The CMO problem most founders actually have

It is almost never a marketing problem. It is a decision problem, and hiring a full-time CMO to solve it is the most expensive way to find that out.

Most founders who tell me they need a CMO do not need a CMO. They need somebody to make four or five decisions that have been open for a year, and then hold the company to them.

You can tell from the symptoms. The team is busy and the pipeline is flat. Three channels are half-running because nobody was willing to kill one. Everyone can describe the product and nobody can describe the buyer. The last two agencies were fired for the same reason and no one has named what that reason was.

A full-time CMO hire does not fix that quickly. It takes three months to find one, three months for them to form a view, and by then you have spent most of a year and a senior salary discovering something a good operator could have told you in six weeks.

The fractional version works because the incentive is inverted. I am not building a department. I am not protecting a headcount. The fastest route to my own success is to make the decisions, prove them with money, hand you an operating system your team can run, and become unnecessary.

What that looks like in practice: one buyer, named specifically. One promise, tested against real spend rather than a workshop. One channel driven to a cost per qualified conversation before anything else gets switched on. Everything else waits.

If your marketing feels busy but your pipeline does not, the problem is upstream of the marketing.

← All writing