What is a fractional CMO?

A senior marketing executive working part-time on an ongoing basis, usually one to three days a week. They own the strategy and are accountable for the commercial result, but they direct the work rather than produce it.

How is this different from hiring your agency?

An agency executes and is measured on the work it delivers. A fractional CMO sits inside your leadership team, decides what the agencies should be doing in the first place, and is measured on pipeline and revenue. If you engage both, the fractional seat is disclosed and separated from the agency work so the vendor decision stays honest.

How much time does it take?

Between 10 and 40 hours a month depending on scope. Early-stage businesses sit at the lower end; businesses with an existing marketing team at the higher. The spine is a standing weekly session of two to four hours.

What do you need from us?

Scope agreed in writing, edit-level access to your CRM, marketing platforms and analytics, and decision rights on ideal customer, messaging and budget. Without those three, nobody can be held accountable for the result.

How long is the commitment?

It opens with a four week trial sprint against defined deliverables, after which either side can end it cleanly. Beyond that the engagement is open-ended and designed to end when you can hire a full-time CMO or run it yourselves.

What if our problem is not really marketing?

Then I will say so. If the product does not fit the market, or sales cannot close qualified opportunities, or the pricing is wrong, no marketing leader fixes that. Businesses regularly hire marketing leadership to solve a sales or product problem and conclude the model failed.

▸ Fractional CMO · Leadership, not another vendor

A CMO seat, for the days you need one.

Most businesses under $20m do not need a full-time marketing executive. They need someone senior deciding what gets done, directing the people who do it, and answering for the number at the end of the quarter.

✓ Plan in 24 hours✓ 90-day results guarantee✓ No lock-in contracts✓ Your accounts, always

jjm@studio — fractional.brief — live LIVE

$ jjm.run('fractional-cmo')

✓ commitment · 1 to 3 days · a week, ongoing

✓ owns · strategy + result · not the keyboard

✓ measured on · pipeline, revenue · never impressions

✓ trial · 4 weeks · defined deliverables, clean exit

▸ capacity for one new fractional seat

[ How this service runs in the studio · plain numbers, no decks ]

▸ The systems this leadership reports through

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01 / THE LEADERSHIP GAP

You are not short of marketing activity. You are short of someone deciding. That is a leadership gap, and no agency retainer closes it.

✗THE OLD WAY

An agency runs the ads. A freelancer writes the content. Someone built the website. Nobody owns whether any of it adds up, so the reporting says everything is working while revenue says otherwise. The founder ends up as the de facto marketing director between doing their actual job.

✓THE AGENT WAY

One senior person owns the strategy, sets the budget split, directs every vendor and contractor against a single plan, and reports on pipeline and revenue rather than activity. The existing team keeps executing. What changes is that the execution now points somewhere.

▸ The thinking — why this matters

The distinction that matters: a consultant advises and leaves, an agency executes the work, and a fractional CMO directs and carries the result. Hiring the wrong one of those three is the most common and most expensive mistake in this category, because all three cost real money and only one of them owns your number.

This is deliberately not a pair of hands. If your marketing has no team, no agency and no execution budget behind it, a fractional CMO produces a strategy nobody implements, and the honest answer is to say so before the engagement starts rather than three months into it.

02 / WHAT SHIPS

Leadership, as a working system.

Strategy, direction, accountability, at the fraction you actually need.

D/01

Marketing strategy

The plan that names what you stop doing as well as what you start. Positioning, ideal customer, and the motion that reaches them.

D/02

Channel and budget architecture

Which channels earn a place, what each one is for, and how the money splits. Allocation argued from revenue, not from cost per lead.

D/03

Vendor and team direction

Your agencies, freelancers and in-house people working against one brief instead of five. Selection, briefing and performance management included.

D/04

Attribution and reporting

A reporting model you can act on, tied to pipeline and revenue. Conversion counts are a proxy, and proxies get businesses into trouble.

D/05

Executive reporting

Board-ready reporting on what marketing contributed, what it cost, and what happens next quarter. In plain English.

D/06

Succession

The engagement is built to end. Systems documented and a team capable of running them, so you can hire a full-time CMO or keep going without one.

03 / HOW IT RUNS

▸ Same loop every week

DIAGNOSE

Listen and audit. Ship nothing.

Weeks one and two are stakeholder interviews, opening with the executive team on what they believe is broken and what success looks like at day 90. Weeks three and four audit the channels, the stack, the team and the data.

DECIDE

Positioning, plan, budget.

By day 60 you have documented positioning, a channel strategy naming the role of each channel, a budget split with reasoning attached, a team and vendor structure, and the metrics I am to be judged on.

RUN

Direction, not production.

The system goes live and your team executes it. I review output, manage the vendors, hold the budget and adjust on early data. My hands stay off the keyboard.

COMPOUND

Tune, report, hand over.

Quarterly the plan gets re-argued against what actually happened. Systems and decisions are documented as we go, so the value stays with you when the engagement ends.

04 / THE WORK

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