fractional leadership
you might not need a fractional CMO.
People search for one when growth has stalled and the in-house team is stretched. It's a sensible instinct and often the wrong shape of answer. Here's when it works, when it does not, and what to ask before you hire either of us.
what a fractional cmo actually is.
A senior marketer, part time, on your leadership team. Usually one to three days a week, usually on a rolling contract, usually somebody who has done the job full time somewhere larger.
It's a good model. It exists because a business can need senior marketing judgement long before it can justify a full-time salary for it, and the market has correctly worked out that the gap is real.
when it's the right answer.
Three cases, and they are common.
You know the problem is marketing.
Demand is genuinely the constraint, the rest of the business works, and what is missing is somebody senior to own it.
You have a team to lead.
There are people doing marketing already and the gap is direction, standards and someone accountable for the number.
The work is continuous.
Marketing is not a project for you, it is an operating function that needs running week after week.
If all three are true, hire one. We will say so on the call, and we can usually suggest where to look.
when it's the wrong shape.
The problem crosses functions and only one of them gets a seat.
This is the common case and it is the reason this page exists. A business comes to the conclusion that it needs marketing leadership because demand is the symptom it can see. Underneath, enquiries are not converting because the handover is broken, margin is thin because pricing was never revisited, and the team is doing by hand what a system should do. A fractional CMO will diagnose that correctly and then be able to act on roughly a third of it. The other two thirds are somebody else's remit, and the honest ones will tell you so. Now you are hiring a fractional COO as well, and the two of them are negotiating the boundary between them at your expense.
Nobody is accountable for the whole number.
Split the problem across two part-time functional leaders and you have split the accountability with it. Each can succeed at their remit while the thing you actually wanted does not move.
A seat is not a diagnosis.
Deciding you need a CMO is deciding what the answer is before anybody has established what the question was. That is the same mistake as buying software before defining the problem, and it is more expensive.
what we do instead.
We are not a fractional anything and we do not want a seat on your leadership team.
We take the problem, work out what is actually causing it across every function it touches, and build the fix. Sometimes that's marketing. Often it's a pricing change, a process, a system, or three small things in three different places that only make sense together.
Then we leave. An engagement that has done its job should end, which is not what a monthly retainer for a seat is designed to do.
the questions to ask either of us.
Ask these of a fractional CMO and of us. The answers will tell you which shape you need.
- 01What would you look at first, and why that?
- 02What would make you say this is not a marketing problem?
- 03What does success look like, as a number, and when would we know?
- 04What happens to this when you are not here any more?
- 05What would make you tell me to stop paying you?
If the answers to the second and the fifth are vague, that's your answer, whoever you are talking to.
describe the problem, not the role.
Tell us what is actually happening and we'll tell you what shape of help it needs, even when that is not us. The first conversation is an hour and it's free.