Fractional CMO With a Named Successor From Day One

Two or three days a week, six to twelve months, and your permanent hire agreed by name before month four. I hold the marketing budget line, the team and the agency relationships, and I sit in the executive meeting with a number I have to defend rather than a recommendation I can walk away from. I do not sign for less than six months, because nothing measurable happens in three, and I have never stayed past twelve. The first thirty days: No strategy. I read and I listen. Every person on the team, one hour each, alone. The last four board packs and twelve months of reporting, including the months that were never presented. Ten recorded customer or admissions calls, or ten hours on the showroom floor, depending on what you sell. Finance's version of the revenue numbers rather than marketing's. At day thirty you get one page: what I believe is true, what I think we stop, and what I still do not know. What I hold: The budget line and its defence in front of the board. Team performance and the hard conversations attached to it, including the ones your last marketing lead deferred. Agency scope, renewal and, where it is warranted, termination. Pricing and packaging I contribute to and do not own. If marketing owns pricing in your company, that is a structural problem and I will raise it in week two. The successor: The search opens between month three and month four, run the way I run any senior hire: a scorecard signed before the first conversation and a work sample instead of a panel impression. The final sixty days are handover, with the new person in the chair and me in the room saying very little. An engagement that ends without a named successor has failed, whatever the numbers did in the meantime. Limits I keep: Two clients at a time, never three. I do not run media accounts, touch the ad platforms or write copy. If that is what the seat needs, you want a senior manager and you will resent paying this rate for one. I will not take a seat where the founder keeps final approval on creative and intends to keep it; the role is advisory at that point, and both of us would spend a quarter pretending otherwise. No equity in place of fee. Not for: Companies below roughly two million dollars of revenue with no marketing team at all. There is nothing to lead and the money is better spent on your first full-time hire. Companies wanting a name on the website for a funding round. Turnarounds where the decision to cut the team is already taken and the fractional hire exists to execute it; I will do difficult headcount work, but not as a rented signature on somebody else's decision. What I know well: Edtech, where spend is front-loaded against two intake peaks and revenue arrives months after the money went out, and where admissions and marketing almost always disagree about who owns a lead. Publishing with mixed subscription and advertising revenue, where the two halves of the business want opposite things from the same audience. Furniture and home retail, where consideration runs past ten weeks and delivery lead time becomes a marketing constraint before it is a logistics one. Outside those three I take the seat only when the pattern is one I recognise, and I say so before you sign anything. How the money works: Monthly, invoiced in advance, thirty days' notice either way after the first six months. No success fee, no equity, no commission on media or on any vendor I recommend.