Observations
Where to Find Resources for Strategy When Everything Is on Fire: A Guide for the Overloaded CMO
As a Chief Marketing Officer, your workday feels like that of a firefighter. You rush from one “burning” task to another: leads from advertising have dropped, the sales department urgently needs a presentation “yesterday,” and the CEO has requested a sudden report. You know you need to stop and think about strategy, but you don’t have a minute to spare. Everything is on fire.
The thought constantly runs through my head: “Let’s launch this project and clear the backlog. Things will definitely calm down next quarter. Then I’ll focus on strategy.” But that “next quarter” never comes. There are only more fires to put out.
It’s a trap. The truth is, resources for strategy don’t just “appear” during quiet periods. There won’t be any quiet periods. Resources can only be freed up purposefully from the current operational chaos. Strategy isn’t something you do when you have time. It’s something you do to make time.
This article is a practical guide on “creating” resources when it seems there are none. We will examine your three main assets—time, budget, and team focus—and show you how to audit them to free up the minimum necessary to get started. This is the first step to transforming from a “firefighter” into an “architect.”
Time: How to Find Four Hours a Week for Strategy
Your time is your most valuable and scarce resource. As long as you are fully immersed in operational routines, no one is working on strategy. Therefore, the first task is to “reclaim” time for yourself. The goal is to find at least one four-hour block per week for focused work on the system.
How can you accomplish this? Start with an honest audit. Next week, keep a simple time log and meticulously record what you are doing every thirty minutes. By the end of the week, you will have an accurate picture of how you spend your time.
Now, apply a simple framework to this list. Stop, automate, or delegate.
- Stop: Look at your recurring meetings and reports. Which meeting could be replaced by a short email? Which report does no one read, yet you still prepare it out of habit? Ruthlessly eliminate or reduce these activities. Canceling just one one-hour meeting per week frees up four hours per month for strategy.
- Automate: Identify routine data-gathering tasks. If you spend thirty minutes every morning manually pulling numbers from advertising dashboards into a single table, for example, that is a perfect candidate for automation. Ask an analyst to set up an automatic dashboard once.
- Delegate: Identify tasks that you perform that could be done by an employee with a clear checklist. For example, final approval of social media posts. Create simple guidelines on what can and cannot be done and delegate the task. It may not be perfect at first, but it will free up your time for more important work.
After applying this filter to your list, you may be surprised to find “hidden” hours. Schedule them in your calendar as an appointment that you cannot miss. Now is your time to stop putting out fires and start designing a system that prevents them from happening in the first place.
Budget: How to Create an “Innovation Fund” from Current Expenses
The second most common response to the question, “Why aren’t we working on strategy?” is, “There’s no budget.” It seems that all the money is already allocated to “keeping things running”: contextual advertising, salaries, and services. Asking the CEO for extra funds for a “strategic experiment” can seem impossible.
The good news is that you don’t need to. The money you need is already within your current budget. Your task is to audit your budget and reallocate funds from inefficient areas to growth opportunities.
Open your marketing expenses spreadsheet. In addition to the large, obvious expenses, such as payroll and the Yandex.Direct budget, you will likely see a “long tail” of small expenses, such as a service subscription that no one uses anymore, sponsorship of an event that generated zero leads, and a test advertising campaign launched six months ago and forgotten.
Apply a simple rule: “Pause 10%.” Identify 10–15% of your least effective or least transparent ROI activities. Your task is not to “kill” them permanently but to simply pause them for one quarter. Explain to management that you are doing this not to cut costs but to reinvest the money in a more promising initiative.
The money you free up becomes your first “strategic initiative fund.” It is not a “saved” budget that will be taken away from you. Rather, it is targeted capital that you can allocate to launching your first ABM pilot project, developing a nurture sequence, or conducting in-depth client research. You are consciously moving these funds from the “maintaining chaos” zone into the “building a system” zone.
Team Focus: How to Kill “Zombie Projects”
You have freed up time and budget. However, your most valuable resource is the mental energy and focus of your best employees. Often, this energy is scattered across “zombie projects.”
What are these? They are initiatives that were started with good intentions but now lead nowhere. They have no clear KPIs or visible business impact. Yet, they continue to consume the team’s hours because “we already started them” or “it feels wrong to stop.”
How do you deal with them? Hold a team meeting with the following agenda: “What will we stop doing starting Monday?”
Make a list of all current projects and ask two questions for each: How directly does this impact our main strategic goal? What would happen if we paused this project for three months?
Your task is to ruthlessly “kill” or freeze one or two of the lowest-priority projects. This is called “addition through subtraction.” By removing unnecessary work, you provide your team with the most valuable resource: focus. The freed energy of your best people can then be directed toward the most important strategic initiative, where real breakthroughs are possible.
From Firefighter to Architect
Freeing up resources for strategy does not mean passively waiting for “better times.” Rather, it is active managerial work. It is the discipline of saying “no” to good things to say “yes” to the best. It is the art of making deliberate reductions, even in small areas such as time, budget, and focus, in order to reinvest in building a system.
This is a self-reinforcing process. The more you invest in creating a system—for example, automating reports or building a nurture sequence—the fewer “fires” you will face in the future. The fewer fires you face, the more resources you free up for further system improvement. You create a flywheel that transforms chaos into order.
Begin with the simplest step: Keep a time log for the next week. Identify two to three tasks that you can remove, automate, or delegate to free up your first couple of hours for what truly matters.
Save this article as an action guide. Return to it every quarter to conduct this resource audit and ensure that you are the “architect,” not the “firefighter,” of your marketing.
