Why, How, and When to Hire a Fractional CMO

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Mark Evans: At the beginning of the pandemic, I lost my job as the VP marketing of a b to b SaaS company. To be honest, it wasn't a surprise. The CEO and I didn't see eye to eye, and I missed the freedom and flexibility of being a marketing consultant. I like being the boss, setting my own schedule, and not having to attend endless meetings to make decisions. But as I reentered the consulting world, the key question was what kind of a consultant should I be? A brand storyteller? A content marketing strategist? A digital marketing strategist, a strategic positioning consultant. None of them seemed to fit and none of them seemed to resonate. Business was slow, albeit in the midst of a global pandemic that had seen a lot of marketing disappear. But one day out of the blue, I decided to call myself a fractional chief marketing officer or fractional CMO. It felt like putting on a freshly ironed shirt. It felt good and reflected my strategic and tactical skills and experience. And calling myself a fractional CMO was a game changer. The leads and opportunities started to roll in, and they haven't stopped coming. And the question is, why did a new title change everything? Personally, have a few theories. One, my target audience, b to b SaaS companies, was looking for marketing leadership. They had plenty of access to tactical talent, but they wanted strategic guidance. Number two, the fractional CMO title was new, different, and somewhat mysterious. It piqued people's curiosity and broke through the marketing consulting noise. Over the past two years, I've talked to many people about becoming a fractional CMO, and I've started to coach fractional CMOs looking to raise their games. But to be honest, there's still a lot of confusion and lack of clarity around the fractional CMO, which is slowly but surely gaining traction. And to help me peel back the onion, I'm excited to talk with Dave Polis, a fractional CMO, author, consultant, and speaker. Welcome to Marketing Spark.

Guest: Thanks, Mark. I'm glad to be here.

Mark Evans: Why don't we start with a marketing one zero one question or a softball question? What is your take on the fractional CMO landscape? When I started calling myself myself a fractional CMO in mid twenty twenty, I thought that this was gonna be rolling thunder. I thought would be a tremendous amount of momentum because fractional seemed to be the right title at the right time. And to be honest, I'm surprised that it's still a slow burn. It feels like there's some momentum, but not a lot of momentum. And you're also playing the same game than I am. What's your take on the landscape right now?

Guest: Well, the landscape is one that evolves and evolves more slowly than you might have suspected. I first got hip to the fractional portion of all this in 2016. I was at a networking meeting here locally and ran across a gentleman who was a fractional CFO, And I had never heard of that. He said, how do you do that job that requires your fingers in just about every pie in the company and only do it part time? And he said, when you analyze the amount of work that actually needs done, that the physical amount of being present and the number of meetings you're actually required to be in and the amount of focus you could give to it, if you limit that time, you can really do it in fifteen hours or twenty hours depending on the size of the firm and have plenty left over to sell to somebody else. And as soon as that light bulb came on, this could easily be applied to marketing as well in many instances. The landscape has shifted, and I think the the the effect that you experienced has to do with that change in title because the consulting world had run into a point where the tacticians and the strategists were mixing and mingling freely. And you could go on Fiverr and find somebody who was a marketing consultant, and all they would teach you to do is how to put ads on Facebook. That was that was his deal because that's all he knew about marketing. He'd been doing it five years, had cracked the code on making Facebook ads work, and figured he knew everything else. Wrong. They don't have the perspective. They don't have the depth. They don't have anything to go with that, including the structures and the strategies that go with it and certainly not the engagement structure that a real consultant would have, but they were still calling themselves that. So a lot of people were going down blind alleys with with what they thought were competent consultants that were actually tacticians or or technicians. So your your flip into the partial CMO world automatically elevates people's mindset when they're looking and talking to you and saying, oh, this is a guy that does the top end. This is a guy that integrates my c suite. This is a guy that connects those dots and wrangles those marketing cats and all those tacticians to make sure they're all going the same direction and manages them to the point where they're driving actual revenue that I as a as a founder or a CEO can get my mind wrapped around and understand.

