Senior growth leadership, two days a week.

Four things. Owns one model of how your revenue is created, so decisions stop being arguments about dashboards. Sets the quarterly growth bets and the test queue, with kill criteria. Runs the cross functional rhythm between marketing, sales and product, and briefs whoever executes. And reports monthly in one page you can hand to a board. It is senior growth leadership on a part-time engagement, which is a different job from doing the marketing work.

Overlapping, not identical. A fractional CMO leans toward the marketing function as a whole: brand, positioning, the marketing team, agencies and the marketing budget. A fractional CGO leans toward the revenue system end to end, including activation, retention, pricing and the marketing-to-sales handoff, and is more common in SaaS and product-led businesses. If your gap is the marketing function, buy the CMO. If your gap is that nobody owns the whole funnel, buy the CGO. On a scoping call we will tell you which one fits, including when the answer is neither.

A monthly fee, quoted after a scoping call, based on the days per week and the scope you agree. We do not publish rates because the honest number depends on the commitment and a figure without scope helps nobody. For context on the budget it sits inside, Gartner puts average marketing budgets at 7.8% of company revenue. The comparison worth making is not against an agency retainer but against a full time senior hire plus the months of search that precede one. Book a meeting for a scope and a number.

Usually, but the real argument is timing and risk rather than the fee. A full time growth leader is a long search, a full salary with equity, and a one-way bet made before you know which growth problems you actually have. A fractional engagement starts in weeks, is sized to the days you need, and can shrink when it should. There is also a tenure reality behind the caution: average CMO tenure in the S&P 500 is 4.1 years and consumer-company CMOs average 3.5 years, so senior growth leadership is rarely the permanent fixture companies plan for.

Two fixed days a week is the standard shape, one day for some earlier-stage companies and three where the growth function is larger. Fixed matters more than the number: the days are in the calendar, so the weekly growth meeting, the reviews and the briefing time are predictable for your team. Roughly a third goes to the meeting and decisions, a third to working on the model, the bets and the briefs, and a third to the people work, coaching, agency management and the sales handoff.

Not inside this engagement. Your fractional head of growth briefs and holds the standard; your team, your existing partners or a separate Web Tonic agreement do the building. If you want us to execute paid search, paid social or SEO, that is negotiated on its own merits with a scope you can compare against anyone else. The separation is what lets the same person recommend cutting a channel we would otherwise be paid to run.

Often yes, and we would rather say so. Before product market fit the useful work is customer conversations, iteration speed and finding one repeatable motion, which founders generally should not delegate. A fractional CGO earns their keep once there is a motion that works and the question becomes how to make it bigger and less dependent on the founder. If you are earlier than that, a short advisory engagement or growth advisory gives you the judgement without the ongoing commitment.

Six to twelve months is the common range, starting with the 30-day diagnostic and reviewed every quarter. Two endings are healthy: the growth function has matured enough that a permanent hire makes sense, and we help you hire and hand over; or the constraint turns out to be somewhere else in the business, in which case continuing would be us billing for the wrong problem. We build the exit into the engagement rather than treating renewal as the default, and everything we build stays with you.

As their leader for the days we are engaged, not as a parallel structure. That means owning priorities, unblocking decisions, reviewing work and coaching, which is usually the part your marketers have been missing rather than more hands. The CMO Survey finds the most cited capability gap is resourcing rather than a missing skill, with 22.3% saying existing capabilities lack the people, time and budget to function. In practice, a competent in-house team with clear priorities outperforms a bigger team without them.

That is the common case and it usually improves the relationship. Agencies do their best work against a clear brief and a defined outcome, and most underperformance we see comes from the client side of that arrangement rather than the agency's. Your fractional head of growth writes the briefs, sets the targets, runs the reviews and, where needed, has the difficult conversation with evidence in hand. We do not require you to move the work to us, and we will say when your incumbent is doing a good job.

Against the model we build in the first 30 days, on a small number of committed measures: qualified pipeline or orders, cost per acquisition, conversion at the step we agreed is the constraint, and retention or repeat revenue. Alongside those, two process measures that predict the rest, experiments completed per month and the share of bets that produced a clear decision. If the numbers are flat and the process measures are healthy, you are learning; if both are flat, the engagement is not working and the monthly report should say so.

Yes, and the vocabulary is native there: ARR, cohorts, activation, expansion, net revenue retention, product-led growth motions and the GTM handoff between self-serve and sales. Where SaaS differs is that the product is a growth channel, so the bets often live in onboarding, pricing and packaging rather than in media. The same discipline applies in services and ecommerce businesses, where the equivalent levers are the enquiry path, the offer and repeat purchase.

Yes, and it is often the best outcome of the engagement. We write the role definition against the growth model rather than a generic template, build the scorecard and interview questions, sit in on interviews if you want a second opinion, and hand over the model, playbooks and experiment log so the new hire starts with context instead of a blank page. If org design is the bigger question, marketing team structure advisory covers the whole shape of the team, not just this role.

For volume and speed, not for judgement. It is genuinely useful for reading large amounts of customer feedback, clustering search demand, drafting variants for tests and building analysis faster. The decisions about what to test, what to stop and what a result means stay with the named growth leader, because a model will produce a confident recommendation from thin evidence without flagging it. We also keep an eye on where automation is quietly spending your money, since bidding and generated creative both optimise for what they can see.

B2B SaaS and product-led businesses, professional and B2B services, ecommerce and consumer brands, and multi-location or franchise operators where the growth problem is repeatability across markets. We turn down work where the constraint is clearly not growth, for example a capacity or delivery problem dressed up as a marketing one, and we say so on the first call rather than learning it on your budget. If the whole marketing function needs leadership rather than the funnel, the fractional CMO engagement is the right one.