Recon · Days 0 to 14
Establish the facts
Nothing gets built in the first two weeks. We find out what's true.
- Funnel and channel performance review
- Attribution reality check
- Team capability and gap map
- Written diagnosis, ranked by value
Fractional CMO · Founder-led companies
A fractional CMO who builds the function, not the dependency.
Marketing runs through you: every campaign waits on your approval, every hire needed a manager you didn't have time to be. I take the function off your desk (set the strategy, lead the team, build the dashboards) and hand it back running without me by day 90.
No pitch deck · 45 minutes · You leave with a plan
01 When this is the right call
Marketing became your second job
None of these mean your marketing people are bad. They mean nobody senior owns the function, and by default, that's been you.
You'll recognise at least three of these
- 01
Every campaign waits on your approval. Marketing is a queue, and you're the server.
- 02
You've hired marketers before: good ones. They needed a manager you didn't have time to be.
- 03
The agency sends reports full of activity. Nobody can tell you which activity became revenue.
- 04
The funnel converts, but you can't say which part does the work, so you can't scale it on purpose.
- 05
There's no marketing number you trust, so decisions get made on the most recent anecdote.
What changes
- One person owns marketing. It isn't you.
- Every channel reports to one dashboard you read weekly, in Notion, Asana, or wherever your team already lives.
- The team runs a documented system, not tribal knowledge that leaves when someone resigns.
- New marketers onboard into SOPs and a trained role, not a job description and a shrug.
This works for SaaS founders, agency owners, coaches and course creators, and e-commerce operators doing roughly $100K to $2M+ a month.
02 The division of labour
What I own. What stays yours.
The failure mode of every outside marketing hire is a blurry boundary. Here is the boundary, in writing, before you've spent anything.
| Area | Mine | Yours |
|---|---|---|
| Strategy & positioning | The plan, the argument, the priorities | Final sign-off |
| Channel execution | Direction, standards, weekly review | Your team does the work, led by me |
| Dashboards & attribution | Built, maintained, honest | Reading them weekly, the habit I leave you |
| Hiring & training | Role definition, sourcing, first 90 days of KPIs | The employment relationship |
| Budget & vendors | Recommendation and negotiation | The signature |
03 The work
Fixed scope. Fixed fee.
The marketing engagements, with their actual prices. Each one ships a working system and the documentation to run it without me.
Sales funnel optimisationAudit, optimisation plan, implementation, A/B testing, report.
$2,00015 days
KPI dashboard setup & managementCustom dashboards, team trained on them, monthly review.
$2,000
Hiring & delegationRole definition, sourcing, interviews, first 90 days of KPI management: plus an internal training course so the role is repeatable.
$5,000per role
Marketing strategy & implementationStrategy, execution oversight, weekly check-ins, monthly reporting.
$2,500per month
Fractional CMO, full function ownershipTeam leadership, budget and vendor management, cross-functional coordination.
Retainerscoped
Founder's Advantage, 90-day planTwo hires, strategy, funnel, dashboards and onboarding bundled into one engagement.
Bundle
Something operational rather than marketing-shaped? That's the fractional COO engagement. The complete list across both lives on the engagements page.
04 The arc
The first ninety days
The same arc as every engagement (recon, ascent, altitude), pointed at marketing.
Ascent · Days 15 to 45
Ship the systems
The fixes that ranked highest, built in order.
- Dashboards live and reporting
- Funnel rebuilt and under test
- SOPs written for each process
- Roles defined, sourcing opened
Altitude · Days 46 to 90
Make it run without you
The part most consultants skip, because it is unglamorous and it is the whole point.
- Hires onboarded through the training course
- KPIs managed to the 90-day mark
- Weekly reporting running without me
- Full documentation handover
Day 91
Marketing runs without you in the room. Now we scale it.
05 Answers
Asked on almost every call
What does a fractional CMO actually do?
A fractional CMO owns the marketing function part-time (strategy, team leadership, reporting and accountability for results), typically one to three days a week instead of a full-time salary. The difference from an agency or a consultant is ownership: what the function produces is the fractional CMO's problem, not a line item on someone else's report.
In this practice the role runs on a 90-day arc (recon, ascent, altitude) documented in full here.
How much does a fractional CMO cost?
Fixed builds are published at fixed prices: funnel optimisation at $2,000, dashboards at $2,000, hiring at $5,000 per role. Ongoing marketing leadership starts at $2,500 a month. A full fractional CMO retainer is scoped after the discovery call, because its price depends on the state of the function.
Every engagement and its price is published here. You can decide whether the conversation is worth having before you have it.
Do I need a fractional CMO if I already have marketers?
That's usually exactly when you need one. Marketers without senior direction produce activity (posts, campaigns, reports), and activity is not a strategy. A fractional CMO turns the people you already pay for into a function: priorities set weekly, work reviewed against numbers, skills developed deliberately.
If you have no team at all and no budget to build one, you don't need a CMO of any kind yet. You need a first marketer, and I'd tell you that on the call.
What's the difference between a fractional CMO and an agency?
An agency executes one function at depth (ads, SEO, content), inside its own scope. A fractional CMO owns the whole marketing outcome and directs that scope, including telling you when the agency is the wrong spend. An agency structurally can't recommend spending less with itself.
The two work well together, with the roles in the right order. The honest comparison is here.
What happens in the first month?
Two weeks of recon, then the first builds. Nothing gets built in the first fortnight. We establish what's true: funnel and channel performance, the attribution reality, what the team can carry. You get a written diagnosis with the fixes ranked by what they're worth, and the highest-value build starts in week three.
The rest (engagement length, remote work, what happens if we don't get along), is on the full answers page.
Next step
Marketing off your desk in ninety days.
Bring the funnel, the numbers, the team: whatever state they're in. Forty-five minutes later you have a written read on what to fix first, whether or not you ever hire me.