Two years on. What CDM has become.

A note from Caylee on what the firm is, what it isn't, and what's new.

Two years ago this week, I started CDonaldson Marketing. The last twelve months in particular have been some of the most demanding of my life, for reasons that have very little to do with work and everything to do with what makes work worth doing.

It was supposed to be a simple thing. I'd worked in B2B event marketing for over a decade running campaigns, leading teams, fixing the messy parts of the funnel that finance always wanted to know about and marketing teams rarely had time to articulate. I left to do that work directly for clients, on my own terms, with the consultants I most trusted plugged in around me.

I wasn't sure if it would become a firm. I thought, honestly, that it might just be me freelancing for a year while I figured out what I wanted next.

It's now twenty-plus clients later. A small but brilliant team. A specialist bench of contractors I'd trust on any of my own projects. Engagements that have moved real commercial numbers; registrations up 47% on a flagship summit, rebook rebuilt from 41% to 68% across a conference portfolio, sponsor pipelines built from cold to closed. Work I'm genuinely proud of, with people I'm grateful to know.

This week, on CDM's second anniversary, I'm writing to share what the business has actually become, and what's new.

What CDM is now

CDM is a flexible resourcing solution for B2B event organisers. We provide event marketing people, at every level from marketing assistant to Marketing Director, on the durations, in the team shapes, and with the working pattern that actually fits what each client is trying to deliver.

What that looks like in practice varies more than I'd realised before sitting down to write this. Some clients have us for a single contractor across six weeks. Some have a senior consultant of ours fractionally for a year. Some have a full embedded team running an event cycle from launch through delivery. Some bring us in to plug a maternity gap or a resignation while they recruit permanently. Some bring us in to run an entire event cycle so their in-house team can stay focused elsewhere.

The unifying thread isn't a particular kind of engagement. It's that all of it is event-led, done by people who've spent their careers in events and are deeply passionate about marketing.

For a long time I described CDM as a "senior event marketing consultancy" because that's how it started. Two years in, the truth is broader: we're the resourcing solution event organisers call when they need event marketing capability, in whatever shape, without the overhead of permanent hiring. Marketing assistant for the busy season. Marketing director for a year. A team for a launch. A specialist for a specific stretch. We do all of it. We're built for it.

If you've worked with us before, none of how we work has changed, same standards, same people, same care. What's changed is that we're saying the actual proposition out loud rather than describing only its narrowest version.

What's new: Sprint and In Diary

Two specific kinds of work kept coming up that didn't quite fit inside the resourcing model. Both deserved their own focus, with their own commercial logic. So we built two specialist sub-brands.

Sprint is for specialist event marketing projects. The kind of work where the right answer is a niche skill set delivered properly, not a permanent role to keep doing it. CRM rebuilds. Data audit and acquisition programmes. Analytics and tracking architectures. Marketing operations restructures. Every project is scoped properly upfront, delivered to a fixed fee, and handed over with the documentation a client team needs to maintain it.

Sprint exists because there's a real gap between hiring someone permanent and engaging an ongoing consultancy. Most specialist marketing work is too specific to justify an in-house hire, the skills are niche, the work is intermittent. Too bounded to need a contractor for three months. Too technical for a generalist agency to deliver well. Sprint sits in that gap, delivered by experienced specialists who've built their careers inside the event industry.

In Diary is for outbound business development campaigns. Warming cold prospects and reviving stale leads, so your sales team can sell to people who already know who they are. Senior callers, considered outreach, real meetings booked into real diaries. We work with your data, not ours. We build the boilerplate that lets our team represent your brand confidently. We blend calls, emails, voicemails and LinkedIn outreach as one coordinated programme. And we report transparently, every week.

In Diary exists because most outbound for B2B is industrialised in a way that doesn't work for senior audiences. The model needed rebuilding around craft, not volume. We bring our marketing expertise to the table and deliver the business development campaigns we wish were delivered when we were booking these campaigns ourselves!

The cleanest way to think about the three

CDM is for when you need event marketing people at any level, in any shape, for any duration. Sprint is for when you need a specific project delivered well without bringing someone in to deliver it. In Diary is for when you need outbound calls made to warm cold prospects and book real meetings.

People. A project. Calls. Three different units of value, three different commercial structures, all running off the same standard and the same leadership.

What hasn't changed

The thing I most want to say, particularly to clients who've been with us from the start: nothing about how we work has changed. Same standards. Same care. Same people.

What's different is that we've named the work that wasn't quite fitting before. The technical projects clients kept asking for, that were too bounded for a full engagement, now have a home in Sprint. The outbound work that needed to be its own discipline, with its own rigour, now has a home in In Diary. The full breadth of resourcing, assistant through to director, contractor through to embedded team, now has language that actually describes it.

If you're a CDM client today, you don't need to do anything. The next time a project, an outbound need, or a different shape of resourcing request comes up, we'll point you at the right place in the family.

A thank you, and what's next

Work has been the place where things have made sense, even when other things haven't. To everyone who's worked with us, sent referrals, made introductions, given feedback, or just told someone else about us at the right moment: thank you doesn't quite cover it. Particularly through this past year.

To the clients I'm yet to work with: I'd love to. Whether you need event marketing people through CDM, a specialist project through Sprint, an outbound campaign through In Diary, or just a conversation about whether we're a fit, the door is open.

The next two years are about going deeper. Better case studies. More specialist content on the work that actually matters. A slightly bigger team where it makes sense. Clearer language for the breadth of work we already do.

That work starts now.

Caylee Donaldson Founder, CDM

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