I asked a CEO this week who owns marketing in his business.

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Private equity money has been in for a while. Good product, decisive leadership, a brand agency doing proper work, a sales team that's flat out. 

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He thought about it and said someone from sales is covering it until the end of the year, when they'll make a longer term decision.

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He's a smart operator and he said it without flinching, because it's a completely normal answer. 

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This issue is about the gap of understanding between marketing and growth.

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The money arrives before the owner does

The day investment lands, marketing changes category. Before the raise it was a cost you could defend with instinct and a good quarter. After it, it's a line in a board pack with a number next to it and a date.

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What almost never changes on the same day is who's responsible for that number.

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So it gets covered. By you, the CEO, which makes you the CMO on top of everything else you're now doing. By someone from sales who's good and willing and never asked for it. By an agency that was briefed for awareness and is now, quietly, being judged on leads.

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I understand every one of those choices. Hiring a senior marketer straight after a raise feels like spending the money on overhead before you've proved you can spend it on growth. "We'll sort it properly when the commercial hire starts in January" is a reasonable sentence. The pull to wait is real.

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The board doesn't wait for January though because it meets in October.

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What it looks like from inside

The pattern is recognisable once you've seen it a few times, and it rarely announces itself as a marketing problem.

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The agency's monthly report gets challenged on pipeline, but pipeline was never its brief. Nobody's wrong here. The brief was written for one job and the expectation has moved to another, and no one noticed the drift.

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The brand work stalls when one person leaves, because the thinking lived in their head and the workshop outputs never got signed off.

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Two brands sit side-by-side after an acquisition and there is no clear agreement on how they relate, so every post and every page pulls in a slightly different direction and the market sees two half companies.

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Customer research stopped at the deal. The investors did due diligence on the market but since then nobody has asked the customers a question.

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And the people making the content have never seen the sales hit list, so they're writing for everyone, which in B2B means no one.

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None of these is a failure of effort. I've watched capable people work very hard inside every one of them. Each is a decision that nobody was positioned to make, because the position didn't exist.

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The first marketing decision after a raise is about ownership

Before a hire, before an agency review, before another channel, decide who owns the growth number and can say no on its behalf.

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The CEO needs sales, marketing and product working to one metric sheet and one goal (100% aligned that this is a must!) That single sheet does more for a post investment business than any campaign, because it's the thing that decisions get made against, the thing the agency gets measured on, and the thing you can put in front of the board without a caveat.

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Then be honest about what you're buying. Direction and delivery are two separate costs. At around £3k a month you can fund one of them. A senior thinker at that budget buys you roughly a day a fortnight of judgement and nothing to build with, so you end up with a plan and nobody running it. An experienced manager at that budget gives you hands and very little of the strategic cover the board is now asking for. Neither is the wrong call. Pretending one budget buys both is where it goes wrong.

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The last piece is cheaper than people expect. Restart the customer conversations. Six interviews in the month after a deal will tell you more about where growth actually comes from than the due diligence deck did, and it hands your team a brief they can't argue with.

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The one thing to do this week

Open your last board pack and find the marketing slide.

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Ask whose name is on that number. If the honest answer is yours, or "the agency", or "it's covered until January", you've found the thing your investors will spot before you do. They've seen this pattern across a portfolio. You're seeing it once.

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Drop me a line and tell me who owns yours. I'll tell you honestly whether the structure you've got will hold to the next board meeting, and what I'd change first if it won't.