMOs - is that those CMOs weren’t necessarily all they were cracked up to be.

I recently checked ten random fractional CMO profiles on LinkedIn. Only one out of ten had held a CMO title or any kind of marketing leadership within the last five to ten years.

The other nine had renamed themselves into this market. Some had come out of fairly senior executive roles in companies that had nothing to do with marketing. A couple had some experience as graphic designers or web designers, and now they’re marketing themselves as CMOs.

That’s not the same as the twenty years of experience I’ve had agency-side before I decided to stop running an agency and focus on CMO work. There’s a real credibility gap in this space.

And here’s why that matters. When you as a founder or CEO are looking for a fractional CMO, that decision carries real weight. You’re handing someone strategic authority over your marketing function. You’re trusting them to make decisions about budget, positioning, team structure, and channel investment.

Done well, it accelerates growth. Done badly, it burns months of budget and leaves the business further down the drain than before.

You know what I see in the first 90 days of most fractional CMO contracts? Things like: we’re going to spend the first three months getting your messaging right, getting your offers sorted, looking at your brand positioning - and maybe considering a rebrand.

All of that may well be relevant at some point. But the reason a founder or CEO brings a CMO on board is to connect revenue directly to marketing activity. It has to be about the numbers from day one.

The question worth asking before you hire anyone in this space is very simple. Have you actually held a CMO role? Have you had experience running campaigns like this, and what were the results?

If the answer is no, or it’s evasive, or the experience just isn’t there - move to the next person. The market is expanding quickly, which is great because it gives you choice. But when you’re sifting the wheat from the chaff, it gets hard to find someone who genuinely has the experience and expertise.

The easiest way to protect yourself is to look at their profile. How long have they been in the game? Were they transitioning from a corporate position - maybe a redundancy or a golden handshake - and now they’re branding themselves as a CMO? Were they head of distribution or operations before this? It matters.

The fractional model works when the person carrying the title has genuinely done the job. When they haven’t, you’re paying executive rates for a very expensive experiment.

If you want to know more about the role I play as a performance-based fractional CMO, head over to anthodges.com. Subscribe to CMO Field Notes wherever you’re listening - Substack, Apple, Spotify. Drop a comment and let me know your thoughts. I’d love to hear them.

I’m Ant Hodges. Let’s simplify.

And apologies a little longer CMO Field Note for today.

Since the closure of the Strait of Hormuz in late February, roughly 20% of global oil supply has been disrupted. Brent crude surpassed $100 a barrel for the first time in four years during March. The head of the International Energy Agency described it as the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. Some shipping companies have suspended routes, chemical manufacturers across the UK and EU have imposed surcharges of up to 30% to offset surging energy costs, and Goldman Sachs revised its inflation forecast up and lowered its GDP growth projection within days of the conflict escalating.

For those indirectly affected in business, this is not just geopolitical noise, this is a cost structure event.

Inside the businesses that I work with, those with revenues around $5million to $50millon, here is what I see happening. Delivery costs are rising, supplier costs rising, energy costs rising, margins tightening and cash flow buckling under the pressure. My gym also sent a message to members this week telling us all that after careful consideration, they are left with no choice but to raise the membership fees we all pay - they are feeling the energy cost impacting them. And then to top everything off, almost without fail, someone looks at the marketing budget and says it isn’t working.

The marketing didn’t change, the economics changed. I see the marketing getting blamed because it’s the most visible expenditure with the least obvious short-term return. Nevermind if there is a war going on, and consumers are being more careful with their hard earned cash, or if the strategy is wrong, it’s always the marketing’s problem if it can’t justify itself.

The businesses navigating this well are doing a few things differently though.

They’re not cutting first and asking questions later, they’re getting clear first. They are asking some key questions:

• Which offers are genuinely strong enough to convert at a higher price point in the current climate?

• Which channels are producing measurable return despite consumer anxiety right now?

• Where is the team’s time going, and what is it actually producing?

I firmly believe that external shocks don’t kill businesses, it’s an unclear strategy during external shocks that does.

I know this from my own experience. My first business collapsed in the height of the economic downturn in 2008/09. I owned and was running an advertising agency at the time, working with clients across the third sector - charities, non-profits, local government, and a division of the MoD. Every single one of those clients is still around today. My business isn’t.

Yes, the sub-prime crash had an impact on the financial decision-making inside our clients’ organisations. That wasn’t what brought us down. Internally, we had grown so fast, and had a fairly large team, but we had no real processes, no clear strategy, and no poise to ride out the storm when it hit. The external pressure was real. But it was the lack of foundations that made us crumble.