Mark Evans: You know, I think it's interesting that the fractional CFO was a concept that had been around for a long time in Toronto where I operate. There was a fellow named Mark McCloud, and he was serving four or five or six different b to b SaaS company at the same time. And they all love Mark because they were fairly early stage. They didn't need a full time CFO, but they needed someone with a lot of experience to help them manage their, obviously, finances and capital raising. People were comfortable with the idea of a fractional CFO. I think it's taken time for people to come around to the idea of a fractional CMO because I think a lot of companies it's a walk before you run thing with marketing. When they hire someone in marketing, they don't wanna they eventually embrace it as opposed to tiptoe into it. The question that I had for you is the slow burn that we're seeing when it comes to being a fractional CMO. Is it because companies are not aware that that fractional CMO exists, or do they not see the benefits, or aren't they not willing to embrace it yet? I'm just trying to get your sense on maybe some of the hesitancy or some of the things that that are holding back the whole idea of hiring a fractional CMO and feeling good about hiring a fractional CMO.

Guest: I think a lot of it has to do with the level of commitment that each individual company has towards its marketing and the mindset it has towards its marketing efforts. If it's still seen as an expense line, then you're probably not there yet. They have to realize that this is an investment and that it's an investment that will pay back multiple, multiple layers later and years later, in fact, in some cases, and that you have to make a long term commitment. If you wanna make money fast, brew beer. If you wanna make money slow, you become a distiller. You gotta wait. You gotta be patient, and you gotta wait for this stuff to go. So the slow burn effect you're seeing is the fact that the level of commitment amongst a broad swath of companies and sectors is not there for marketing yet. They've often had the bigger companies, the enterprise folks have had CMOs for a long time because they realized the value. That's what got them there, was realizing the value of marketing and letting it drive the the boat, drive the show, and pull in revenue as it is supposed to. The smaller companies who often the founders are from the sales side or from the marketing side to a certain degree think they understand it, but they don't have the depth and the breadth, and they're way, way overloaded with other corporate duties to be able to focus on it adequately. But the first thing founders look for in some help is somebody who's not going to threaten their autonomy and their authority. Well, marketers are change agents. You call up that guy. You better be ready to reap the whirlwind because they're gonna come in and make some fairly impactful changes fairly early to get you on the right track and to get you going strong and to get those cats all moving in the same direction. So I think there's some hesitancy there. The whole concept that that asking for help is a weakness sometimes plays into that as well, and I'm sure you saw that in the consulting world. You know, if you have to turn around and and have somebody else solve a problem for you, you know, maybe the board's gonna question your abilities. So there's a certain amount of that going on. The other thing that I've noticed is that the people that are willing to embrace this are very, very comfortable knowing that someone else has taken that off their plate. The less secure the founder and the CEO is, the less comfortable he is making that commitment and delegating that authority and driving that change somewhere other than his chair. So I think it's a combination of all three things that are that are driving the hesitancy and the slow creeping progress that CMOs have been able to make. The inroads are there, but you gotta catch the right people. It's like if you you own a castle for a house. Yeah. Everybody likes to live in a castle, but there's only two or three guys that can really afford it and understand how much work that really is. So your buyer pool is very limited for something like that, but it's a tremendous property, and you don't understand why their buyers aren't lining up. That's why. It takes a very specific buyer to make that work.

Mark Evans: I think my view of the world is that a lot of people, they have a hard time understanding what a fractional CMO does. They understand what a director of marketing does or a VP marketing. These are the people that are gonna sit in the seat. They're gonna drink the Kool Aid. They're gonna be there twenty four seven, and they're gonna handle marketing. They're gonna run marketing, and they're gonna make marketing a integral part of our business. And I don't know whether people understand exactly the role of us fractional CMO or how much time they're gonna invest, and that's one. And the other thing is really getting the understanding of the fact that there's different types of fractional CMOs. We're not we're not all the same creatures. And my take is that there there's some maybe we maybe as fractional CMOs, we have to do more education. We have to walk people through how this engagement works and how the rules of engagement working with us are different than having a full time CMO.

Guest: I think I've seen the light bulb come on if if I was able to to get somebody into a couple of meetings and really get them engaged with me. And I said, why don't I send over my engagement agreement with some terms on it that I think I'm understanding that you'll be agreeable to, and we'll see what happens from there. And as soon as they open up that engagement, which is really only about four pages, and they read the specifics and they see what the the limits are and the scope and and the deliverables and everything else is all laid out in front of them, the light bulb comes on and they go, oh, this is what we're talking about. Now I'm comfortable with this because now it's concrete. Now it's it's specific that I can say yes to this, no to this, and, oh, you're gonna develop a plan in in twenty days, or you're gonna put a plan in action in sixty days, and you're gonna reap these results in nine months or whatever. You've got it up a, it's like a lease. You have a finite end to it, which makes people very comfortable. You can live with almost anything as long as you know it's going to end at a specific time. So even if they if they're a little off about it in the beginning and they still sign off, they know that if no matter how bad this gets, it's got an endpoint. So that they're a little more comfortable with that. The other thing is once they've seen those specifics, now they can get back and put their CEO coat back on and say, okay. I'm gonna hold this guy's feet to the fire with these specifics and these overall scopes and say, I know how to do that. I know how to manage department heads. I can manage that. And if that's what this looks like, the fact that he's only showing up to every third meeting, but it's the important one and it's the right one doesn't bother me. So they're okay with it after that. Once they've seen it be concrete and specific, they're okay.

