Straight answers
When marketing has become a leadership gap rather than a labor gap. The pattern looks like this: the founder is still the default marketing decision-maker, real money is going out the door with nobody able to say what it returned, and agencies or a small team are executing without anyone senior on your side setting direction. You do not need more hands. You need the seat filled, at a fraction of the week and the cost.
The founder is the marketing department. Every decision waits on the person with the least time to make it. Spend nobody can account for. Money goes to ads, tools, and retainers, and nobody can connect it to revenue. Agencies without a senior counterpart. Work gets executed, but nobody on your side decides whether it is the right work. Growth has stalled or turned unpredictable. Referrals carried you here; they will not carry the next stage. Something big is coming. A launch, a raise, a rebrand, a new market: moments that punish improvised marketing. Two or three of these together is the signal.
Three situations argue against it. There is nobody to lead. If there is no team, no agency, and no budget to execute, a strategist is an executive watching an empty channel; buy execution first. The problem is one bounded thing. A website, a logo, a single campaign: hire for that, at a project price. The product itself is still unsettled. If you do not yet know what you are selling or to whom, marketing strategy is premature, because it would lock in answers that are about to change. A good fractional CMO will tell you this in the first conversation rather than sell you the seat.
The next step is a conversation, not a commitment. At Extra Medium the first conversation is free and specific: we look at your current marketing, name the gap as we see it, and say plainly whether the fractional seat is the right fix or whether something cheaper is. If it is the right fix, the engagement shape and the price go in writing before any work begins. The mechanics of vetting and hiring, including the questions worth asking any provider, are in how to hire a fractional CMO. Bring last quarter’s numbers if you have them.
There is no universal threshold, but published guides cluster around companies from roughly $1M to $25M in revenue: large enough to have real marketing spend and execution capacity, not yet large enough to need the seat forty hours a week. Below that range the fee can crowd out the work; above it, full-time usually wins.
Yes, and it is one of the better uses of the model. The fractional seat runs the function now, defines what the full-time job actually is, and can help interview and onboard the permanent hire. Companies that hire the executive first often discover the job they described is not the job they needed.
Faster than any executive hire: there is no search, no notice period, and no relocation. Published guides put time to value at 30 to 45 days once started, most of it the audit and the first plan. At Extra Medium, the first conversation is free, and the engagement shape and price are in writing before work begins.
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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