<div class="gn-article"><div class="gn-hero gn-reveal"> <div class="gn-hero__image"><img src="https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/687a235da6861294eec73166/6a02fe37eb096a5104790aa4_entry-002-banner-69fc74efdca57752281233.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 009: “The Hold-For-Now Decision”</h1> <div class="gn-meta"> <strong>The GO Network</strong> <span class="pip"></span> <span>27 March 2026</span> <span class="pip"></span> <span>4 min read</span> </div> </div> </div> <div class="gn-body"> <p class="gn-reveal" style="color: rgb(69, 172, 98)"><em>w/c 6th April 2026</em></p> <p class="gn-lede gn-reveal">I am writing this on the train back from a coffee that lasted ninety minutes longer than planned. The meeting was the second of two I held last week. Two agencies. Two conversations. Two contracts that, as of last Wednesday, are no longer being renewed.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">Some of you will remember the slide I drafted in October. <em>"Revisit agency model. Too fragmented. Not adding value."</em> I added a note underneath that said, <em>"Hold for now."</em> I held. For five months I held. The note travelled with me through Q3 and Q4 and the year-end and the FY27 planning cycle, in the same tab on my second screen, never closed, never resolved.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">In mid-February, after the CFO conversation I wrote about a few weeks ago, I closed the tab. The decision was made privately, communicated narrowly, and given a long runway so that the conversations I had to have did not feel rushed.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">Two of our agencies will not be renewed for FY27. Two of our key partners will be retained, with expanded scope. One internal hire, a new role I am calling Director of Creative Operations, starts in three weeks to do the work that fragmentation prevented us from doing properly across the existing roster.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">That is the structural answer. The harder part of the entry is the conversations.</p> <div class="gn-divider gn-reveal" aria-hidden="true"></div> <p class="gn-reveal">The first agency I spoke to last week was a specialist we had retained for category-specific work that has, over the last two years, become less central to our priorities. The agency lead came in prepared. He had read the same dashboards I had read. He took it well. He asked for transparent feedback, which I gave him, and he asked whether the door was open for future projects, which I told him honestly was a maybe and dependent on what we end up needing in eighteen months. We left the room on good terms.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">The second conversation was the one I am still thinking about today. A creative agency held over from before my tenure, never quite found its place in the roster, never quite missed badly enough to force the conversation any sooner. The lead came in less prepared. The questions were sharper. <em>"Was this driven by procurement?"</em> Partly, but not in the way he meant it. <em>"Was this driven by the workshop in September?"</em> Partly, but again not in the way he meant it. <em>"Did anyone advocate for us internally?"</em></p> <p class="gn-reveal">That last one. I had a moment, sitting across from him, where I had to decide whether to be honest. I chose honesty. I told him that the team viewed the work as competent but not distinct, and that distinct was what we needed for the next eighteen months.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">It did not land softly.</p> <aside class="gn-quote gn-reveal"><q>The agency leads who handled the conversation well are the ones I will most likely call again. The agency lead who lost composure has not realised that the call was the start of the next conversation, not the end of the previous one.</q><cite>The Secret CMO</cite></aside> <p class="gn-reveal">I should be honest in this entry that the second conversation has stayed with me longer than the first. Not because of the agency. Because of how easily it could have gone the other way for any agency. The work was not bad. The work was not distinct enough. There is a margin between those two assessments, and that margin is where most agency relationships actually live.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">The two retained agencies have already noticed. Both have leaned in. One has booked time with my deputy this week to walk through what the expanded scope might mean. The other has, without prompting, sent me a piece of unbriefed thinking on a category we have been quietly worried about. The dynamic has shifted, in three days, from vendor to partner. I have seen this shift before. It is real, and it does not last forever, so I will use it.</p> <div class="gn-divider gn-reveal" aria-hidden="true"></div> <p class="gn-reveal">What I am sitting with, three days into FY27, is not the question of whether the call was right. It was right. The roster needed to be smaller. The accountability across the partners we kept needed to be larger. The internal hire needed to exist.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">The question I am sitting with is whether I will hold the discipline. Whether, when the next inevitable tactical request comes in over the next quarter, I will resist the easy pattern of pulling in another specialist, another freelancer, another small piece of bolt-on resource that solves the immediate problem at the cost of the structure I have just built.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">The honest answer is that I am not sure. The pattern that produced the fragmented roster did not arrive overnight, and it was not produced by stupidity. It was produced by a thousand small decisions, each one defensible in the moment, that together created the model I have just had to dismantle.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">If I do not change the pattern, the roster will fragment again, and a future version of me will write a future version of this entry, in a future April, with a different set of names and the same outcome.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">The discipline is the work now. Not the decision. The discipline.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">More soon.</p> <p class="gn-reveal"><strong style="color: rgb(69, 172, 98)">The Secret CMO</strong></p> </div></div>