That time in business taught me the most significant lessons I have ever learned in business. The key lesson was to get the foundations in right, as soon as you can. It’s like that Sunday school lesson we learned as a kid, when you build on solid foundations things last, build on sand and the’ll wash away when the storms come.

When everything tightens - margins, budgets, team capacity - the businesses with strong foundations of vision, clarity of purpose and a solid delivery mechanism, they keep moving. The ones still trying to do everything with a loosely defined strategy freeze and suffer the worst at times.

As always, let me finish with an important question to ask right now if some of this resonates and lands with you and conversations in your business right now.

“Let’s for get what we think we need to cut for a moment and ask what do we need to make absolutely clear?”

If the next few months are going to be harder than the last three, clarity is not a nice-to-have, it’s the lever that you can pull on to stay alive and thrive.

A great CMO knows all of this and will think strategically about that line between the investment in systems and resource in your marketing division, linking it directly to revenue all the time, despite the economic or geopolitical events around the world.

It reminds me of the days pf the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 - the CFOs then were pulling on the purse strings and cutting marketing spend.

The new data from this survey are not isolated data points. They’re a consistent signal about where the relationship between marketing and finance is heading.

Inside the businesses I work with, I see founders and CEOs who don’t fully trust the marketing numbers they are being presented with. The reporting is inconsistent - different dashboards showing different things, none of them telling a clear story about what marketing is actually contributing to revenue. In short, attribution is messy. So when the CFO asks what the marketing budget is producing, the honest answer is often “we’re not entirely sure.”

And when you can’t answer that question clearly, budgets don’t get cut to zero. They get frozen. With everything going on in the world right now, uncertainty about markets is piling on even more pressure for fear of dealing with another recession - and yes, I did say the R word. All the number are getting questioned even more that ever, and seeing as we are just into Q2 of a new calendar year, and Q1 of a new financial year in the UK, they get whittled down incrementally because nobody can make a confident case for investing more.

Unfortunately it’s a pattern I see in many businesses, marketing not being abolished, just marketing being eroded because the connection between activity and outcome has never been made explicit or given clear visibility to everyone involved, not just the C-suite.

The solution isn’t more reporting. More reporting usually means more numbers that don’t tell a story. What changes the conversation with a CFO is one clear line from marketing activity to revenue. Not impressions, not engagement rates, not MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) sitting in a pipeline that hasn’t moved in sixty days. A clean answer to the question “What did we spend, and what did it produce?” is the answer.

Most marketing teams can’t answer that question. And until they can, the budget conversation will always feel like a fight. Marketing that can’t show its contribution to revenue is always a cost. Marketing that can show it is an investment. The CFO treats those two things very differently.

This is the No.1 task of any modern day CMO. Put away the crayons and fluffy work around branding, get with it with the numbers. and create that clear line between activity and revenue that everyone can cheer about.

If the budget conversation in your business has been uncomfortable lately, the question worth asking isn’t how to make a better case for more money. It’s why the current spend is hard to defend.

If this is the conversation you’re having right now, we need to talk. Head over to www.anthodges.com and let’s start the conversation.

Source reference: The CMO Survey, September 2025 - Marketers Claim a Broader Role and Increased Influence Amid Pressures. 63% CFO pressure statistic.

So far in 2026, over 60,000 tech workers have been cut. In 2025, the total was nearly 245,000 across the sector. Amazon cut 16,000 roles - while simultaneously reporting record revenue of $716.9 billion. Microsoft. Meta. Companies with strong financial performance making significant headcount reductions in the same quarter.

The pattern is consistent. Headcount down. Revenue expectations unchanged.

Inside $1m-$50m businesses, the same logic is playing out at a smaller scale. Teams are leaner than they were two years ago. Hiring is tightly controlled. But the growth targets set in January haven’t moved.

So the marketing team is doing more with less. The founder is doing more with less. Everyone is doing more with less. And the expectation is that focus and efficiency will fill the gap that headcount used to fill.

Sometimes it does. Often it doesn’t.

Here’s what I see when this goes wrong. The team is stretched across too many channels, too many campaigns, too many competing priorities. Each one gets partial attention. None of them gets enough. Results are inconsistent because the effort is inconsistent - not because the strategy is wrong, but because there isn’t enough capacity to execute any single strategy properly.

The answer most businesses reach for is hiring. But the businesses I see handling this well aren’t hiring their way out of it. They’re cutting their way out of it.

Fewer channels. Fewer campaigns. One or two things done exceptionally well rather than eight things done adequately. When you’re operating with a leaner team, concentration isn’t a compromise - it’s the only strategy that works.

The capacity mismatch is real. The way through it isn’t trying to do everything with fewer people. It’s deciding what not to do.

What used to be solved with headcount now needs to be solved with focus. And that’s actually a harder decision than hiring.

