Fractional CMO
Senior marketing leadership, without the full-time cost.
Strategy before spend.
Most businesses don't have a marketing problem, they have a leadership gap: tactics running with no one owning the strategy, the numbers, or the team. A Fractional CMO gives you senior marketing leadership on a fraction of a full-time budget, accountable for the plan, the channels, and the results.
- Marketing strategy and roadmap tied directly to revenue goals
- Channel and budget allocation, where every dollar goes and why
- Team and vendor management, in-house or agency
- KPI dashboards and accountability leadership can read at a glance
- AI-adoption strategy to make marketing faster and leaner
- Hands-on leadership in your meetings, not a deck you never open
When a Fractional CMO makes sense.
- You're spending on marketing but no one owns the strategy or results
- You need senior direction but can't justify a $200K+ full-time hire
- Your channels run in isolation with no unifying plan
- You want to adopt AI across marketing but don't know where it pays off
See if Fractional CMO is the right move for your team.
Request a free quoteGet the leadership your marketing is missing.
We'll assess your current marketing, find the gaps, and show you what senior leadership would change first. Book a strategy session.
Questions, answered.
A consultant advises and leaves you a deck. We embed as your acting head of marketing: we own the strategy, set the budget, build the funnel, and then run and manage the execution alongside or in place of your team. That means we sit in your leadership meetings, make the calls on channels and spend, hold vendors and contractors accountable, and report on pipeline and revenue, not just impressions. The agency relationship typically reports up to the fractional CMO, not the other way around.
Most fractional CMO engagements run in the range of one to three days per week, scaled to your stage and how much hands-on execution you want us running. Pricing is a flat monthly retainer tied to that committed time, not hourly billing, so you can budget it cleanly against the cost of a full-time CMO hire. For example, an early-stage company often starts at a lighter cadence to set strategy and hiring plans, then dials up during a launch or funding push. We right-size the commitment at the start and revisit it each quarter.
The first weeks are a deep audit: your funnel, your data and attribution, current spend efficiency, the team and tools you have, and where revenue is actually coming from. By roughly day 30 you get a prioritized marketing strategy and budget; by day 60 to 90 we are executing on the highest-leverage moves and standing up the reporting that ties marketing activity to pipeline. We do not wait a quarter to act. Quick operational fixes, like cleaning up tracking or killing wasted ad spend, usually happen in the first few weeks while the bigger strategy takes shape.
Both are common. If you have a team, we lead it, set priorities, coach the people, and fill capability gaps with our own bench or vetted contractors. If you do not, we run the function ourselves and help you hire toward a permanent structure when the timing is right. For example, we will often write the role definitions, screen candidates, and onboard a full-time marketing lead, then transition from operator to advisor so you are not dependent on us forever.
We agree on the metrics that matter to you up front, typically pipeline contribution, customer acquisition cost, conversion rates, and marketing-sourced revenue, and report against them on a regular cadence. Because we run the work and not just advise on it, you can see real movement in campaigns, spend efficiency, and reporting clarity within the engagement, not just at the end. Engagements are month to month or on a short term after an initial ramp period, so you are never locked into a multi-year contract. If it is not delivering, you can wind it down with notice.