Senior operating capability, sized to what your P&L can carry — unit economics first, then an engine across paid and owned that compounds after I leave.
Consultants recommend. Agencies execute channels. A fractional CMO owns the outcome — the budget calls, the hiring calls, and the number the board asks about. Four moves, in order:
Unit economics first: CAC, payback, LTV, channel mix, and where the funnel math actually breaks. No deck — a diagnosis, and a plan priced against your P&L.
Paid and owned built as one system that reinforces both — acquisition, attribution you can trust, the data infrastructure, and the offers the numbers say to run.
I own the number in the room — budget calls, hiring calls, channel calls — reporting to the founder or board on capital-efficiency metrics, not vanity metrics.
The engagement builds in-house capability that stays: a team that runs the system, documented economics, and channels that keep producing. Often I help hire my full-time successor.
If the situation below sounds like yours, there's a page that goes deeper — each one is the same operator, pointed at a different problem.
Operator roles through three exits, a public-company rebuild, and a category built from zero — the same system, pointed at different P&Ls.
My longest engagement: replaced the agency model channel by channel in ~90 days, built first-party data and honest multi-touch attribution, and scaled the channel to $100M+ per year in attributed revenue.
The fix was the customer, the offer, and the funnel economics — operator decisions that turned the P&L in two months and set up the exit.
Built the national leader in in-home pet end-of-life care with a lean AI-native team — demand compounding through owned channels, paid as the accelerant.
Marketplace growth done in sequence: solve the harder side, build density market by market, then scale the easier side with cheap channels.
Enter your website. The diagnostic reads your company and your market the way an operator would — where the funded pain is, what your current marketing is actually selling to, the gap, and what I'd do next. A few minutes; the output is yours to keep.
The same job as a full-time CMO, on a defined weekly commitment: own the growth number end to end. In practice that means auditing unit economics in the first 30 days, building and running the growth engine — paid acquisition, owned channels, attribution, the team — and reporting to the founder or board on capital-efficiency metrics. It is an operating role with budget and hiring authority, not an advisory relationship that produces recommendations.
Across the US market, most serious fractional CMO engagements run somewhere in the mid-four to low-five figures per month, depending on days per week and scope. Compare that to a full-time CMO at $300K+ fully loaded before equity — or to the quieter cost of another two quarters of stalled growth while you search. The structural advantage isn't that fractional is cheap; it's that you get senior operating capability now, sized to what the P&L can actually carry.
Full-time makes sense when marketing complexity genuinely fills five days a week and will for years — usually well past $50M with multiple product lines. Before that, most companies need senior judgment more than senior headcount. The fractional structure covers the years in between, and a good engagement ends by design: I build the engine, then often help hire and onboard the full-time CMO who inherits it.
A defined weekly commitment sized to scope — enough to own the operating cadence, not to sit in the office. What matters is that the accountability is full-time even when the hours aren't: the number, the budget calls, and the hiring calls are mine to own regardless of the day of the week.
The diagnosis lands inside the first 30 days — you'll know what's broken in the funnel math and what it costs before the first quarter closes. How fast the number moves after that depends on the P&L: at Cubii the business went from losing $40K a month to profitable in about 60 days, but that fix was economics, not magic. I won't promise a timeline before I've seen your numbers, and you should distrust anyone who does.
No. I'm Chicago-based with deep roots here — Shiftgig, Cubii, Golfmiles, and CodaPet were all Chicago companies — but I work nationally and have operated well beyond it. PartnerSlate and Therma (GlacierGrid) were Bay Area companies, and my longest engagement was rebuilding paid acquisition for The RealReal, a public company.
Bring your CAC, payback, and channel mix — or just the problem. If a fractional engagement isn't the right structure for you, I'll say so in the first call.