A fractional CMO is a senior marketing leader who works with your business on a part-time or project basis, typically 2 to 4 days per week. You get the strategic capability and commercial experience of a CMO without the cost, commitment, or risk of a full-time hire. I work as part of your leadership team, attend board meetings and own pipeline delivery - the same accountability as a permanent CMO but with the flexibility PE timelines demand.

My engagements start from £9,500 for a GTM diagnostic, £30,000 for a full GTM build, and from £10,000 per month for ongoing fractional CMO leadership. Compare this to a full-time CMO at £180,000+ salary plus £45,000+ in recruitment fees, plus 6 to 12 months before meaningful output. The fractional model gives you senior marketing leadership at a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the risk.

Most PE-backed B2B companies at the scale-up to enterprise inflection point (£25M+ revenue) cannot justify a full-time CMO hire, but they absolutely need senior marketing leadership. Without it, marketing becomes a cost centre reporting engagement metrics nobody in the boardroom can evaluate. A fractional CMO connects marketing to pipeline and revenue, gives the Operating Partner confidence that GTM investment will show returns and frees the CEO from being the backup seller.

A GTM diagnostic is a structured assessment of your entire go-to-market function: positioning, demand generation, sales and marketing alignment, competitive landscape and AI readiness. I use a marketing maturity model to benchmark where you are against what good looks like, identify quick wins you can action immediately and deliver a 90-day roadmap with a board-ready summary. It is done within four weeks and costs from £9,500.

A marketing consultant advises. A fractional CMO operates. I sit inside your leadership team, make decisions alongside the CEO, present to the board, manage agencies, mentor the team, and own pipeline delivery. I'm accountable for commercial outcomes, not just recommendations. The diagnostic discipline comes from nine years at Accenture. The operating credibility comes from five years inside investor-backed businesses rebuilding GTM engines from positioning through to pipeline

It depends on the problem. A GTM diagnostic takes up to 4 weeks. A full GTM build takes up to 12 weeks. Ongoing fractional CMO leadership typically runs for 3 to 6 months. The goal is not to stay forever. It is to build the growth engine, prove the strategy works, and put you in a position to hire the right full-time CMO from a position of strength rather than hoping your first guess was correct.

An agency sells you services. A fractional CMO builds the strategy that tells you which services you actually need. I sit inside your business, understand your commercial goals, align marketing to pipeline and revenue and then manage agencies to deliver against a plan that connects to board-level outcomes. Without that strategic layer, agencies optimise in isolation and you end up paying for activity that doesn't move the revenue number.