Business and Economics

The CEO's Guide to Marketing-Led Growth (Second Edition)

How to Drive Business Success Through Strategic Marketing: Marketing as a Growth EngineBy Michael Shenher

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Length4h 48m

About this audiobook

Why do some companies grow effortlessly while better products lose on price? The difference is rarely the sales team, the market, or the economy. It's a blind spot at the top: CEOs who treat marketing as a department to fund instead of an asset to build. In this revised second edition, author and business advisor Michael Shenher shows chief executives how to take strategic ownership of marketing — without writing a single ad. You'll learn the five-stage Marketing-Led Maturity Model, the two numbers every CEO must know cold, how to hire and keep the right marketing leader, how to budget like a capital allocator, and how to win in the age of AI. And in the book's signature chapter, Shenher draws on decades of valuation and exit advisory work to reveal what acquirers actually pay for: a growth engine that survives its founder. Practical, direct, and built for owner-operators and mid-market CEOs, this is the playbook for building a company the market chooses and buyers pay a premium for.

CEO Romance

Audiobook details

GenreBusiness and Economics

Length4 hrs 48 mins

Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices

FormateBook with Audio

Publish dateJul 4, 2026

LanguageEnglish

1Introduction: The Growth Lever Hiding in Plain Sight

2The Delegation Trap

3Marketing Is Capital Allocation by Another Name

4Why Now

5The Lighthouse and the Tugboat

Show all chapters

6What This Book Will Do for You

7A Note on What I Am Asking of You

8PART I — THE MINDSET

9Chapter 1: The CEO’s Marketing Mindset

10The Conductor’s Podium

11What Marketing Actually Is (and Why the Word Fails Us)

12Two Operating Systems: Sales-Driven and Marketing-Led

13The Case of the Distributor Who Kept Losing on Price

14The Journey Is the P&amp;L in Disguise

15The CEO’s Move

16Chapter 2: Acquisition, Retention, and the Economics of Loyalty

17The Two Numbers

18The Fully Loaded Truth About Acquisition Cost

19Lifetime Value: The Number That Changes the Question

20The Leaky Bucket

21Costco: A Business Model Built on Renewal

22The Software Company That Grew Profit Forty Percent Without a Single New Logo

23The Hotel Test

24The CEO’s Move

25Chapter 3: The Marketing-Led Maturity Model

26Why You Need a Map Before a Plan

27Stage One: Marketing as Expense

28Stage Two: Marketing as Function

29Stage Three: Marketing as Alignment

30Stage Four: Marketing as Strategy

31Stage Five: Marketing as Operating System

32The Self-Assessment

33The CEO’s Move

34PART II — THE ORGANIZATION

35Chapter 4: Building the Marketing-Led Organization

36Strategy Doesn’t Fail in the Boardroom

37The Cathedral and the Scaffolding

38The First Belief: The Customer Is Everyone’s Department

39Working Backwards: The Amazon Mechanism

40Structure: Silos, Bridges, and the Revenue Question

41The Case of the Manufacturer Whose Org Chart Was the Strategy

42Routines: What Survives the Enthusiasm

43The CEO’s Move

44Chapter 5: The CEO–CMO Partnership

45The Shortest Seat at the Table

46The Translator

47Hire for the Stage, Not the Résumé

48The First Ninety Days: A Contract, Not a Honeymoon

49Evaluating Honestly: Leading Indicators and the Two-Clock Problem

50The Fractional Option: The Mid-Market’s Honest Answer

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The CEO's Guide to Marketing-Led Growth (Second Edition)

About this audiobook

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