Mark Evans: I kinda look at the fractional CMO title as catnip. It's irresistible. When you see it, it's different. It's new. It sparks your curiosity. But one of the things that I found in having conversations with people who are interested in my services is being abundantly clear about what kind of marketer I am. So I only work with b to b SaaS companies. I'm big into positioning and messaging and content marketing. But if you want a performance based marketer or somebody who's really heavy on the SEO, SEM side, that's not me. So I think one of the things for companies to think about is that a fractional CMO is just like any other CMO. We have our strengths, our weaknesses. We're good at some things. We're not good at other things. And regardless of whether you hire a full time CMO or a fractional CMO, you really have to hire someone who's aligned with what kind of marketing you need to do. I think that's that's one of the biggest things that you and I have to deal with in terms of being clear about, I can help you or I can't?

Guest: Well, yeah. And and you mentioned education. I think it is incumbent upon us to educate the general marketing sphere or the the corporate leadership sphere in the fact that, a, this can work and work well. And, b, that we're out here as a resource, that it's really not just the cost savings that are driving this. It's the availability the extra availability of time. That's one less person to manage half that time. The fact that you're getting so much more depth and and they come up to speed so much faster than if you were to do a full time hire, and there's less risk involved, realistically, because the average tenure of a of a full fledged CMO is about 2.8. Right? And that's been getting shorter, believe it or not, over time, not longer, which is what we had all hoped. So by the time the guy gets up to speed at year two, you're really closing in on on the sunset of his tenure anyway, so you're really not gaining anything. Doing the fractional bit gives people that endpoint we talked about and makes them comfortable with the fact that, okay, he's not just going to leave anytime he feels like it or a new challenge comes along. He's already incorporated that new challenge into the schedule, and we've got him for the full year. Let's use him as best we can. So there is that educational component as to how the structure of all this works that I think people need to get comfortable with. And you're exactly right. All these new stripes of marketers, all you know, performance versus lead gen versus demand gen versus all the the different sort of tactical labels that have been attached to this thing, We've got the whole thing covered soup to nuts. In in the real top end CEO integrator type fields, we know how to do all that, but I'm not gonna sit down and code you a website. I'm not gonna sit down and and and pick out your your SEO content for hours and hours on end. We hire people to do that. To that end, I can apply all the places I'm strong and beef up all the places I'm weak all at one shot when I'm building that team, and you'll never know they're there. That's the beauty part of all of this is that that I make make up for my deficits with your money. It's a beautiful thing.

Mark Evans: So let me ask you a black and white question, sort of a yin and yang question. What are the biggest reasons why a company would hire a fractional CMO? And then on the flip side, why shouldn't a company hire a fractional CMO? If you were to talk to to a company, they wanna hire you. I wanna I want you to work for me as a fractional CMO, and you said, nope. I don't think you should do that. So let's talk about why you should hire a fractional CMO and why not.

