If your marketing isn’t tied to revenue, it’s not marketing, it’s theatre.

And in private equity, theatre doesn’t get a second act.

Too many portfolio companies are still reporting on impressions, clicks, engagement rates, as if those metrics mean something in isolation. They don’t.

Marketing isn’t a creative department.
It’s not a vibe.
It’s an investment function.
And it should be treated with the same level of rigour, granularity, and accountability as pricing strategy or working capital.

That’s why we built the Claymore Revenue Driver Tree.

Not as a fancy framework, but as a practical tool to expose where growth is really coming from and where it’s silently falling apart.

Because the problem isn’t always the media spend.
Sometimes it’s the landing page speed.
Sometimes it’s the list segmentation.
Sometimes it’s just misaligned incentives between departments all trying to “do growth” without a common blueprint.

Revenue isn’t linear.
It’s a system of levers.
And if you don’t know which one to pull, you’ll keep spending without scaling.

Marketing = revenue.
Or it’s just noise.