Marketing doesn’t create enterprise value by accident—it has to be engineered, governed, and aligned to the deal thesis. In this week's episode, Bill breaks down the model we use at 50 Capital Growth to turn marketing from a collection of activities into a governed asset that creates measurable enterprise value.

This episode is built for owners, executives, private equity operators, and leadership teams in B2B and industrial companies navigating growth, acquisition, or exit. Bill walks through how to align marketing directly to a deal thesis, protect revenue, unlock expansion inside existing accounts, systematize referrals, and scale into new markets with speed and confidence. The result is marketing that behaves like capital—predictable, defensible, and trusted by boards, lenders, and buyers.

If your marketing didn't move EBITDA or exit multiples last quarter, it wasn't engineered for it. That's what we're talking about today. How to build a marketing system that does more than generate leads or produce reports. I'm going to walk you through the 50 Capital Growth model, a framework designed to protect revenue, harvest expansion, and build a growth narrative that buyers believe in and pay for. By the end, you understand how to turn marketing from a set of activities into a governed asset that creates measurable enterprise value.

Welcome back to the Missing Half Podcast. We're turning our attention to our 50 Capital Growth audience. Those leading companies through periods of growth, acquisition, or exit. You might be an owner, a PE operator, a family office or an executive team trying to align marketing with the financial performance that ultimately determines your valuation. You can engineer your marketing so it behaves like capital: disciplined, governed and focused on EBITDA and multiples. Not by creating more noise or more activity, but with a system that can prove its impact.

That's what the 50 Capital Growth model does. It brings order, governance, and compounding returns to marketing, which is exactly what's missing in most middle market and industrial companies. Here's the challenge I see every single week. Most companies are operating from a fragmented menu of tactics that's been mistaken for strategy. They've got all the activity in the world–new campaigns, digital ads, videos, trade shows, automation systems, new branding–but none of it connects back to an actual value creation plan.

Customer acquisition costs are fuzzy. Time to signal is slow. And quarters slip by without real clarity on what worked and why. In B2B and industrial markets, time is the invisible tax. It's not the media spend that hurts you. It's the time you lose learning the wrong things, chasing the wrong signals, and failing to compound what you already know. That's the real cost.

So the question is, how do you fix it? You engineer marketing. You build a model that behaves more like capital than like activity. The 50 Capital Growth model aligns four core pillars directly to your deal thesis and then executes through a structured go-to-market playbook.

It starts with the deal thesis itself, defining what must be true to achieve the value creation plan and eventual exit. If you can't articulate that, marketing has nothing to align to.

Then we define the market, your total addressable market or TAM. Competitors, pricing power, voice of customer and priority segments. Without that clarity, you're making guesses about where growth is supposed to come from.

The third pillar is brand. Positioning your company's differentiation as actual buying criteria that your customers recognize and value. It's not about how you describe yourself. It's about defining your moat in the language of the buyer.

And finally, there's your go-to-market motion, the repeatable engine that drives scale, predictability, and confidence. Once those four pillars are clear, execution happens in four stages.

The first 30 to 90 days are about defense, protecting revenue, stabilizing systems and eliminating surprises. You start by mapping every logo, every dollar, and your share of wallet. You identify what's secure and what's at risk. You lock in your key partners and shore up the communications inside your team so there's clarity and focus. This stage is about preservation. You can't scale on instability, and every missed conversation with a customer or partner can cost you far more than a line item on your budget. When you complete a true protect pass, your leadership team looks stronger in every lender update, every board deck, and every investor call. You've reduced uncertainty, and that's the foundation everything else builds on.

Once the base is stable, we move into expansion inside the existing business. That means add ons, services, aftermarket programs, training, anything that improves margin and drives incremental revenue at low customer acquisition cost. It's about servicing what's already there. You prioritize accounts by upside and timing. You develop offers your internal team can actually deliver, and you measure the marginal CAC and ROAS of each segment and offer to understand where you're creating the best return. Most companies are sitting on meaningful EBITDA growth that's trapped in existing accounts. It's work you've already done. You just haven't structured it to produce new value.