Guest: Well, the whys are very easy, and there's a number of them. I'm struggling more with the why nots because it really is a pretty good idea for most cases. Now you mentioned that you have companies that that you don't fit their keyhole quite as well because of what they need. What I'm finding here is that companies really aren't sure of what they need, and therefore, you have to be sort of the jack of all trades in order to meet whoever comes down the pike. But that's not the best way to go about it. You're much more on the right track by niching down and being crystal clear and specific on what that value proposition for you is. You're gonna have much better success that way, and so are the companies we're serving, by the way. That's the same advice I give them. Make sure that value proposition is crystal clear and that you know what it is you need to do. Now the hiring proposition is exactly the same. The people who need us or anybody who needs depth, experience, breadth, control, and perspective all in one individual, but doesn't necessarily wanna pay for it full time. And that runs the gamut. We're almost sector agnostic in that level. We're not size agnostic, by the way, though. Startups, very small startups, probably can't take advantage of us because there aren't enough tactics, there aren't enough budget, there's not a big enough team. We're not needed at that level just yet. You would be better off hiring us as a strategy consultant and say, okay. Set up my plan and then tell me what to do. And I'll come back to you in three years when we built it into something you need to manage and go from there. So very tiny companies probably don't need a CMO, which is why they don't hire them, fractional or otherwise. Very, very large enterprise companies. Google doesn't need a fractional CMO. They're huge. They've they've got a real guy at the real helm who's got, you know, 50 assistants and 35 team members to do all this stuff for him, and he just kinda keeps his hand on the throttle and away they go. Big enterprise companies run that way. They don't need the the savings is miniscule compared to the amount of extra horsepower you get by having that guy permanently embedded in being in every meeting and walking up and down every hallway and talking to every minion in the place to gather intelligence and information all the time. We can't do that for them, so we're not that helpful. It's the middle ground where we shine. It's the folks that are between, say, 10 and $200,000,000 that really can take advantage not only of the savings, but of the extra depth and breadth and the the less management time and the less top end that needs to be done. And their founders are often have a a much slimmer c suite to start with, and adding one more can make a huge impact. Whereas if if you've got 19 vice presidents already in there and and are are all trying to gather and and get their FaceTime and do this and that, having another full time guy is just gonna make the room more crowded. Having a part time guy show up one day, carry the water in his briefcase and go, okay. Here's how it's gonna go. Has much, much more impact for those middle market customers regardless of the the the industry sector that they're in. I don't have a particular shining for SAAs, and you do. But throw me in with with any kind of membership association, any kind of professional organization, any kind of manufacturing plant, any kind of product group, and I'll be just fine because I've done those things. I've seen those things, and there's a logic to it. There's a sense to it that that needs to be experienced. But I don't have to know who the big movers and shakers are to be able to pick up the phone and call them. I'll figure that out along the way.

Mark Evans: The way that I look at it is twofold for companies that are looking to hire someone like me. One is I fill a gap. Usually, the companies that are interested in hiring a fractional CMO don't have marketing leadership. They may have a junior marketer. They're doing a little bit of marketing or they're doing no marketing at all. And they recognize that that is a gap that needs to be filled because they're on one side, they're opportunities and the other side, they're threats. So that helps them out. And the other side is risk mitigation. Hiring a full time CMO cost you a 125, a 150, $200,000 plus benefits, plus options, plus perks, and it's expensive. And if you hire the wrong full time CMO, that's a very expensive mistake. And companies that are especially earlier stage not starters, but earlier stage, they don't wanna do that. They don't know what kind of marketing they need to do. And so hiring a fractional CMO is a less risky way to go. So if you bond to the idea that, yes, I wanna hire a fractional CMO. I see the benefits. I understand that it's a it fills a gap, and there's less risk involved. The question is, where do they start? Like, what are some of the first steps they should take in terms of finding the right fractional CMO for what they need to do?

Guest: I think they need to do several things. One, you mentioned risk. I think they need to do an internal risk assessment and see exactly what their goals are and what they're willing to pay to get there. Because one of the things you didn't mention as you were tallying up all the expenses that go into hiring a full timer is the budget he's going to spend.

Mark Evans: Mhmm.

