I am a Fractional CMO who will help you set your marketing strategy and stay on to coordinate your marketing activities giving you the senior marketing leader that you need at a price you can afford.
Background
My career has always run along parallel tracks. For over twenty years I have been working with B2B and B2C clients to set their marketing strategy. At the same time, I have been a senior leader within a number of organisations developing new product and service offerings, expanding the company internationally and leading client success. This unique background has positioned me to be able to lead your marketing efforts as well as giving me the experience to advise your leadership and board in either an advisor or a non-exec director capacity.
What exactly is a Fractional CMO?
The word “fractional” is a rebrand of the former concept of being “part-time”. I work with companies that need a senior marketing leader but are not in the right place in their development to afford one. I am happy to provide that leadership in a flexible working arrangement which suits both of us, for part of the week.
How is it different to a consultant, a freelancer or a contractor?
I am a member of the team. I have a company ID and email address. I have gone through the same induction as every other employee and I get to go to the company summer picnic. I am just not there five days each week.
Consultants tend to focus on a specific project. They come in, complete a specific project and leave the business with a set of recommended actions. They are great for getting a fresh perspective, but it is a luxury to keep them around for the implementation and execution of their recommendations.
Freelancers are great for heavy lifting or craft and skills-based tasks as part of larger projects. They tend to be very transient because they come in to do their part and then are released until they are needed again. When I worked in the agency world, each Thursday we would submit our analytical and creative requirements for the following week and the freelancers would be hired on Friday to start on Monday morning and be gone by the following Friday if not before. While it is common to develop a relationship with a freelancer, the continuity of a permanent employee is not guaranteed.
Contractors provide that continuity but as the name implies, they are hired to fulfil a specific contract. This can be either for a longer-term project or as cover for a specific employee who will be away from the business for an extended period of time.
Which Types of Companies can Benefit from a Fractional CMO?
Any company that needs a senior marketing leader to set and guide the ongoing execution of the overall marketing strategy should have a marketing director or CMO. Fractional CMOs are a perfect fit for companies that are not quite ready, or do not have the resources to hire this marketing leader in a full-time role. It comes down to the trade-off of having a very senior person part-time, or a more junior person full time at the same cost.
The majority of the companies I have worked for are transitioning from start-up to scale-up and do not have a marketer among the founders. They need help with refining their proposition and messaging to go to market at scale or to help secure investment to fund their growth.
Why a Fractional CMO and Not a Full-time CMO?
For many businesses, a Fractional CMO is the perfect solution. You get a senior marketing leader who will set your strategy, but you don’t have to bear the full burden of the cost. You only pay for what you use. Unlike a consultant or contractor, you also get the continuity of having the person who developed the strategy on hand to adjust and tweak as necessary during the implementation phase.
Fractional or shared ownership is very common with very expensive assets like jets, yachts and vacation homes. Most people cannot spend enough time using one of these assets to make full ownerships financially viable. Additionally, full ownership means full responsibility for the asset should something happen. Shared ownership mitigates against all of these downsides because you only pay for what you use, and you share the purchase, maintenance and operating costs with the other owners. You just need to work out who will use the asset when.
Think of a Fractional CMO in the same way. You only pay for what you use, and you mitigate the risk and costs associated with making a bad hire. Unlike with a jet however, there is an additional benefit to shared “ownership” of a CMO – preventing wasted cost. Due to my fractionality, I have to be laser focused. I am only going to be available to you for a couple of days per week, so I have to be ruthless with my time. For example, I will look at every meeting invite and think; is this meeting important to the marketing function and will I add value to the meeting? If the answer to either question is “no” then I will look to get a briefing from the meeting while I crack on driving the marketing strategy forward.
What are the Biggest Challenges to Expect when Hiring a Fractional CMO?
Flexibility is the key to making the Fractional CMO work within your business. I try to assign specific days for each of my companies, which makes it easier for everybody to plan. People know when I am going to be in the office, and I don’t accidentally go to the wrong place.
Everybody needs to recognise however, if these assignments are rigidly adhered to, it’s possible that a feeling of frustration will be created. Sometimes that really important meeting cannot happen on a Tuesday and has to be on the Wednesday. So, I slip away from what I am doing for Company B to jump on a call for Company A.
A great side benefit is that the companies for whom I have worked have each benefited from meetings I have had for another of my companies. For example, I went to a meeting with a potential partner for Company A and they turned out to be the perfect supplier for Company B. This means I have saved time and effort for the company when seeking out and vetting a potential partner or supplier.
The second challenge is that it is very important that both the Fractional CMO and the existing staff feel that this new role and the person in it are genuinely a part of the team. It can feel like waste of time and money but having the new Fractional CMO go through the full staff induction is really important. Further, it’s really critical that the Fractional CMO should receive all of the other things that full-time employees get, including email address, staff badge, and more. All of this feeds into the notion that this new person is not a consultant or contractor who has come in to deliver the “flavour of the month” and will be gone in three to six months so can basically be ignored.