Guide · Money · 8-minute read
What a fractional executive costs
The category's pricing is needlessly opaque. Here are the models, the drivers, the red flags, and, unusually for a page like this, actual published numbers.
Fractional executives price three ways: monthly retainers (most commonly $3,000–$15,000 depending on days per week and the executive's market), day rates ($1,000–$3,000), and fixed-scope projects. In this practice, defined builds are published at $2,000–$5,000 and ongoing leadership starts at $2,500 a month. Treat market ranges as directional, the drivers below matter more than any average.
What actually drives the price
Four variables explain almost every quote you'll see, and none of them is "value delivered". That's the brochure word for the blend of these:
- Days per week. One day a week is oversight; three is operating. Prices scale roughly linearly with days, but the jump from advice to ownership happens somewhere around day two.
- Scope of ownership. Owning a channel costs less than owning a function; owning a function costs less than owning the seams between several. Ask precisely what the person is accountable for, and what happens when it misses.
- The executive's market. A fractional CMO carrying San Francisco costs bills San Francisco rates. One carrying Karachi costs doesn't: same standard, different cost base. Geographic arbitrage is real and legitimate; what it isn't is a quality signal in either direction.
- The state of your function. A function that exists needs running. A function that doesn't yet exist needs building first, which is more senior work, and why honest quotes follow a diagnosis rather than precede one.
The three pricing models
| Model | You pay for | Risk sits with | Right when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Day rate | Time present | You, hours aren't outcomes | Short, well-defined advisory bursts |
| Open retainer | Ongoing ownership | Shared, but renewal inertia favours the executive | A mature function needing steady leadership |
| Fixed scope | A defined outcome | The executive. They estimated it | Building something with a definable end |
The model tells you about incentives before a single conversation. A day rate rewards presence. An open-ended retainer rewards staying. A fixed scope rewards finishing, which is why this practice publishes fixed scopes wherever the work can honestly carry one, and why the retainer here runs in deliberate 90-day arcs with an exit condition rather than by default renewal.
The full-time comparison
The number a fractional price should be compared against is the fully-loaded cost of the alternative. A full-time CMO or COO in the US market runs $200,000–$350,000+ all-in once salary, benefits, recruitment fees and ramp time are counted, an estimate worth verifying against your own market, but the right order of magnitude. Add the soft costs: three to six months of search, six months of ramp, and the severance-shaped regret if the hire is wrong.
The comparison isn't "fractional is cheaper", though it is. It's that at $100K to $2M+ a month the full-time version is usually the wrong sequence. You'd be hiring a permanent operator to do a builder's job. The full argument is in fractional versus full-time.
This practice's actual numbers
Published, because you shouldn't need a sales call to learn a price:
- Discovery call, free. Forty-five minutes; you keep the written roadmap.
- KPI dashboards, $2,000. Built, team trained, monthly review.
- Sales funnel optimisation, $2,000. Fifteen days, audit to A/B test.
- Client onboarding & offboarding system, $3,500. Mapped, built, trained, reviewed at 60 days.
- Hiring & delegation: $5,000 per role. Definition to the first 90 days of KPIs.
- Ongoing marketing leadership, from $2,500 a month. Weekly cadence, monthly written report.
- Cross-functional engagements, scoped after a two-week recon, priced from facts with payback estimated per build.
Context on why these sit below US rates: the engagements page answers it directly: Karachi cost base, global clients, and a preference for being judged on the record rather than the rate card.
What should always be included
Whatever you pay, four things belong in every fractional engagement, and their absence is a price increase you'll discover later:
- Written documentation of every system built: the company's property, not the executive's leverage.
- Training for the people who'll own each system after the engagement.
- Reporting that survives the executive: dashboards your team runs, not spreadsheets that leave when they do.
- A stated exit condition: what has to be true for the engagement to end well.
Red flags in a quote
- A price before a diagnosis. Anyone quoting a cross-functional engagement from a sales call is guessing, and you'll fund the error either way.
- No written scope. "Fractional CMO services" is not a scope. What's owned, what's delivered, what's excluded.
- No exit condition. An engagement with no defined ending is structured to persist. Ask what has to be true for them to leave, and time the pause.
- Strategy with no implementation hours. That's consulting wearing a fractional title: fine, if consulting is what you meant to buy.
- Guaranteed revenue outcomes. Nobody honest guarantees your revenue with variables they don't control. Guaranteed deliverables, yes. Guaranteed multiples, run.
Next step
The reading is free. So is the first call.
Forty-five minutes on your actual business, and you leave with a written plan: whether or not you ever hire me.