<div class="gn-article"><div class="gn-hero gn-reveal"> <div class="gn-hero__image"><img src="https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/687a235da6861294eec73166/6a02fe38acdae6b308e971ad_blob-69fc759cecf60094414330.png" 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 010: “Three Weeks In”</h1> <div class="gn-meta"> <strong>The GO Network</strong> <span class="pip"></span> <span>14 April 2026</span> <span class="pip"></span> <span>4 min read</span> </div> </div> </div> <div class="gn-body"> <h4 class="gn-reveal" style="text-align: left"><span style="color: rgb(69, 172, 98)"><em>w/c 13th April 2026</em></span></h4> <p class="gn-lede gn-reveal">It is a Wednesday morning. The office is quieter than it was a month ago, partly because the early-FY rush has not landed yet, partly because two desks are empty in a way they would not have been in March.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">The empty desks are not redundancies. They are vacancies. The new role I wrote about a few weeks ago, Director of Creative Operations, starts on Monday. The other is a backfill from a quiet departure I have not yet written about and probably will not. The team knows. The team always knows. The desks are always the giveaway.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">Three weeks into FY27, the consolidation is bedding in.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">The two retained agencies have leaned in further than I expected. One has produced a piece of unbriefed strategic work, sent without an invoice attached, that is genuinely useful. I will pay them for it eventually. They know I will. The point of doing it now, before the contract conversation, is to demonstrate the kind of partner they want to be in the new shape of the relationship. I am not naive about the gesture, but I appreciate it.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">The other agency has done something subtler. Their account lead, who in the old roster used to limit her presence to the work that had her name explicitly attached, has been in two of our internal meetings this week as a quiet observer. She did not contribute to either. She listened. The team noticed. So did I.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">The two former agencies have, in different ways, made the same point about themselves.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">One has handled the parting professionally. A handwritten card from the agency lead arrived on Friday. Names of contacts I might find useful at adjacent agencies. A thank-you for the work over the years that did not feel performative. An open offer to keep in touch, framed as something useful to me rather than to him.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">The other agency has gone silent. No outreach. No card. The agency lead has not responded to a follow-up message I sent ten days ago, which I sent in part because I wanted to make sure he had the practical information he needed for the handover and in part because I wanted to know whether the silence was deliberate. I now know it is.</p> <aside class="gn-quote gn-reveal"><q>The morning after the decision is harder than the decision itself. The decision is a meeting. The morning after is a hundred small signals you cannot prepare for, sent by the people you used to work with, telling you whether they will still want you to call.</q><cite>The Secret CMO</cite></aside> <p class="gn-reveal">One moment from this week worth recording.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">A junior on the team came into a one-to-one and asked, carefully, whether they could continue working with one of the former agencies on a personal project they had been collaborating on outside of work. They wanted to know if it was a problem. They wanted, more accurately, to know if their judgement of the situation was the same as mine.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">I told them the truth. The relationship is theirs to manage. The decision the company made does not extend to their personal life. It might, in two years, become awkward if the agency we did not renew comes back to pitch for something they end up working on. I trust them to navigate that when it lands. They thanked me. They left looking slightly less worried than when they arrived.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">Juniors notice these conversations. The way they are handled becomes part of how the team understands the company. I have made enough of the wrong calls in my career to know that the small ones echo for longer than the big ones.</p> <div class="gn-divider gn-reveal" aria-hidden="true"></div> <p class="gn-reveal">The new Director of Creative Operations starts Monday. I have spent three of the last five days in prep meetings, briefings, and a quiet introduction lunch with the two retained agency leads, because if this role does not land well, the whole consolidation case unwinds. The hire is the lynchpin. I have probably been overthinking the first week. The team will see what they need to see.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">What I notice, three weeks in, is that the days feel quieter. Not less full. Quieter in a different way. A meeting that wrapped on time. A briefing that got to the agency without three rounds of internal review. A junior who said in passing that the team feels clearer than it did before Christmas.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">None of it is dramatic. None of it would be visible from outside the building. But the absence of friction, in a job like this, is itself the signal. The friction we used to absorb without noticing was costing more than I had quite admitted.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">I will hold the line on a smaller roster for as long as I can. April is not the test. The test will come in late summer, when something tactical lands, and the easiest answer is to bring in a specialist for one project, and the hardest answer is to make the in-house team and the retained partners do it together, slower, less elegantly, but inside the structure I have just built.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">I will report back when that test arrives. It always does.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">More soon.</p> <p class="gn-reveal"><span style="color: rgb(69, 172, 98)"><strong>The Secret CMO</strong></span></p> </div></div>