Every marketer knows the phrase.
Do more with less.
Especially if you follow the B2B marketing legend that is Mark Choueke, who has spent years unpacking what it really means, the damage it quietly does and how marketers can navigate it.
It gets framed as a motivational challenge. A test of creativity. A badge of honour.
In many Private Equity owned businesses, it is something else entirely.
It is a contradiction.
The song I wrote, “Six Months to an Exit”, dramatises a familiar scene. A CMO with a growth plan, a launch vision, a category story to build. And a board that listens, nods, studies the spreadsheet, and then says:
Can you just do the same as last year again.
But faster.
And cheaper.
And with a hockey stick on the end.
This tension is not personal. It is structural.
Private Equity firms are not buying companies to run them forever. They are buying them to sell them. Usually in three to five years. Often sooner. Their job is to improve valuation, and the cleanest lever for that is EBITDA to drive the exit multiple.
Revenue growth matters. But margin matters more.
Predictability matters more than experimentation.
Certainty beats ambition.
None of this is irrational. It is simply misaligned with how marketing actually works.
Marketing is an investment function, not a cost function. Brand, demand, trust, and reputation compound over time. They do not obey quarterly cycles. Yet PE time horizons are often shorter than the payback period of the very activities that create sustainable growth.
Hence the paradox.
We want a growth story for the exit deck.
But we do not want to fund the growth story.
We want a hockey stick.
But we want flat spend.
And when this logic meets reality, the internal battles begin.
Global marketing needs scale, consistency, and long term bets.
Regional leaders own P and L and are measured on this quarter’s number.
So they protect local budgets, resist central programmes, and block spend that does not show immediate regional ROI.
Everyone is acting rationally.
Collectively, the system becomes irrational.
Research on matrix organisations and PE backed structures shows that when incentives are misaligned, collaboration drops and political behaviour rises. Marketing stops being a growth engine and becomes a cost to defend or cut.
Then Q4 arrives.
The number is missed.
The CFO claws back budget.
The pipeline still needs filling.
Leads are still demanded.
But the fuel is removed.
The Head of Sales is probably polishing the CV, because they are often the first fall guy.
This is the purest form of the do more with less fantasy.
Can you protect the brand while cutting the voice.
Can you grow demand while freezing headcount.
Can you hit targets while stripping out the very activities that create them.
Short term, you can make it look like it works.
You can window dress.
You can push promotions.
You can burn the database.
You can overwork the team.
You can borrow from future quarters to save this one.
For a while, the numbers hold, helped by momentum from past investment. The story stays intact. The exit deck looks clean.
This is why the song talks about smoke and mirrors. It is not incompetence. It is incentives.
The buyer wants a smooth story.
The seller wants a clean multiple.
Management wants to survive the process.
Marketing, which lives in the long game, gets squeezed in the middle.
The tragedy is that the things that create real enterprise value are the first to be questioned.
Brand investment.
Category creation.
New product launches.
Modern infrastructure.
Senior talent.
They all make the P and L look worse before they make it better. Which makes them politically vulnerable in an environment obsessed with short term optics.
So what does “do more with less” usually mean in these contexts.
Not smarter.
Just harder.
Same expectations.
Fewer people.
Less budget.
More pressure.
And a growing gap between what the business says it wants and what it is willing to fund.
For CMOs operating in PE backed businesses, the job is not just marketing. It is translation.
Translating long term value into short term language.
Translating investment into risk mitigation.
Translating brand into future multiple.
And when you are asked to deliver a hockey stick on a flat budget, the only honest response is not blind compliance. It is clarity.
Here is what we can grow.
Here is what will stall.
Here is what we will be trading off.
Here is the risk we are taking, even if we would rather not say it out loud.
Because growth without investment is not strategy.
It is hope.
And hope does not show up in EBITDA.
Listen to Six Months to an Exit on Marketing Mixtape