Next comes referrals. And here's where most companies leave money on the table. They treat referrals like the weather. Great when they happen, unpredictable when they don't. We treat them like an asset. That means defining referral triggers and incentives, tracking performance, and systematizing the proof. Case studies. Testimonials. Reviews. Referral CAC is low, credibility is high, and when you build the repeatable referral engine, the results compound. Every new customer can lead to two more. But only if you've built the process to make it happen.

Stage four: new market growth. Once the base is stable and existing customers are growing, we move into new market growth. This is where discipline matters most. We go one segment, one problem, one solution, one conversion at a time. You pilot first: small parallel tests to learn quickly. You batch what works to prove repeatability. And once the unit economics are right, you scale. The most important thing here is the compression of time to signal. We don't want to wait months to decide if something worked. We build clear thresholds for kill and scale. Kill fast, scale hard. And every test teaches you something valuable, even if it's what not to do.

From volume to refinement, in those early passes, your CAC will look messy. That's fine. It should. You're buying speed of learning. The goal isn't to produce beautiful dashboards. The goal is to create confidence in the pattern that works. The one that finance can model, operations can support, and leadership can scale. Once you identify those winning channels or offers, you reallocate resources from the losers to the winners. That's how marketing shifts from noise to performance–through refinement, not just volume.

We establish success and failure thresholds before we start. We operate in defined time boxes. Days, not weeks. Tests are reviewed weekly, narratives updated monthly, and deal thesis are revamped quarterly. When you do that, marketing becomes board grade. You move from conversations about activities to conversations about outcomes. That's the difference between teams that hope marketing works and teams that can prove it.

The next thing we want to talk about is ABM. Where it's appropriate, we also want to hedge the bets we've placed, and that's where the 36 month ABM track comes into play. The ABM track bet is where we launch a long cycle ABM track targeting enterprise buyers. In year one, we're going to plant tall trees that will start to grow and yield results in year two and three. And certainly start to build a repeatable enterprise pipeline by year five.

That's how we move EBITDA and exit multiples over a hold period. You plant these tall trees early and you let them grow while the rest of the system compounds around them. The ABM play is about starting early for big wins when you need them most. Let's say we're in year three of the hold period, and some of the growth initiatives have not taken hold. Or we have some operational challenges which are all too common in roll ups. Well, a nice large enterprise win in year 3 or 4 that starts to build momentum, is a great win and helps get us through some of those hard board meetings and tough times when other growth markets are not planning panning out.

This is one of the biggest mistakes I see companies making when they don't hedge their bets with enterprise campaigns, with ABM programs that can generate some significant wins and smooth out earnings reports, smooth out growth forecasts and reports, and help us present a great response to the board and to potential investors.

The metrics we track fall into two categories: efficiency and velocity. Efficiency metrics are your CAC, LTV, payback period, gross margin, retention, and expansion. They tell you if the model works economically. Velocity metrics, things like time to signal, test throughput and cycle time, tell you how quickly the system learns and how confident you can be in the data. If you can brief your CFO on both sets of metrics in under five minutes, you've got a system that's ready to scale. If you can't, you've still got work to do.

There are two main ways we implement this model. The first is a strategic roadmap sprint. A 30 day engagement where we define your deal thesis, prioritize markets and stand up the protect, harvest, referral, and new market playbook.

The second is through fractional CMO and execution pods, where we operate the model inside your cadence, with your team and your partners, so you get the system without having to build it from scratch.

If you're ready to run marketing with the same discipline as capital, schedule a short fit call. We'll look at your deal thesis, your current pipeline, and the areas this model will move first. This is the Missing Half. I'm Bill Woods. Thanks for listening. And if this episode helped clarify how to align marketing with enterprise value, share it with a CEO, investor or operating partner who's thinking about their next phase of growth. See you next time.