About Rich Webley
Most established SMEs don’t have a marketing problem.
They have a marketing function problem.
After 20 years working inside and alongside growing UK businesses, I’ve seen the same pattern repeat itself: capable leaders, strong products, commercial ambition, and a marketing function that never quite delivers what the business needs.
Not because people aren’t working hard. But because marketing is rarely designed, run, or accounted for as a proper business function.
Marketing doesn’t fail. Functions do.
In many owner-led, established SMEs, often grown through hustle, referrals, or strong sales leadership, marketing grows reactively. Shaped by internal requests and short-term pressure rather than playing a clear commercial role.
Activities accumulate. Channels and campaigns pile up without clear intent. Priorities priorities compete rather than align. Results are discussed, but rarely owned.
Over time, marketing becomes busy, expensive, and underwhelming, while the rest of the business outgrows it.
Sales, operations and finance functions mature as the company scales. But marketing often remains underdeveloped, underpowered, and structurally immature. Expectations rise, scrutiny increases, yet the function itself hasn’t been designed to deliver predictable results.
My work is focused on closing that maturity gap, so marketing functions can keep pace with the rest of their business and contribute meaningfully to growth.
A functional view of marketing
I specialise in marketing function effectiveness: how marketing is structured, resourced, planned, and measured so it can play a clear role in driving growth.
That lens has led to the development of the Marketing Function Performance System™, a practical framework based on real-world experience, for building and running marketing functions capable of delivering 20%+ growth.
It combines four elements:
- The Marketing Function Maturity Model™ - to diagnose structural gaps
- The Evidence-Led Planning Method™ - to define the right growth priorities
- A 90-Day Operating Process™ - to turn strategy into accountable execution
- A Performance Improvement Toolkit™ - to embed discipline, governance and measurable progress
This is the thinking that underpins everything I do.
Where this perspective comes from
For most of my career, I’ve been preoccupied by a single question:
What should a marketing function really do for a business?
Not in theory, but in the real world - under commercial pressure, with limited time, imperfect information, and leadership attention stretched thin.
That question has followed me through every phase of my career.
I started out in marketing research, where early exposure to data and evidence shaped how I think about performance. It taught me that instinct has its place, but evidence is what makes decisions reliable, and that unless a business genuinely values data, confidence can quickly turn into guesswork.
Later, running a management consultancy focused on culture and performance, I saw first-hand how outcomes are shaped less by individual brilliance and more by alignment, leadership, and operating models. Talented people struggled inside poorly designed environments. Average teams often outperformed expectations when given clarity, purpose, and structure.
That lesson stayed with me when I moved into in-house marketing leadership. Sitting in the CMO seat, accountable for growth rather than advice, removed any remaining comfort in abstraction. Marketing had to perform, not impress. Decisions had consequences. Results mattered more than activity.
But it was only after working across many different businesses as a self-employed “CMO for hire”, leading more than twenty marketing functions inside owner-led and founder-led UK SMEs, that the pattern became impossible to ignore.
Performance only changed when the function itself changed.
Marketing performance doesn’t improve by accident - it's determined by the maturity of the marketing function behind it.
What I do now
Today, I spend my time:
- Writing and publishing clear thinking on marketing performance and growth
- Advising founders and leadership teams on how to build effective marketing functions
- Developing frameworks, operating systems, and diagnostic tools that improve marketing function effectiveness and impact
I’m also the founder and CEO of Framework Twelve, where this thinking is applied in practice by a specialist team focused on helping £2–20m B2B businesses who have ambitious growth plans but need marketing to start playing its part.
This site is where I share the thinking behind the work.
If you’re leading a growing business and want marketing to start playing its part in driving growth, you’ll find plenty here to challenge and sharpen your thinking.
If you want to go further
If this perspective resonates, there are a few ways you can explore it further - depending on what you’re looking for.
⬇️
Book a 25-minute Strategy Call
If you lead a £2–20m B2B business and want to clarify whether your marketing function is structurally capable of supporting your growth ambitions, start with a focused 25-minute Strategy Call.
We’ll review your objectives, assess how marketing is currently structured, and determine the most appropriate next step.
Free of charge. No obligation.
Work With Framework Twelve
If you already know marketing needs to operate at a different level, Framework Twelve provides advisory, leadership and fully managed marketing function support for £2–20m B2B businesses.
Prefer to email directly?
If you’d prefer to contact me directly, you can email rich@richwebley.co.uk and I’ll respond personally.
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From time to time, I share deeper thinking, frameworks, and events with a small group of subscribers. Join the list via the button top right.