Guest: And he's going to ask for about three times what you're comfortable with because that's what he knows he needs to make it go. So now you've not only spent the $300 on his salary and Benny's and everything else. You've probably spent 2 or $3,000,000 of stuff in that year or so that he's there or two years that he's there getting the ground under him, and you don't know what he's doing. You don't have a plan in front of him. So that's an even bigger risk for those middle market companies is dumping that 2 or 3,000,000 into the ad spend and the the creative and all the rest of the agency work and all the rest of it that has to go with it. The fractional often brings partially his own team with him that cuts risk as well. I know I can pick up the phone and hire creatives all day long and know that they're gonna perform without even blinking an eye in terms of risk and know I'm gonna get what I want the first time around cutting my cost out. So I'm gonna work on the cheap for you as well as with you, which is a much better thing. Now as far as the first steps that a company needs to think about, I would make sure that they know what it is their goals really are and make sure that they're realistic. Setting expectation is our number one job. When we go in the door and they say, well, we wanna triple sales in six months, you need to stone up your face and say, no. We're not going to be able to do that with the resources you've got and the time you've all allocated. And it's not my time. It's everyone's time. Things take a while to evolve. You're not gonna unless the machine is is running perfectly and all it's lacking is fuel, which is money, you're not going to be able to triple sales in six months. It's just not going to happen unless there's a whole bunch of pent up demand that you're aware of that no one else is that hasn't and if they are, they've stolen it from you. You're not gonna get that from from just about any company. But if they say, I I wanna increase by about 40%, I'm gonna give it about a year to do that, and here's $3,000,000 to do it, Then you know they've kind of embraced the thing and and set their mind correctly in what the job really is. Now you have a concrete goal. You have a specific way to do it. You have a specific size and scope and budget. So those things were all decided before you walked in the door. Now you have a set of parameters to sell to that candidate. Now you can go about finding the right candidate that fits the needs you have within those parameters. That to me is the the the path that most companies need to take. Get your house in order first, then go looking for the carpenter. It's it's a whole bunch different than saying, well, we need another team member. Okay. Who do we need? Let's go find him. You need to be a little more specific than that because we've got our finger in a lot of eyes, and we're at the top end of the pyramid. We're gonna interact with accounting on a very peer to peer level. We're gonna interact with sales on a very peer to peer level. We're gonna interact with your accounting department and and your compliance department and everything else at a very peer to peer level, and we're gonna make demands, and we're gonna push back. So you've gotta be prepared for all that stuff.

Mark Evans: One of the biggest challenges that I run into when I do start working with a company is establishing the rules of engagement and expectations. Now some of that is around what what does success look like? You know, being realistic and setting both sides up for success in in terms of saying, yes. We can achieve 40% growth in in a year. 300% growth, maybe not so much. That's one. But the second one, and I think this is sometimes more challenging, is how much are you gonna get from me in terms of time and commitment? Because I could work for you for three hours a week. I could work eight or two or three days. And then how do you manage what I call service creep? I want you to do these things and these things and these things. And then also in your fractional CMO is really a full time CMO because you rely on them that much. So what's your experience in terms of being very clear about how we're work gonna work together? How much you can expect from me? How much time I'm gonna commit to you and what success looks like? Because you don't tee that up. If you don't get those all established before the engagement starts, then you're gonna run into problems. At some point in time, either you or the client is gonna be unhappy, and that's just a recipe for disaster. So what is your approach to setting expectations and the rules of engagement?

Guest: A, you're absolutely right. B, I take it back to the engagement contract that we set up in the beginning. That at least sets the the the broad strokes of of what the scope of this thing looks like. And you're right. Scope creep is an incredible pitfall to fall into because they do start once they see some some activity and see things changing and see you engaging with other people in the company and and making things happen, then the confidence kinda sorts to ooze out, and they go, oh, this is a guy I can trust to get stuff done. Why don't we stick this on him? And why don't we have him do this? And why don't we run with this? And that's okay. You can do that, but it's gonna take away from this other thing that we've already talked about. My plate is is of a limited size because that's what we've agreed on in terms of number of hours. I know my speed and my efficiency levels and my productivity levels. I'm telling you now that you've just taken away about a third of what was on that plate for the new things you just tossed on there. So you have to prioritize which one of those things you want. That's a difficult conversation to have the first time. After that, they get the message really quickly because it works out well, and they understand that, okay. Which one would you deprioritize to get this new thing? So part of it is understanding that you do have a mind of your own, and you're not shaking in your boots all the time worried about one of these erratic CEOs is gonna fire you on the spot out of peak. You've got your own standards, and and you're gonna maintain them and hold them. That's part of setting expectation. The other is understanding that not everything happens at once. Rome wasn't built in a day. I gotta plan this first. I gotta budget it first. I gotta figure out what it is you need that's gonna work with what you've given me. If I've only got, you know, 20 yards of concrete, I'm gonna have to make a different kind of house than than if you've got 50. It's just that simple. You you work with what you're given. So I can either turn around and say, no. That's not enough and ask you more, or I can figure out how to make what you've got work as well as it possibly can. And I generally choose the latter and then show proof of concept. And then I can go back to the well and say, okay. This is how this worked the last time. If you wanna up your game, we can go from twenty hours to thirty, and we can triple the the the output budget. And here's what you're gonna get now that you're comfortable with it. My goal is to build a machine that works at any level. And the more you fill it up, the faster and and more quickly it scales.

