Straight answers
Extra Medium is a marketing agency in Greensboro, North Carolina, and its Lead practice embeds a senior fractional CMO in your company part-time. For Triad manufacturers, logistics firms and growing services companies, it is CMO-level strategy and vendor accountability without a full-time executive package competing with your next hire or your next truck.
A fractional CMO owns your marketing function the way a full-time CMO would, on a part-time cadence: diagnosis, one written strategy, then running the calendar, the budget and every vendor against it. In leadership meetings they translate — what marketing can deliver this quarter, what it cannot, and what deserves funding. Our Lead practice is senior-only and founder-led, with the studio underneath it, so the strategy and the execution live in the same company.
The Triad runs on owner-led companies: manufacturers, logistics firms, furniture and services businesses where the founder is still the marketing department, approving ads between everything else. The work has outgrown that arrangement, but a full-time CMO package has to compete with the next hire, the next truck, the next warehouse system — and it loses, rightly. The fractional model splits the difference: senior leadership for a part-time price. Published market ranges put fractional CMO retainers at typically $3,000 to $20,000 a month depending on cadence and scope; our cost page breaks down what drives the number.
Engagements usually run one to three days a week equivalent, weighted toward planning cycles — in this region, often the run-up to High Point Market or a hiring push. It starts with a diagnosis and strategy phase, priced on its own. Then the rhythm: numbers first, calendar second, vendors held to outcomes, and a strategy document that keeps the function running on the days the CMO is not in the building.
Key takeaways
Published market ranges put fractional CMO retainers at typically $3,000 to $20,000 a month, depending on cadence and scope. That is a market range, not our quote — Extra Medium shapes each engagement in the first conversation and puts the number in writing before work begins.
A marketing manager executes; a CMO decides what is worth executing. If your team needs hands, hire the manager. If it needs direction — and most founder-led firms need direction first — the fractional seat supplies it, and can help you hire the manager when the time comes.
Start on the contact page with a few lines about the company and where marketing feels stuck. We reply in writing within one business day — no call required — with whether the seat fits.
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.
