Decide the shape of the marketing team before you hire.

Four things. An inventory of every job the marketing function has to do, sized by volume and seniority. A written in-house versus agency call on each block of that work. An accountability chart with one owner per function and the numbers each seat carries. And a sequenced hiring plan with role scorecards, interview questions and triggers for the hire after this one. Three weeks, fixed scope, handed over in editable files.

Both, and the useful answer is which parts. Continuous work that accumulates institutional knowledge, owning the numbers, the website, lifecycle, customer insight, belongs in house. Spiky, specialist or tool-heavy work, platform buying at moderate spend, production peaks, technical SEO, is usually cheaper and better bought. Most companies settle near the market average: 33.6% of digital marketing activities are performed by external agencies, partners and services. The rule we apply is that you must keep enough capability in house to be a competent buyer of the rest.

A fixed fee, quoted after a scoping call, with deliverables and dates written down before you commit. Team size and the number of locations move the number, so we do not publish a rate that would mislead most readers. For context on the budget it sits inside, Gartner puts average marketing budgets at 7.8% of company revenue, and the comparison worth making is against the cost of one mis-sequenced hire. Book a meeting for a scope and a number.

No. We design the structure, write the scorecards and build the process, and we will sit in on interviews as a second opinion if you want us there. We do not source candidates, we take no placement or referral fee from any recruiter, and nothing in our compensation improves if you hire more people. That is deliberate, because the most valuable output of this engagement is often the recommendation to not fill a role you were about to advertise.

It is not a redundancy exercise and we do not take that work. In practice the common finding is the opposite: capable marketing team members carrying work three levels apart, with no time for the part they were hired for. The usual recommendations are to move work between people, stop some of it, buy a specialism rather than expect it internally, and give one person the number they are actually accountable for. Where a role genuinely does not fit the structure, we say so to you privately, with the reasoning, and how you handle it is your call.

Everyone who touches marketing: each marketing team member, the sales lead or head of revenue, whoever owns the website, the person who produces the reporting, and the CEO or founder. Where an agency is central to the work we interview them too, with your permission. Conversations are confidential in the sense that we report themes and evidence, not who said what, which is what makes people candid enough for the exercise to be worth doing.

It fits inside it rather than beside it. If you run EOS, the accountability chart we produce is a marketing-depth version of yours, the role scorecards use measurable weekly numbers that can sit on your existing scorecard, and the meeting rhythm we recommend plugs into your weekly meeting instead of adding a parallel one. The same applies to other frameworks. What we will not do is hand you a generic template and call it org design, because the value is in the specific work your business has and the people you already have doing it.

Sometimes, usually for one of two reasons. A new marketing leader wants an independent read on the team they inherited before making changes they cannot reverse, and with average S&P 500 CMO tenure at 4.1 years and consumer-company tenure at 3.5 years that handover happens often. Or an established CMO wants outside evidence for a structural case they are making to a CEO or board. In both, our job is a second opinion with the interviews and the numbers behind it, not to duplicate the leadership.

No. This is a three-week advisory project that produces a structure and a hiring plan. A fractional CMO is ongoing leadership that owns the plan, runs the team and reports monthly, and a fractional head of growth does the same for the revenue system. Many clients do this project first, precisely to find out whether the answer is a permanent hire, a fractional leader or a redistribution of the work they already own.

It depends on your constraint, but the pattern we see most often is that companies hire a junior generalist when they need one senior operator two days a week, or hire a specialist for a channel that has not been proven yet. The safer first hire is usually someone who can own execution across the two channels that already produce revenue and can brief specialists for the rest. The plan we write names the role, the level, and the trigger, typically a revenue or volume threshold, that should be met before you hire the next one.

Every seat gets one primary number it can genuinely influence, plus two or three supporting measures and a small number of process measures for roles whose output lags. A demand generation lead carries qualified pipeline; a content owner carries the organic and AI-search visibility that leads to it, not word count; a lifecycle owner carries repeat revenue. Where the data to measure a role does not currently exist, that becomes a phase-one item, because a scorecard nobody can populate is theatre.

No, but it shapes the recommendation, and it is common: only 49.7% of companies say their marketing teams have the skills and training to use their own marketing systems, down from 54.1% in 2022. We work from the sources that can be trusted and flag what cannot, and the structure we design names who owns the repair. If the measurement problem is the bigger constraint, a marketing audit is the cheaper first step, and our analytics team can do the repair as a separate project.

It changes the mix more than the headcount. Production volume that used to justify junior roles is now partly automated, which raises the value of people who can judge output, own data and manage specialists, and lowers the value of roles defined purely by throughput. In the plans we write that usually means fewer, more senior seats, one clear owner of measurement, and explicit expectations about tool use in every scorecard. We also flag where AI is being used as a reason not to fix a structural gap, which is a more expensive mistake than the tooling saves.

You own the chart, the scorecards and the hiring plan, and you run it. Most clients want one check-in ninety days later to review what changed and what the first hire is actually doing, and that can be scheduled but is not required. If the plan concludes you need ongoing leadership rather than another hire, we will say which of the fractional engagements fits and let you decide, including deciding to buy it elsewhere. Nothing in this project obliges you to buy anything from us afterwards.

B2B services and professional firms, manufacturing and industrial companies, consumer products and ecommerce, SaaS, and multi-location or franchise operators where the real question is what sits centrally versus locally. The method transfers because the failure modes do: work nobody owns, seniority mismatched to the job, and an agency filling a gap that should have been a decision. Where a sector needs regulatory expertise we do not have, we say so before you sign rather than learn it on your budget.