Fractional CMO

Hire the operator and the machine that runs the plan

Fifteen years of growth leadership across GLP-1, healthcare, ed tech and ecommerce — plus a live AI marketing system that executes the plan instead of documenting it.

  • 15+ years across four verticals
  • Full-funnel CRO, one owner of the message
  • Execution included, not quoted separately
  • Starts with a free audit you keep either way

You have been sold a plan before

The category has a known failure pattern, and if you have hired a fractional CMO before, you have probably lived it. None of these are talent problems — they are structural, which is why changing the structure of the engagement is what the rest of this page is about.

Ninety days in, you have a deck and no movement

Industry analysis describes the first three months as peak risk for exactly this reason — the point where performance expectations collide with operational reality.

The strategy assumed a team you do not have

Senior direction without execution capacity underneath produces documents. If there is no team, no agency, and no budget to build one, you have bought a plan and no way to run it.

Nobody could tell you whether it worked

Ambiguous scope, no baseline, no instrumentation. The engagement ends and the honest answer to “did that work” is that nobody measured it.

You had a consultant’s authority and a C-level’s expectations

Boards ask for executive outcomes while designing advisory authority. That mismatch is structural, and it guarantees disappointment regardless of who you hire.

All four are solvable by changing the shape of the engagement rather than the person in it.

Fifteen years. Four verticals. Numbers with a method attached.

Every figure below is described the way it would be defended in a room: the vertical, the window, the baseline, and what actually moved it. Client names are withheld by agreement — a category you can defend beats a name you cannot.

4× revenue growth in 90 days

A direct-to-consumer telehealth brand (GLP-1 category)

A compressed market with brutal acquisition economics and a compliance ceiling on what you can say. Growth came from restructuring the offer and the funnel around it, not from spending more. Engagement predates the current L2C platform.

  • Offer architecture
  • Landing page test programme
  • Lifecycle email sequencing

Why it’s defensible: Measured against the pre-engagement baseline on the same channel mix — not a blended number that quietly adds new spend. The engagement predates the current L2C platform, so this is the operator’s result rather than the system’s.

Three months from engagement start

0400100Baseline400Month 3

Indexed to 100. A restatement of the 4× figure, not a separate measurement.

110% year-over-year growth

Physician practices and clinics

Multi-location healthcare, where the constraint is almost never traffic. It is that the phone rings and nobody converts the call, and no two locations are performing alike.

  • Local demand capture
  • Intake conversion
  • Per-location measurement that made the weak sites visible

Why it’s defensible: Year over year against the same locations, so seasonality and underlying market growth are already netted out.

Twelve months, year over year

0210100Prior year210Year 1

Indexed to 100. A restatement of the 110% figure, not a separate measurement.

71% year-over-year growth

National leader in online courses and continuing education

A category where the product is credibility and the buying cycle is long. The work was making the message coherent across a very long consideration window.

  • Full-funnel message coherence from first touch to enrolment
  • Content built for search and for the decision
  • Nurture aligned to a long cycle

Why it’s defensible: An established national baseline, not a small number made to look large by a percentage.

Twelve months, year over year

0171100Prior year171Year 1

Indexed to 100. A restatement of the 71% figure, not a separate measurement.

Positive sales in month one

Multiple ecommerce startups, from zero

No historical data, no audience, no brand equity, and no time. The discipline here is refusing to spend six months building before anything is tested.

  • Fastest-path-to-first-sale sequencing
  • A tight test loop from launch day
  • Building only what the first sales proved was worth building

Why it’s defensible: “Positive sales in month one” is a binary that either happened or did not. It is the least gameable claim on this page, which is why it carries no chart.

Month one, repeatedly, across multiple brands

What these numbers are not

They are results from engagements with specific conditions — a real product, a real market, and a client willing to move. They are not a forecast for your business. Any fractional CMO who converts their past results into your projected revenue before looking at your data is selling you a number they cannot defend. The audit exists so the first number you hear about your business is measured rather than borrowed.

Three things you are actually buying

01

An operator who has done it in four different markets

Fifteen years driving growth in GLP-1, healthcare, ed tech and startup ecommerce. That range matters more than it sounds: a specialist in one vertical brings one playbook. Someone who has grown four has judgement about WHICH playbook applies here, and — more usefully — which one does not.

The thing you are paying for is not the work. It is the decision about what to focus on, what to kill, which positioning to test and where to put the budget. That judgement is the part of marketing that has not been automated and will not be.