If you’re sitting with a leaner team and the same targets, I’d be curious what you’ve decided to stop. Hit reply.

Source reference: Network World / RationalFX analysis, March 2026 - Tech layoffs surpass 45,000 in early 2026. Amazon record revenue cited from same report.

There’s a few things that I am actually seeing underneath that story that paint a different picture.

AI is speeding up execution, I do not disagree with this. But in a business without clear strategic direction, faster execution means you could end up going in the wrong direction more efficiently. The gap between what leadership thinks is happening and what’s actually happening on the ground is wider than most founders realise.

Research published in February 2026 from Harvard Business School found that senior leaders are consistently struggling with AI adoption - not because the tools are complex, but because of what one researcher described as “contested definitions of value.” In other words, nobody has agreed what success looks like. Team adopts the tools, activity increases and the founder looks at the outputs and wonders why the business isn’t moving faster.

Over 80% of business leaders are confident in their oversight of AI execution, while 75% of the end users believe leadership underestimates how hard AI execution actually is. That gap has a name that one analyst called the “visibility mirage” - where leaders and practitioners are looking at entirely different versions of progress.

This is the leadership problem AI is exposing. It was always there. AI just makes it impossible to ignore now.

The businesses I see getting genuine value from AI have one thing in common before they start. They’ve already made the hard decisions about what matters. They know their primary channel. They know their core offer. They know what the team is supposed to be doing. When AI arrives into that clarity, it accelerates the right things.

When it arrives into ambiguity, it accelerates the chaos.

The question to ask before investing more time in AI tools isn’t “which tools should we use?” It’s “are we clear enough about where we’re going for AI to be worth deploying yet?”

Most businesses aren’t. And that’s not a technology problem.

If this sounds familiar in your business, I’d be curious to know where the clarity gap actually sits. Hit reply.

Source reference: Harvard Business Review, February 2026 - Where Senior Leaders Are Struggling with AI Adoption

Leads are coming in. Pipelines look active. Salespeople are having conversations. And still, the revenue number at the end of the month doesn’t match the level of activity.

Where are the gaps then?

1 - Lead response time is slow.

Research across 939 B2B companies in 2025 found that the average response time to a new enquiry is 47 hours. Only 23% of companies respond within 5 minutes. Leads contacted in under 5 minutes achieve a close rate of 32%. Those contacted after 24 hours close at 12%. The lead that came in warm on Monday is cold by Wednesday.

2 - Offer clarity is weak.

When a prospect lands on a sales page, speaks to someone, or reads a proposal, the outcome isn’t specific enough. The difference between this and everything else isn’t clear. So they delay. They say they’ll think about it. They go quiet.

3 - Marketing and sales are running parallel rather than in sequence.

Marketing generates leads that don’t match what sales is equipped to close. Sales gives feedback that never makes it back into the marketing message. The handoff is loose and the gap between interest and commitment stays wide.

The numbers most businesses haven’t run astounds me.

What I am talking about is how doubling a conversion rate has a more significant effect on revenue than doubling lead volume - and it’s almost always cheaper to achieve. Tightening a follow-up process costs nothing. Clarifying an offer takes a day. Fixing the handoff between marketing and sales is a conversation.

More leads fed into a leaky system produce more noise. The leads that are already coming in, followed up faster and converted better, produce more revenue.

The question to run before the next campaign that is worth asking is…

“If we doubled our conversion rate on current volume, what would that be worth?”

For most businesses the number is fairly significant. And the path to it is simpler than a bigger ad budget.

If you want to run that calculation for your business, I’m happy to help you think it through. Hit reply.

Most businesses that have grown to at least $5m in revenue have built their stack reactively. A new hire joined and brought their preferred tool. An agency recommended a platform as part of their onboarding. The founder bought something at a conference because it solved a specific problem. Each decision, at the time, was reasonable. Nobody set out to build something complicated.

But five years on, you’ve got a CRM that doesn’t talk cleanly to the email platform. The email platform produces reports that don’t match the analytics tool. Simple changes take three conversations and two weeks to implement. And the team has developed workarounds so embedded that nobody remembers why they were built in the first place.

The real cost isn’t the subscriptions

Although those add up, it’s the friction. Every time someone needs to pull a report, run a campaign, or make a change to a customer journey, they’re navigating a system that was built by accumulation rather than by design.

Marketing Week reported in February 2026 that Gartner’s latest survey shows marketers are only using 49% of their stack. Half of all capability sitting idle. And that’s actually an improvement on 2023, when utilisation sat at just 33%. So businesses are carrying full costs for partial use, while the unused features create the impression of a sophisticated operation.