Mark Evans: My advice to companies hiring a fractional CMO, one of my piece of advice is that in many respects, you're hiring a change agent, as you said earlier. May see you as a consultant with a fancy title, and there are often expectations for immediate instant gratification. I hire you, you're gonna do something right away. So one of the things that I highlight when I'm working with a new client is not only how we're gonna work together and ultimately what success looks like for you, but I also try to help you identify what are your biggest pains right now? Where's the house on fire and and how can I help solve that or figure out that problem? So I look for quick wins. In my case, what I'll say to a company is, tell me your biggest problems, the things that you would like me to solve right now. And it could be, I need an updated sales deck or I need a one pager. And what I find is that it does a couple of things. One is it helps a fractional CMO prove their worth and demonstrate you made the right decision by hiring someone who can get stuff done. And two, it helps to make the client more confident. They're seeing marketing actually start to happen. And I think that's an important rule or important element in terms of a a successful long term engagement is that you actually start things off on the right foot. And I always look for ways that I can prove value right away.

Guest: Oh, absolutely. In in in a full time role or in in a fraction role, early wins are key. And and promoting those early wins on a broad scale only helps you gain acolytes and and supporters inside. Because once everybody wants to be on the train that's got the winner on it. So if you can show a couple of of key early things that take away those pain points early on, I just started an engagement with a with a small company that's growing that the founder already inherently knew this. And I said, I'm gonna help you realign your brand. I'm gonna help you do this or not. It was multiple entities. They all had to play in the same sandbox, different value props for each. You wanted them to hang together as a unit. It was a bunch of functional and and and visual problems that needed to be solved. But she said, that's fine. We're gonna do that right away, but here's five things you can work on in the meantime while you're getting all that lined up. I need this. I need this. I need this. Start working on these things. And, oh, by the way, sign us up for this conference, this trade show, and this. And I said, okay. And we took care of those early pain points very quickly because they were very specific. It was pick up the phone, find a creative, find a distributor, find a producer, get the thing done. And in those instances, you can find an early win. And when you show them the proof in the pudding, look. It's done. Here. Finished. They really do start to gain a lot of confidence in the fact that the things you tell them are true, they are doable, they're real, and they help. One of the

Mark Evans: tricky questions when it comes to using a fractional CMO is how long the engagement lasts. Ideally, you know, a fractional CMO, in my view, needs at least three to three months at least, but ideally at least six months to really start to build the engine, get established priorities, start to get stuff done. In my experience, I've been with a couple of companies for a year. And at that point in time, the relationship starts to sort of I what I call engagement fatigue. You're essentially their full time resource. I often feel in those cases, they really need a full time resource. Is there an ideal period of time in which the fractional CMO delivers magic and then it starts to fade, or can it be something that continues for as long as they wanna start work they wanna keep working together?

Guest: I think there's a couple of things. One, it determine it's determined largely by the level and depth of the problem you're trying to solve. If you've got a a big company that needs rebranded and remaneuvered and goes after a slightly different market share and maybe running away from a PR problem that has four or five other things that need done, I think a year minimum is pretty much where I start because it just takes time. You're you're busy as a one arm paper hanger, and you're also limited by the number of hours you're really committed to. So there's a constant squeeze on your time. You're trying to be as effective and efficient with it as you can, but things just take time sometimes. And they take time to develop. They take time to spread internally so that you have support to do things quickly. You know, when the accounting department takes four days to get back to your email, you know you haven't quite spread the seed as far as you need to because that check needed to be there yesterday. So what you end up with is there needs to be a time scale that's set up and built to accomplish the bulk of the work that needs done in an effective amount of time. I don't do engagements if I can help it for less than a year because you're shortcutting the process. Marketing takes time. You have to be patient with it. You're not gonna eat the fruit off the apple tree you plant today. You're just gonna have to wait. So given that year to take care of all the details and to get all the stories straight and to get everybody all the internal buy in you need, this takes time. But you're right. There is some fatigue because you quit producing those magical moments. As you're going into the second year, you're looking at it going, okay. Now what levers do I pull that I haven't pulled already? And you start looking around for new challenges and new things to put at them, and you've built the machine well enough that, your twenty hours aren't being spent as effectively and as high impact as they were in the beginning because things start to run themselves after a while. Other departments are now busy. Sales is very busy. They've been fed. You know, accounting is now busy keeping track of all these massive expenses they got going. Other departments are busy making sure operations and customers are happy and and all the new software is standing up and all that thing. So you push the productivity down the hill and the rest of the departments start picking up on it after about a year, suddenly and you're left with a whole lot less to do that has visual and visible impact. You're still running the show, and the show has many, many, many points and many, many levers, but you got them all pretty much dialed in where you want them, occasional adjustments here and there. So it doesn't look as busy. It doesn't feel as busy. And, yes, they're starting to get a little fatigued with it. Eighteen months is a good time frame. I it depends on the industry in some cases, though. I worked for a a financial advisory firm, good sized one, and they started to get antsy with their results at roughly the nine to twelve month mark. But we also worked with a much, much larger firm who had made the marketing commitment a whole lot earlier in their tenure and were run by a CEO who came from another industry. So he understood marketing very well. He was a consumer industry. And when they went on a buying spree and bought a bunch of other companies and expanded, he gave each of those new companies that they'd purchased twenty eight months to get their marketing house in order because he knew it took time to put all the flooring underneath all that stuff and to get them aligned properly. He had the patience to really make it work. Now had I had an engagement as a fractional CMO for him for twenty eight months, they should have just hired me because, ultimately, it comes out cheaper that way. But there there's a tipping point for everyone. It just depends on the depth of the problem as much as anything else.

