One group budget, nine country budgets, and one definition per metric
How do you hold a marketing budget that is spread across ten countries, several currencies and ten ways of working? Not by centralising the spend. By centralising the rule. Between 2022 and 2024, as group marketing and communications director at Bboxx, I held a six-figure group budget for 2024, line by line, and built a consolidated country budget with nine subsidiaries, more than twice the size of the group budget.
The starting point was not a money problem. In the first quarter of 2023, across the ten markets, only three budgets had been received and approved. Three had not come in at all, one market had no defined budget and cleared its spend month by month, another had no visibility on its own. Nobody was cheating. There was simply no common format, no calendar, and no shared definition of what was being counted.
What changed is not the amount, it is the rule. One construction template, one written definition per metric, a review ritual with the nine subsidiaries, and real-time dashboards where the group and the country read the same number at the same moment.
Bboxx operated in ten African countries, with subsidiaries of very different sizes and maturities. Each market built its marketing budget with whoever was at hand: here the marketing manager, there the managing director, elsewhere finance, elsewhere again a file inherited from the previous year. The group did not have one marketing budget, it had ten, written in ten formats. Arbitrating between them was impossible, and comparing one market to another meant nothing.
A marketing budget in a multi-country group is not an accounting line, it is a permanent negotiation. The country lead defends their market, finance defends cash, the group defends brand coherence. Add several currencies, including one market whose budget is denominated in CFA francs, and approval cycles that do not land at the same time. And the underlying constraint: I had no line authority over the country teams, the oversight was functional. A rule that is not adopted is not imposed.
1 · One build template.
The same file for all nine subsidiaries, the same line items, the same granularity, the same carry-forward tab from the previous year. And one rule inside it: a country's budget is derived from its target volume and its average contract value, at a rate chosen from four regimes, 2% for an established market up to 10% for a growth goal, then split with one B2C and B2B allocation grid. Nobody asks for an amount. Comparison becomes possible the day everyone writes in the same place, not before.
2 · One definition per metric, and only one.
A lead, a sale, a cost per sale: one written definition, the same everywhere, including when it suited a market less. It is the least visible part of the job, and it decides everything else.
3 · Real-time dashboards, read by everyone.
The group and the country look at the same number at the same moment. The country keeps execution autonomy, the group keeps the truth. No more arbitration over numbers rebuilt after the fact.
4 · A functional management ritual.
A regular review with the nine subsidiaries under remit, the same agenda every time. With no line authority, regularity is the only lever left, and it is a good one.
5 · The group budget held line by line.
On the 2024 group budget, the lines I held directly were named: media buying, outsourced production, tool licences, group B2C campaigns. A marketing director who cannot say exactly what they hold, holds nothing.
Bboxx group scope, 2022-2024.
- An annual six-figure group budget and nine country budgets, governed across ten markets in 2024: the group budget held line by line, each line owned by name, the country budgets consolidated and arbitrated
- Consolidated country budget built with nine subsidiaries, more than twice the group budget, four approved out of nine at consolidation
- From three budgets out of ten received and approved in the first quarter of 2023, to one construction template applied by all nine subsidiaries
- One written definition per metric, the same from group to country, read on shared real-time dashboards
- A functional management ritual held with the nine subsidiaries, with no reporting line
A budget is not a number, it is an agreement. Across ten markets, the hard part is never spending, it is knowing what you count and counting it the same way everywhere. Once the definition is written and shared, arbitration becomes a ten-minute conversation instead of a three-week negotiation. If your subsidiaries report ten different truths, that is not a reporting problem, it is a definition problem.
The construction rule, the allocation grid and the monthly file are written up, with the working spreadsheet, in the paper on the marketing budget of an African subsidiary.
Ten subsidiaries, ten different truths?
The first call30 minutes. We talk about your traction and what is blocking it. You leave with 2 or 3 moves you can act on. No pitch.
Half the agency's margin came from business I had won
Constraint: selling and producing with the same people.
Read the case studyPublishing prices and lead times, in an agency, in 2014
Constraint: selling digital to a market that was not buying it yet.
Read the case studySeventy-seven months of monthly P&L, line by line
Constraint: a business where a negative month is negative.
Read the case studyA marketing function built from zero, in a company that had none
Constraint: one external consultant, a team to build from scratch.
Read the case studyTV-package sales through a rights-free AFCON campaign
Constraint: no sponsorship rights, three markets not even qualified.
Read the case study