02

AI where it earns its place — and nowhere else

The market is loud about AI right now and most of it is noise. The useful question is narrow: which parts of your marketing does AI genuinely compress, and which parts does it quietly degrade.

There is a real AI marketing system behind this — content generation, email testing, landing page variant testing, cross-client evidence. It is not a chatbot bolted onto a retainer. And it is applied selectively, because the judgement about where it fits your company profile is worth more than the automation itself.

What that means for you: work that used to take a team and a quarter takes an operator and a fortnight. The strategy does not get thinner. The gap between deciding and shipping does.

03

Full-funnel CRO, so the message survives the whole journey

Most funnels break at the seams. The ad promises one thing, the landing page says another, the email forgets both, and the sales conversation starts from scratch. Every handoff loses people, and nobody owns the loss because everybody owns one piece.

Full-funnel CRO means one person owns the coherence of the message from first touch to final sale, and every change is a test with a baseline behind it. Not opinion. Not best practice. A measured result you can hold up in a board meeting.

Built against the ways this normally fails

Every row is a documented failure mode of this category, and how the engagement is shaped to avoid it.

Strategy arrives, execution does not
The execution stack is already built and already running. You are not waiting for a team to be hired.
Ninety days of deck-building
The audit happens before the engagement. Week one starts from findings, not from discovery.
Nobody can prove what worked
Baseline captured first. Every initiative is a test with a stated success metric agreed up front.
Consultant authority, C-level expectations
Decision rights are named in writing at the start — what I decide, what you decide, what goes to the board.
Evergreen retainer, no performance trigger
Explicit review points with agreed metrics. If the metrics are not moving, that is a conversation already on the calendar rather than one you have to start.

This fits if you are

  • Doing real revenue, and growth has stalled or gone unpredictable
  • Carrying a marketing team, or an agency, that needs direction more than headcount
  • Launching something and unable to afford six months of build before the first test
  • Tired of reporting that goes up and to the right while the bank account does not

This does not fit if you are

  • Looking for someone to run ads and nothing else — that is a specialist, not a CMO
  • Not ready to give the role real decision-making authority
  • Expecting results without changing anything about the offer, the site or the process

Start with the audit. It is free, and it is the real one.

Not a checklist. Not a lead magnet with your name on the cover. The same full-funnel audit that runs at the start of a paid engagement.

  • Where the funnel actually leaks — measured page by page, not guessed
  • What your measurement is and is not telling you — including what is not instrumented at all
  • Your AI readiness — what AI systems can and cannot currently see about your business, which is now a real acquisition channel
  • Competitive position — how your message reads against the people you lose deals to
  • The three things worth doing first, ranked by what moves revenue soonest

You get the findings whether or not we work together. If the audit says you do not need a fractional CMO, it will say that.

Talk to us about scope

Thirty minutes. You leave with the audit findings whether or not we work together.

Objections worth raising now

How is this different from an agency retainer?

An agency executes a plan you approve. A fractional CMO owns the outcome and decides what the plan should be. The difference shows up when something is not working — an agency asks what you want to change, and this role tells you.

Can a fractional really know my business well enough?

It is a fair question, and the honest answer is that depth of context is the real trade-off in this model. It is offset two ways: the audit front-loads the learning curve before the engagement starts, and fifteen years across four different verticals means the pattern is usually recognisable even when the industry is new. Where it is genuinely not, you will be told.

What if it does not work?

Then the review point surfaces it early, with a baseline to prove it, and you make a decision with real information. The failure mode worth avoiding is not a test that loses — it is twelve months of activity nobody measured.

We already have a marketing team.

Good — then you need direction, not headcount, and this is the cheaper problem to solve. Most stalled teams are not underperforming. They are executing several different strategies at once because nobody has picked one.

Is AI writing all our marketing?

No. AI compresses production and testing. The strategy, the positioning and the judgement about what is worth testing are human, and they are the reason the output is any good. A team that hands the strategy to the model produces a great deal of fluent, plausible, forgettable marketing.

Why is there no price on this page?

Because a range would be less useful to you than the audit is. Scope varies enough that any number published here would be wrong for most readers, and the audit tells us both what the engagement needs to be before either of us commits to a figure.

The plan is the easy part.

Anyone can write you a growth strategy. The question worth asking a fractional CMO is what happens on the Monday after the strategy is delivered. Start with the audit and find out what your funnel is actually doing.

Talk to us about scope