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.

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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.