Fractional CMO, agency, or a full-time hire? Pick the one that fits.

I am a fractional operator, so treat this page accordingly. I have still tried to write the version I would want to read if I were the one deciding, including the cases where hiring me would be the wrong call.

The question underneath the question

Most companies phrase this as a budget decision. It is usually a diagnosis problem. Before comparing options, work out which of these is actually true for you, because each one points somewhere different.

You do not know what to do. Pipeline is flat, the theories are competing, and nobody senior enough owns the answer. Hiring execution capacity here buys you faster movement in an unknown direction.

You know what to do and cannot get it done. The plan is sound, the team is small, and the work is specialist. This is what agencies are for.

You know what to do, you are doing it, and it needs an owner. The motion is repeatable and the job has become management. Hire someone full-time.

Side by side

	Fractional leader	Agency	Full-time hire
Best at	Strategy, systems, and unblocking a stuck funnel	Execution capacity and specialist channel skill	Running and growing a team over years
Time to value	Days. They start in the same week you decide	Weeks, after onboarding and a discovery phase	Three to six months of recruiting, then ramp
Cost shape	Monthly, scoped, stops when you stop	Retainer plus media, usually scaling with output	Salary, equity, benefits, and severance risk
Fails when	You need volume of hands, not direction	Nobody internally can judge the work	The strategy is not settled enough to hire against
Leaves behind	Systems, definitions and documented playbooks	Campaign output, and dependency on the agency	A team and institutional knowledge

When not to hire a fractional CMO

When what you need is thirty landing pages by the end of the quarter. That is a capacity problem and an agency or a contractor will serve you better and cheaper.

When you do not have product-market fit. Marketing leadership will make an unclear value proposition more visible, not more compelling, and you will spend the money finding that out.

When leadership has not agreed on the strategy. A fractional operator can arbitrate a disagreement about tactics. They cannot resolve a founder-level disagreement about what the company is, and taking the engagement anyway wastes everyone's money.

What to ask whichever way you go

What will exist after you leave? Systems and documentation, or a dependency.
How will we know it worked? If the answer is a vanity metric, or if nobody can define the metric precisely, that is the first problem to solve.
Show me the last time this failed. Anyone who has run real engagements has one. The answer tells you more than the case studies do.

Common questions

What does a fractional CMO cost compared to a full-time VP?

A full-time VP of Marketing in a US tech hub runs well into the mid six figures once you include equity, benefits and payroll costs, plus three to six months of recruiting before anyone starts. A fractional engagement is usually a fraction of that because you are buying a slice of someone's week rather than all of it. The real comparison is not the hourly number, it is what you get in the first 90 days for the money you spend in those 90 days.

Can a fractional CMO replace an agency?

They solve different problems. An agency supplies execution capacity: people who write, design, run ads and ship campaigns. A fractional leader supplies judgment about what should be executed and builds the systems that make execution measurable. Plenty of companies need both, and the common failure is hiring the agency first, then discovering nobody internally can tell whether the agency is working.

When should you hire full-time instead?

When the strategy is settled, the motion is repeatable, and the job has become running a team rather than building a function. At that point you want someone whose whole week belongs to you, who can hire and develop people, and who will still be there in three years. A good fractional engagement should be actively working toward that handoff.

How long should a fractional engagement run?

Long enough to build something that survives the exit. Three to six months is typical for a foundation engagement, longer where the person is also running a function. Be suspicious of open-ended retainers with no defined endpoint, and be equally suspicious of a 30 day engagement promising a transformed funnel.

If a fractional engagement is the answer

Six engagements, written up with what was built and what moved. Read those before you talk to anyone, including me.

Case studies The numbers How I work

Talk through your situation