Mark Evans: You know, as consultants, you know, we wanna stick around as long as possible. I mean, long term customers

Guest: It's all about the follow.

Mark Evans: Yeah. It's all it's all about, you know, making sure that we've got the the check comes in every month, and it sort of gives us economic stability. But at some point in time, every client well, I would say nearly every client needs to hire a VP marketing if you've got the marketing machine established, if it's rolling, need somebody in the seat. At least my view is twenty four seven. What are the signals as to you as a fractional CMO that my client is probably better off with a full time VP marketing or a or CMO? And then what is the role that you, as a fractional CMO, play in terms of hiring your successor?

Guest: There are several instances. One, if the scenario was try it before you buy it, you have to decide whether that's a company you wanna be aligned with full time and just take the full time gig. Mhmm. The second alternative is, yes. It's time to turn this over to someone slightly less senior, but also considerably less expensive that can really mind the store twenty four seven. So when I start to look at the plan for the following year and I'm not making massive sweeping changes in it from the prior year, that's one of the signals I use to say, okay. This thing is pretty well established now, and it doesn't need massive sweeping changes. It needs minor adjustments and and incremental changes. Anyone coming in cold to that situation with that good a road map can make those incremental changes and and those those small adjustments and do well enough internally because their finger's on the pulse all the time. What they lack in-depth, they'll make up for an attention at that point. So that's kinda one of the triggers I look at is when that plan flips over and instead of being a crash and burn, it's more of a seek and destroy, then I can kinda walk away and say, okay. Now if you wanna keep me around as an adviser on on a pay as you go basis, I'm very comfortable with that. And that's how you do the extension at the end or at least how I do.

Mark Evans: Right.

Guest: Because then they can call you up out of the blue and go, look. You set us up with all this stuff, and this guy's good at about three quarters of it. We need the other quarter covered somehow. What do you recommend? And I can look at the situation and not come in with a a pair of of literally recently revealed eyes and look at it. I know the background. I can I can see where it went off? I can see where it's been missed, and I can make very strong and very specific recommendations to write the train again and get it going at very minimal cost because I've done all the learning already. So for them, it's really a matter of, okay. Write the guy a $10,000 check, have him come in and fix the other little pieces, and we're good. Most companies are very amenable to doing that. It's like hiring the sniper rather than a whole battalion. You just come in and fix the one problem.

Mark Evans: We have covered a lot of ground in the last thirty, thirty five minutes. I hope that we've provided companies with insight and advice on how to hire the right fractional CMO. How why to hire a fractional CMO? Final question to you is where can people learn more about you and what you do?

Guest: I certainly, LinkedIn is a great spot to do that. I'm I'm posting on a daily basis with all sorts of of learning and and content that's valuable for companies in that middle market sector. You can certainly go on Amazon and purchase my book, the the marketing doctor's survival note. You can certainly go to my website, themarketingdoc.com, and find out more about our services and how we offer fractional CMO as well as consulting services for tactical and and strategic executions. Those are places you

Mark Evans: can find more about me. Dave, thanks for the amazing advice, and thanks for everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. To learn more about how I help b to b SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic adviser, and coach, send an email to mark@markevans.ca or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll talk to you soon.