A Chat with Caroline Hodson, Founder and Managing Director at WoolfHodson

Tell us about WoolfHodson

We are marketing engineers. We are experienced business and technology practitioners who solve marketing challenges.

Unlike traditional consultancies that craft marketing and business strategies, we bring those strategies to life through a lens of levers and mechanisms, asking: ‘How do we operationalise this strategy, and how do we ensure its successful execution?’

This engineering mindset sets us apart. Our mission is to improve sales and marketing performance across the entire customer lifecycle. We build stronger connections that equip businesses with new capabilities, making them more effective, efficient, and scalable.

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

As marketing director of a global tech company, I led the implementation of CRM and marketing automation platforms to increase our digital and data maturity.  As early adopters, we believed in the promise of seamless integration – that simply plugging in new technology would transform our operations overnight

It wasn’t true.

Marketing technology rapidly became a core component of a marketing leader’s role. But many marketers found the ‘new ways’ uncomfortable.  So, the key premise behind WoolfHodson was to enable organisations to do it themselves.  By working closely with marketing teams, we helped them bridge the gap to sales so teams could better explain the progression they were making in digital capabilities – and the benefits of those changes.

What is your advice to aspiring entrepreneurs?

My advice to aspiring entrepreneurs is quite straightforward: at some point, you must back yourself and jump off the cliff. If you have strong views and believe things can be done differently, there comes a moment when you either step up or get back in line.

If you’re at that point, jump off the cliff.

What’s the worst that can happen?

You land badly and get another job. That’s it.

What most excites you about WoolfHodson?

What excites me most is building a culture where people genuinely enjoy their work, feel challenged, and truly care – about each other, our clients, and the outcome we deliver. Continuing to grow our business and not lose that passion is what drives me.

And right now, we are lucky to be in such an exciting, fast-evolving, and unpredictable market.  I enjoy that ambiguity; I thrive in situations where I don’t have all the answers.

I often tell the team: embrace the fog. You can’t get to the other side without stepping into it first.  We’re creative thinkers, connecting the dots, and pulling different perspectives together to make sense of it. That’s exciting. When you have people who care, who can simplify complexity, and impacting business outcomes, you’re driving real change.

How has the company evolved over the last couple of years?

The core idea hasn’t changed. But we’ve gotten a lot better at it and we’ve grown.

As the world and our business evolve, new tools and capabilities mean that we can deliver faster progress and tackle more complex challenges.  We don’t build or own technology, but by connecting the right pieces thoughtfully using new technical capabilities to automate processes, we’re unlocking the answers to problems that business leaders have been grappling with for years.

That’s how we’re evolving.

What can we hope to see from WoolfHodson in the future?

The future is more of the same – but different.

Five years from now, will we look like we do today? I doubt it. Technology is evolving fast and that drives change.

Our job is to stay two steps ahead of our clients. If we’re not, we can’t guide them.

There are difficult times ahead for businesses. We don’t have all the answers, but we have a proven methodology that enables us to, working in partnership with our clients, to work them out.  We need to stay ahead of the technology and change curve.  And that’s exactly where I intend to be.

So, we’ll keep diving into the fog; finding the potential and creating a sense of order as we come out the other side!