<div class="gn-article"><div class="gn-hero gn-reveal"> <div class="gn-hero__image"><img src="https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/687a235da6861294eec73166/6a4ce7dfce6e42a06bcf7a9f_entry-001-banner-6a39287f73314348386249.jpeg" alt=""></div> <div class="gn-hero__head"> <span class="gn-kicker"><span class="dot"></span>Expression</span> <h1 class="gn-title">The Secret Diary of a CMO Entry 012: &amp;ldquo;The August Decision I Made in July&amp;rdquo;</h1> <div class="gn-meta"> <strong>The GO Network</strong> <span class="pip"></span> <span>22 June 2026</span> <span class="pip"></span> <span>5 min read</span> </div> </div> </div> <div class="gn-body"> <p class="gn-lede gn-reveal">It is mid-June, the calendar is open in front of me, and I am running my finger down the next six weeks the way I always do at this point in the year.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">Half-year reviews. Two board pre-reads. A trade alignment that always pretends not to be a budget conversation. A scheduled coffee with my CFO that will be a budget conversation. And, somewhere in the second week of July, a quiet meeting between me and my deputy where we will reopen the H2 spend and decide where the money actually goes.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">I dread the mid-July meeting more than any of the formal ones. The formal ones are theatre. The mid-July meeting is consequential, and it never looks consequential while it is happening.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">I want to write this entry about a decision I made in mid-July last year, because I now know it was the moment a much harder decision started. And because I am about to walk into the same meeting again, with what I hope is at least a slightly better instinct.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">If you have followed these entries, you might remember the slide I drafted in October last year. <em>Revisit agency model. Too fragmented. Not adding value.</em> With a note underneath: <em>Hold for now.</em></p> <p class="gn-reveal">That slide did not appear in October out of nowhere. It crystallised something I had been feeling since the previous summer. By mid-July of last year, I already had the rough shape of the problem. The roster was carrying agencies whose work no longer matched our priorities. The senior bench in two of those relationships had been quietly thinning. Performance was steady but not strategic. The cost was defensible on the spreadsheet but not on the work.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">I did not act on it in July. I made what I told myself was a smaller decision instead.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">The CFO had asked for room. The board had signalled belt-tightening. The internal pressure to find some percentage across the marketing line had been audible since June. So in the second week of July, with my deputy, I made a quiet reallocation. One of the agencies whose strategic value I was already questioning had their retained scope reduced. I did not pick up the phone. I did not have the harder conversation. I sent the new scope through the system and moved on.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">I told myself it was a budget decision. It was not. It was the consolidation decision, made tactically, six months before I was willing to make it strategically.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">By October, when I drafted the <em>Revisit agency model</em> slide, that agency had already lost two of its three senior leads on our account. They did not lose them because of us. But the reduced scope was the reason the seniority could not be sustained. The bench thinned. The next campaign briefed underwhelmed. By the time I wrote <em>Hold for now</em> under that slide, the relationship I had quietly contracted in July was already structurally broken. I just had not allowed myself to call it.</p> <aside class="gn-quote gn-reveal"><q>The August decision is made in July. By the time the agency notices, the conversation that would have prevented it has already passed.</q><cite>The Secret CMO</cite></aside> <p class="gn-reveal">In March of this year, when I finally moved to consolidate the roster down to two retained partners and added the Director of Creative Operations role, that same agency was one of the two I did not renew. The conversation we had was the one I should have had nine months earlier, with much more of the work and the senior bench still salvageable.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">I do not believe the relationship could have survived. The misfit was real. But the way it ended was a consequence of how I made it end, slowly, by stealth, through a budget reallocation I did not name. If I had called it for what it was in July last year, the agency could have planned. Their senior people could have moved on to work that would have kept them growing. The reduced months of half-engagement, where they delivered diminishing-quality work because they could not justify the team that would have done better, would not have happened.</p> <div class="gn-divider gn-reveal" aria-hidden="true"></div> <p class="gn-reveal">I am writing this in mid-June because I will be in that mid-July meeting again in three weeks, and the agencies I am now retaining are different agencies, and the dynamic is different, but the calendar pressure is identical. The CFO will ask for room. The board will signal restraint. There will be a small reallocation that nobody minds and a moderate one that someone should mind.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">I have promised myself one thing. Any change to scope above a threshold I have written down for myself will trigger a fifteen-minute conversation with the agency lead before it lands in their inbox. Not a justification call. Not a soft preamble. A heads-up call that says, here is what is changing, here is roughly what I think it means, and here is what I would like you to do with the information before the budget moves.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">It is a small commitment, and I am writing it down in part because I know I will be tempted not to keep it. The mid-July week is the worst possible week for a careful conversation. The CFO timeline does not allow for it. The agency founder is, by historical coincidence, on holiday in the second week of July more years than not. My own diary is choked with the pre-board work that defines the H2 cycle. The path of least resistance is to do what I did last year, which is to make a budget move and let the consequences arrive at someone else's desk later.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">But the agencies that have stuck with us longest, including the two I have just retained, have one thing in common. They have absorbed at least one ungenerous summer from me without breaking the relationship. They have done it through the quality of their senior leads more than the quality of the contracts. And the senior leads can only do that work if they know what is happening in time to lean in.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">It is mid-June. I have three weeks before the meeting. The fifteen-minute call will go in the diary today.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">More soon.</p> <p class="gn-reveal"><strong>The Secret CMO</strong></p> </div></div>