The average company is running twelve to eighteen marketing tools. Most of their team understands maybe half of them.

So how did it get this way?

The stack grew reactively. A new hire brought a tool. An agency introduced another. The founder bought something at a conference. No one stepped back to simplify.

And because each individual tool solved a real problem at the time it was bought, nobody ever had a compelling reason to remove it. So it stayed. And the next tool arrived alongside it.

The solution isn’t always more.

When I do a stack audit with a client, we’re typically looking at twelve to eighteen tools. In almost every case, we consolidate to five or six without losing any meaningful functionality. What we gain is clarity. One source of data. Faster execution. A team that actually knows how to use the tools they have.

The stack isn’t the strategy. The strategy is what the stack is supposed to serve. When those two things get confused, complexity becomes the bottleneck to growth.

If you’ve never done a clean audit of what your marketing tools are actually costing you - in money, time, and team attention - it’s worth an afternoon. The number is usually surprising.

If you want a framework for how to approach that audit, hit reply. I’m happy to share what I look at.

Here’s what I actually see when I get inside these businesses.

The marketing isn’t broken. The decision-making is.

PwC’s 2025 Pulse Survey found that 57% of executives say slow decision-making is costing them opportunities.

That’s not a marketing problem. That’s a leadership one.

In businesses doing anywhere between $1m to $50m, the founder is almost always still acting as the de facto Head of Marketing. They’re approving campaigns, weighing in on messaging, reviewing creative, and fielding ideas from every direction. The team is waiting for direction before they move. And because the founder has hundreds of new ideas, a whole team of others wanting a piece of them, fifteen other meetings and projects all demanding their attention, the direction arrives either slowly, inconsistently, or not at all.

So, the marketing team executes. They keep things moving. They launch campaigns, post content, run ads. But without a clear decision at the top about what matters most right now, each person makes their own interpretation. You end up with a dozen traffic sources, multiple active offers, three email platforms, two CRMs, and nobody is quite sure what the priority is.

This isn’t a team problem. It’s a clarity problem.

The businesses that grow well through this stage are the ones where someone has made hard decisions about what they’re focusing on. One primary channel. One lead offer. One conversion path that gets all the energy. Everything else either waits or gets cut.

It sounds obvious when you say it like this. But in practice, most businesses keep adding rather than deciding. A new idea arrives and it gets added to the pile. An agency recommends something and it gets layered on. The stack gets bigger. The strategy gets thinner.

Growth stalls when decision-making is weak. And the most valuable thing a senior marketing person can do in a business at this stage isn’t to generate ideas. It’s to help the leadership team make fewer, better decisions about where to put their energy.

If your marketing feels like it’s running hard without going anywhere, the question worth asking is this…

When was the last time you made a clear decision about what you’re stopping?

Hit reply if this is landing close to home. I’d be curious what the decision backlog looks like in your business right now.

Ant explains why CMO Field Notes exists - and what makes it different from most marketing content you’ll come across. Not advice from the outside. Observations from inside growing businesses, written down and shared clearly.

He covers the three areas the show returns to week after week: the decision-making that stalls marketing before it starts, the technology stacks that cost more than they deliver, and the conversion gaps that more leads will never fix.

And he explains exactly who the show is for - and who it isn’t.

Key takeaways

Most marketing problems in $1m-$50m businesses aren’t marketing problems. They’re decision problems. When the founder is still acting as Head of Marketing by default, direction is slow and the team fills the gap as best they can.

The average business at this stage is running twelve to eighteen marketing tools. Most of their team properly understands about half of them. The hidden cost isn’t the subscriptions - it’s the friction that slows everything down.

More leads is almost never the answer. The leads are usually already there. What’s missing is speed of follow-up, clarity of offer, and a handoff between marketing and sales that actually works.

CMO Field Notes is published a few times a week. Each piece is short, built around one observation, and written to be useful in three minutes.

Resources and links

Find out more about working with Ant: www.anthodges.com

Start with a Simplify Day - a full day working directly on your marketing: anthodges.com

Read the Substack and subscribe to CMO Field Notes: www.cmofieldnotes.com

Read Simplify the Funnel by Ant Hodges: www.simplifythefunnel.com

About Ant Hodges

Ant Hodges is a Fractional CMO and the author of Simplify the Funnel®. He works directly inside businesses doing $1m-$50m as their senior marketing leader - embedded in the decisions, the team, and the strategy. He has over twenty years of experience and has contributed to more than $76m in client revenue. He believes complexity is almost always the problem, and simplicity is almost always the answer.

Subscribe and follow

CMO Field Notes is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you listen. New episodes publish several times a week.

If something in an episode resonates, hit reply on the Substack or email cmo@anthodges.com directly.