Straight answers
Hire a named person, not a firm’s bench, and interview for operating history, not vocabulary. Ask who exactly will sit in the seat, what they would stop you doing in the first month, how they report against revenue, and what happens to the strategy when they are not in the room. A real operator answers all four concretely. A good engagement then starts with a short diagnosis phase before any retainer — the plan should be built on your numbers, not a template. Everything else is negotiation.
Ask these, and weigh the answers literally. Who exactly sits in the seat? A named person with a history you can check — if the answer is a rotating bench, you are buying an agency with a new label. What will you stop us doing in month one? Operators cut things. Someone who only adds has never owned a budget. How do you report? The answer should end at revenue: pipeline, sales, cost per customer — not impressions and engagement. What happens when you are not in the room? The strategy has to survive their absence, in writing, with the team able to run it.
Three show up again and again. Decks without operating history: polished frameworks from someone who has never been accountable for a number. Ask what they ran, at what size, and what it returned — then check. Activity reporting: monthly reports full of posts shipped, campaigns launched, and traffic charts, with no line connecting any of it to revenue. That is a vendor protecting a retainer. Nothing is ever killed: channels only get added, budgets only grow, and every quarter is a building quarter. A CMO who will not cut a channel is not managing your money; they are spending it politely.
Diagnosis first, retainer second. A serious fractional CMO will want a few weeks inside the business before proposing the plan: the numbers, the customers, the current spend, the team, the vendors. What comes back should be specific — what is working, what is leaking, what happens in the first 90 days, and what it costs. That is how we work at Extra Medium. The first conversation is free and specific, and the engagement shape and price are put in writing before any work begins. If a provider wants a long contract signed before they have looked at your business, keep looking. For grounding on the role itself, see what a fractional CMO does.
One named person in the seat. Teams are fine underneath — strategists need execution support, and our own model pairs the seat with a studio — but accountability has to have a name on it. If the person in your leadership meeting changes month to month, nobody owns the outcome, and outcomes are the entire point of the hire.
Most engagements run one to three days a week on a monthly retainer, often with an initial term of a few months so both sides can judge fit. Be wary of long lock-ins demanded up front. The honest structure is a short diagnosis, a defined first phase, and a retainer that continues because it is working, not because the contract says so.
One page, monthly, tied to money: spend by channel, what it produced in pipeline or revenue, cost per customer, and what changes next month and why. Supporting detail can sit behind it, but if the first page is activity — posts, campaigns, traffic — instead of results, you are being managed, not led.
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.
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