Fractional CMO services for companies that outgrew winging it
There is an awkward stage where marketing is too important to run off the side of the owner desk and not yet big enough to justify a full time chief marketing officer at north of two hundred thousand a year. That gap is where campaigns get bought without a strategy and nobody can say what worked.
A fractional CMO fills it. You get senior marketing leadership, an owner for the number and a plan the whole team runs against, for a set number of days a month. We have 40+ years of combined experience, and you get the owners of the firm, not a placement from a bench.
What a fractional CMO is
A part time chief marketing officer. Same role as the full time version, compressed into a set number of days a month. They own the strategy, direct whoever executes it, and are accountable to leadership for what marketing produces. What they are not is a consultant who delivers a deck and leaves, or a contractor who runs your ads.
When you actually need one
The signals are consistent. Marketing spend is real money now and nobody can say what it returned. You have vendors but no plan they all follow. A junior marketer is being asked to make senior decisions. Or growth stalled and the internal debate has no tiebreaker. If none of those are true, you probably need execution, not leadership, and we will tell you so.
What it costs against a full time hire
A chief marketing officer in a mid sized company is a large salary plus bonus, benefits, payroll tax and the risk of a bad hire at that level. A fractional engagement is a fraction of that number because you are buying days, not a person. The comparison people miss is that a bad full time CMO costs a year of momentum on top of the money.
How the first ninety days go
Weeks one to three are the audit: analytics, ad accounts, site, content, pipeline data and a read of the team. Weeks four to six produce the written plan, the budget split and the targets. From week seven it is execution oversight, with a standing leadership meeting and a monthly report. By day ninety you should be able to see the difference in the reporting, not just the activity.
Working with the team you already have
Most engagements direct people who are already there: an in house marketer, an agency you like, a designer on contract. Good leadership makes that group more effective rather than replacing it. Where a role is genuinely missing we say so, and we help write the job description and interview for it.
How you know it is working
Leading indicators move first: tracking gets trustworthy, the plan exists, meetings get shorter because the decisions are already made. Then pipeline. We agree the number at the start and report against it monthly, and if it is not moving by the second quarter, that is a conversation we start rather than one you have to.
Recent reading from our team
Written by our team, not spun by a tool. Everything we publish is something we do for clients.
