Maybe Your CEO Isn’t the Problem

The growth target came down last week. Grow 40%.

The marketing budget did not move. 

You’ve run the numbers enough times to know those two things can’t both be true, and you’ve been sitting with a version of the same thought ever since: how am I supposed to do that? He wants more revenue and won’t fund it. He’ll be pissed off in Q3, and it’ll land on me.

I’ve had that thought more times than I want to admit. I was building the case in my head, and it was a good case. (To be honest, I’ve had plenty of vilifying thoughts like these about my CEO…)

Then I caught what I was doing.

I was hating my CEO for doing exactly what a CEO is supposed to do.

THE PROBLEM: YOU’RE MAD AT HIM FOR BEING A DRIVER

Your growth target and your marketing budget don’t have to be at war. Think about what you’re actually asking for when you ask him to be reasonable about this.

His job is to push the company further than it’s currently capable of going and to protect the cash while he does it. Those two things are in tension by design. That tension is the job. A founder who asks only for a growth target he can already comfortably fund isn’t ambitious, and a founder who spends into every ambition without checking runs out of the company.

So he asks for 40% and holds the line on spend. Not because he’s ignoring the math. Usually because nobody has ever put the math in front of him in a form he can act on.

That’s the part I got wrong for years. I read the flat budget as a verdict on marketing. It was almost never that. It was that nobody had ever reverse-engineered the number in front of him, so he had no reason to believe the gap was real.

And after nearly 20 years as a marketer, this is true: eight or nine times out of ten, YOU ARE NOT GOING TO GET THE MARKETING BUDGET YOU NEED. That shouldn’t be a surprise at this point; it’s the normal condition of the job, and every year you spend treating it as an injustice is a year you’re not spending working the problem.

THE FRAMEWORK: THREE WAYS TO HANDLE THE BUDGET NEGOTIATION

There are exactly three things a marketing leader does when the goal and the money don’t match:

1. Say yes. Nod, take the number, go try. Most people do this, and it isn’t cowardice. It feels like ownership. But you’ve just agreed to something you know isn’t possible, and now every week between here and the missed target is spent managing the gap privately instead of solving it publicly. This is how good marketers end up on the chopping block, defending their judgment in a room they should have owned.
2. Ask for a proportional increase. Better. At least you ran a calculation. But it’s still a request, which puts you in a negotiation about money rather than a conversation about outcomes. And in a negotiation about money, the person who controls the money wins. You’re going to lose this one most of the time, and losing it repeatedly trains him to hear you as expensive rather than rigorous.
3. Bring the trade-offs and decide together. This one’s different. You run the equation, you show what the goal requires, and then you put the three levers on the table. Approve the marketing budget, adjust the goal, or extend the timeline. You’re not asking for anything. You’re presenting a decision only he can make, with the consequences of each option attached.

That third response is why the second one isn’t good enough. Asking for money makes it your request. Bringing the trade-offs makes it the CEO’s decision, and he’s going to make it either way. The only question is whether he makes it in January with information or in September without it.

One more thing, and it’s the thing I most wish someone had told me earlier in my career. Go find the waste BEFORE you ask for a dollar. If you walk in asking for more money without having found the efficiency you already have, you’ve told your CEO you’d rather spend his cash than examine your own work. The credibility cost is real.

THE PROOF

The first time I brought Jake math that changed a plan, I made a mistake I’d make only once.

I hadn’t had anyone check it.

I was confident, the logic was clean in my head, and I presented it that way. Then he found a problem in it in about four minutes, and the issue wasn’t the error. The error was fixable. The issue was that I’d walked in certain, so being wrong cost me more than the mistake was worth.

Two things fix that permanently:

1. The first is that I never bring math to that room now without someone else having looked at it. Not for approval. For holes. Somebody who has no stake in the answer being yes.
2. The second came from Jake, and it changed how I walk into every planning conversation. Don’t position yourself as confident if you aren’t. There’s nothing wrong with opening with “this is my first pass, let’s poke holes in it.” That sentence costs you nothing and it buys you the ability to be wrong in front of your CEO without it becoming a referendum on your judgment.

Once we’d been doing this for a few cycles, my marketing math became the most reliable forecasting input the business had. Not marketing’s forecast. The company’s. Because it was the only model in the building that connected spend to customers to revenue with real numbers behind each step.

That’s when the marketing budget conversation stopped being a conversation.

TAKE THIS AND USE IT MONDAY

🎯 For Marketing Leaders: Before your next planning meeting, run the equation. A revenue growth goal divided by average order value gives you the customers you need. Customers needed, multiplied by what you can afford to pay for one, gives you the budget. Then go find your waste before you present anything, because the first question coming back at you is whether you’ve exhausted what you already have. Bring three options, not one ask. And have somebody who isn’t invested in the answer check your math first.

📊 For CEOs: When your marketing leader tells you the number doesn’t work with the budget attached, you’re getting the cheapest possible version of that information. The expensive version arrives in Q3. And if your honest answer is that the growth target is non-negotiable and so is the spend, say that plainly rather than leaving it ambiguous, because a marketer who knows the real constraint can work inside it. One who’s guessing can’t.

THE TRUTH

Your CEO asking for more than the budget supports isn’t a character flaw. It’s the job.

Your job is to make the gap visible and put the decision in front of him while there’s still time to make it. Not to absorb it quietly, and not to resent him for handing it to you.

You will not get the budget you need eight or nine times out of ten. What you do in that moment is the entire difference between a marketer who gets managed and a marketer who gets trusted.

We put both sides of this on the Indispensable Marketer show this week. Jake’s solo episode is the equation and the four places waste hides. The conversation episode is the one where I admit I’d been blaming him for doing his job.

Both are on YouTube now.

— Chad de Lisle
Head of Marketing, Disruptive Advertising

P.S. On September 30th at 1PM ET, Jake and I are going live for an hour on this exact problem. Free. We’re walking through the Trust Gap and the system we built to close it, and there’s no recording, which is on purpose. Everyone who stays to the end gets a physical copy of the book shipped before it’s on sale anywhere.

So if you HATE your CEO (or you’re a CEO that HATES your marketer), this webinar is for you:

Save your seat