You need marketing leadership. You don't need a $250,000 hire.
Someone senior enough to own the number, set the direction, and develop the team you already have - without the salary, the equity, the search, or the risk of getting it wrong twice.
Schedule a discovery call →- We need a CMO. We can't justify the comp.
- My marketing manager is good. She needs someone to report to who knows more than she does.
- We had a CMO. It didn't work out. (Often twice.)
- The board wants a marketing strategy and I don't have one to give them.
- We've got the platforms. Nobody's driving them.
- I'm the CEO and I'm functionally running marketing, and I'm not good at it.
Each of these describes the same underlying gap: the company has outgrown marketing-as-a-function and hasn't yet built marketing-as-a-discipline. There's execution but no direction, or direction that changes every quarter because nobody senior owns it.
A full-time CMO search takes four to nine months and costs a quarter million a year once it lands. That part is well understood.
The part that gets underestimated is the failure rate — and why it's so high at this size.
A company that needs someone to build a function hires someone who has only ever run one. Those are different jobs. The person who thrived with a team of thirty and an agency roster is not necessarily the person who can build from two people and a half-configured CRM.
Nobody has diagnosed what's actually wrong before hiring someone to fix it. The CMO arrives, spends the first quarter figuring out what everyone thought they were hiring for, and discovers three incompatible answers.
By the time it's clear the hire isn't working, eighteen months and several hundred thousand dollars are gone, the team has churned, and the CEO is more gun-shy about the role than before.
If you've been through this once, you already know all of it.
What actually gets done
A Fractional CMO engagement covers the whole chain. Not advice on it — accountability for it.
Plus the part that isn't on any list: developing the marketing people you already have, so good work happens without you in the room.
Not advice from the sidelines. Ownership.
- A marketing strategy tied to the revenue plan, not to a channel list
- Clear priorities — what gets resourced this quarter and what doesn't
- Positioning and messaging that hold up under sales pressure and competitive contact
- Accountability for pipeline contribution, not for activity
- Reporting the board can read and challenge
- Honest calls about what's working, including when it's something you paid for
- Your marketing manager or coordinator gets someone senior to learn from — usually the highest-return part of the engagement
- Structure and standards, so good work happens without you in the room
- Hiring guidance when it's time to add, and honest counsel when it isn't
- Including AI. Most companies are being sold AI tools right now. Fewer are being helped to think about what AI actually does to their market, their category, and what their marketing function should look like in three years.
- The useful answer is frequently “not yet, and here's what has to be true first.” That answer is worth more than a pilot.
You get senior judgment on every engagement. Not a senior person who sells the work and a junior team that delivers it. The person who diagnoses the problem is the person who does the work — with systems built to handle the volume that would otherwise require a department.
We plug in as your marketing function, not as a vendor. In your meetings, in your CRM, accountable to your numbers. Your team knows who to bring problems to.
Fixed monthly fee, agreed up front. No hourly billing. No scope surprises.
Defined cadence, real availability. A set rhythm of strategy and working sessions, plus availability between them. Marketing problems don't schedule themselves.
Built to make itself unnecessary. The goal is a function that runs without outside help. Some engagements end with a full-time hire that finally makes sense — and by then you know exactly who to hire and what to ask them, because the role has been defined by someone doing it.
Every engagement at this level begins with a Growth Readiness Assessment.
It's a fixed-fee diagnostic, and it happens before any retainer is scoped.
The reason is straightforward: scoping the work before understanding the problem is how the expensive version of this decision goes wrong. It's the same mistake as hiring a CMO against an undiagnosed mandate — you commit to an answer before anyone has established the question.
The assessment examines the growth engine across people, process, and platforms, and produces a written diagnosis and a prioritized roadmap. Sometimes it concludes you need a fractional CMO. Sometimes it concludes you need a marketing operations hire and a cleaner CRM, and no retainer at all. Sometimes it concludes your marketing is fine and the constraint is somewhere else entirely.
All three are good outcomes. You get an accurate answer either way, and the assessment stands alone.
Learn about the Growth Readiness Assessment →Is this the right fit?
- Marketing needs direction more than it needs more activity
- You have people who can execute but nobody who can set the strategy
- The board or your investors are asking questions about growth you can't answer well
- You've tried a full-time hire, or looked hard at one and couldn't make the math work
- You want to develop the team you have rather than replace them
- You'd rather build a function than rent a campaign
You want someone to execute campaigns rather than lead — that's a different hire
You want a strategy document and no involvement
Marketing is still mostly you and there's no team yet — the Small Business Accelerator is built for that stage
You need a name for the org chart more than you need the work done
Current work
New England's Tap House Grille Restaurant Group
Four businesses under one ownership group: a restaurant, a raw bar, a farm, and an event venue. Each with its own audience, all competing for the same attention and the same owner's hours. The work was untangling that — distinct positioning per brand, shared operating discipline underneath, and a structure the team could actually run.
Kirk Trucking & Forestry Recycling
A regional operator with real demand and no way to capture it. Brand and website rebuilt around how customers actually search and decide.
Z Car Club Association
Fourteen years building a 40,000-member community and a partnership with Nissan North America, on effectively no budget. Most of what we know about producing results under constraint came from here.
Where the pattern was learned
Before consulting, we ran marketing inside organizations large enough to see the same problem at scale — and in three very different ones, the growth constraint turned out to be identical. The demand was already visible in the data, and nothing was set up to act on it.
At Newforma, contact data was arriving at too low a resolution to be useful. Raising that fidelity, isolating the people engaging with high-intent content rather than browsing, and segmenting around that behavior increased qualified leads by 289%.
At Cell Signaling Technology, working with sales and web operations, we identified which contacts were genuinely in research and consideration based on how they moved through the site, and built messaging for those cohorts — the company's first global program of its kind.
At Southern New Hampshire University, gaps in the nurturing process were letting interested students go cold. Closing them, realigning messaging, and concentrating communication on students actively researching specific areas of study contributed to enrollment growth from 90,000 to 120,000.
Common questions.
Why does a Fractional CMO engagement start with the Growth Readiness Assessment?
Scoping the work before understanding the problem is how the expensive version of this decision goes wrong. It's the same mistake as hiring a CMO against an undiagnosed mandate — you commit to an answer before anyone has established the question. The assessment examines the growth engine across people, process, and platforms, and produces a written diagnosis and a prioritized roadmap. Sometimes it concludes you need a fractional CMO. Sometimes it concludes you need a marketing operations hire and a cleaner CRM, and no retainer at all. Sometimes it concludes your marketing is fine and the constraint is somewhere else entirely. All three are good outcomes. You get an accurate answer either way, and the assessment stands alone.
Is a Fractional CMO the right fit for my business?
It fits if marketing needs direction more than it needs more activity; you have people who can execute but nobody who can set the strategy; the board or your investors are asking questions about growth you can't answer well; you've tried a full-time hire, or looked hard at one and couldn't make the math work; you want to develop the team you have rather than replace them; or you'd rather build a function than rent a campaign.
When is a Fractional CMO not the right fit?
It isn't the right fit if you want someone to execute campaigns rather than lead — that's a different hire; you want a strategy document and no involvement; marketing is still mostly you and there's no team yet — the Small Business Accelerator is built for that stage; or you need a name for the org chart more than you need the work done.
Start with a conversation.
Thirty minutes. Tell us what's happening with the business, what you've tried, and what the board is asking about. We'll tell you honestly whether this is a leadership gap, an execution gap, or something that isn't a marketing problem at all - and what the right next step looks like, whether or not it involves us.
Schedule a discovery call →