Ep 1 - When marketing stalls, it’s rarely a marketing problem

The easy assumption when sales drop and revenue flatlines, is that marketing is broken. You have the wrong channel, the wrong message, the wrong team. So you hire someone new, add another tool, or brief an agency to fix it.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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.cmofieldnotes.com