Straight answers
Extra Medium is a marketing agency in Dallas, and our fractional CMO practice puts a senior marketing executive inside your company part-time. You get strategy, a calendar and a team being led, for a monthly engagement instead of a full-time executive package. The seat is senior-only and founder-led, never handed to a bench.
DFW grows companies past founder-led marketing faster than almost anywhere. Relocations land with headcount targets, real estate and home-services firms add locations across the metro, private-equity-backed companies inherit growth goals with no marketing leadership attached. The pattern is the same: spend is real, activity is everywhere, and nobody senior owns the strategy. A fractional CMO fills exactly that gap: an executive who has run the function before, inside your business part-time, accountable in the leadership meeting.
The week is concrete. Numbers first: where revenue came from, what each channel produced, what gets stopped. Then the calendar: launches, campaigns, the agencies and freelancers briefed and held to outcomes across a metro where your vendors might sit in four different suburbs. Then translation: leadership gets told plainly what marketing can do this quarter, what it can’t, and what the evidence says to fund. Underneath it all, one written strategy every decision gets tested against, including the decision to kill good ideas that don’t fit.
Published market ranges put US fractional CMO retainers typically at $3,000–$20,000 a month depending on cadence and scope, while a full-time CMO in a market like Dallas carries a total cost in the high six figures once salary, bonus and equity are counted. Those are market ranges, not our price; every engagement here is shaped in the first conversation and put in writing. The fuller comparison lives on our fractional CMO cost page. The short version: you pay for leadership days and skip the executive package, and the seat usually pays for itself by stopping spend nobody senior was questioning.
Key takeaways
Most engagements run one to three days a week equivalent, weighted toward launches and planning cycles. The shape is set against what actually needs leading: a company mid-expansion needs more seat time than one holding a steady course.
Not necessarily. Agencies execute; the CMO writes the brief, sets the strategy and judges the work. Many Dallas companies keep their agencies and finally give them senior direction. At Extra Medium the seat and the studio sit in one company, which removes the hand-off entirely if you want it to.
In writing, through the contact page. Describe the company and where marketing feels stuck. The first conversation covers whether the seat fits, what the cadence would look like, and what it would cost, in plain terms.
Let’s talk
Don’t know exactly what you need? Good. That’s our job. Tell us where the business is headed and we’ll tell you honestly whether we can help — and if we can’t, who might.
Usually replies within one business day.
