Here’s a question worth sitting with for a minute: who is actually setting your marketing strategy right now?
If the honest answer is “me, at 11pm, between everything else,” or “whoever posted last,” you are not alone. Most $1M-20M companies get to a point where the marketing that built the business — referrals, reputation, word of mouth — stops being enough, and nobody senior is driving what comes next.
The instinct is to either hire (a $200K+ CMO, or a $65K coordinator who still needs managing) or keep duct-taping it together yourself. There is a third option most owners have not priced out. Here are seven signs it is worth a look.
1. Marketing happens after hours, not during them
If strategy gets decided at 11pm because it never made it onto the calendar during business hours, that is not a discipline problem. That is a resourcing problem. The business has outgrown “whenever I get to it.”
2. You are comparing a $200K salary to doing nothing
Those are rarely the only two options, but they are the only two most owners have priced out. A full-time CMO runs $200K+ before benefits and equity. A marketing coordinator runs closer to $65K — and still needs someone senior telling them what to do. Neither is wrong. Both are worth comparing against a fractional seat before you sign an offer letter.
3. Your digital presence is ten years behind your work
Referral-built businesses are especially prone to this. The work is excellent and the website, social, and search presence have not caught up, because nobody with senior marketing judgment has owned them. Every hour you spend trying to fix that yourself is an hour off running the business.
4. You have a marketing person, but no marketing direction
A coordinator or junior hire can execute. Most cannot set strategy, and should not be expected to. If your in-house person is guessing at priorities instead of working from a plan, the gap is not headcount. It is seniority.
5. You want strategy, not another person to manage
Hiring in-house means onboarding, managing, and eventually replacing someone. A fractional CMO seat is built to skip that: senior judgment on call, without adding a body to the org chart you have to run.
6. You are doing $1M-20M in revenue
Below that, most businesses genuinely do not need senior marketing leadership yet — the founder can still hold it. Above $20M, most companies have the budget for a full in-house team. In between is where a fractional seat earns its cost.
7. You want the option to walk away
A full-time hire is a long commitment either way it goes. If what you actually want is senior help with the option to leave in 30 days if it is not working, that rules out a hire — and it rules out any fractional arrangement that locks you into an annual contract.
What a fractional CMO seat actually includes
Worth being precise here, because “fractional CMO” gets used loosely. At Fifty & Five, a seat is an advisory relationship, not embedded production: a monthly strategy session, a written brief on what moved and what is next, one prioritized recommendation scoped and ready to execute, and direct text access in between. Hands-on execution — content production, ad management, website builds — is real work, priced and scoped separately, so the seat stays strategic instead of turning into another vendor bill in disguise.
What it costs
Seats run $4,000-$6,500 a month, scoped to the business and how much oversight it needs — roughly a third of a full-time CMO’s salary, on a month-to-month basis with no contract. We cap it at three seats at a time, because senior attention does not scale past that without becoming the exact problem a fractional seat is supposed to solve.
None of this replaces a marketing person you already trust — it gives them direction. And it is not for everyone: pre-revenue companies, anyone who wants to approve every post, and anyone who wants content volume without strategy are better served elsewhere.
If two or more of the seven signs above sound familiar, it is worth a conversation. See how the seat works →
What does a fractional CMO cost compared to a full-time hire?
A full-time CMO typically costs $200,000 or more per year before benefits and equity. A fractional CMO seat runs $4,000-$6,500 per month — roughly a third of the cost — on a month-to-month basis with no long-term contract.
What size company needs a fractional CMO?
Fractional CMOs are typically the best fit for owner-operated companies doing $1M to $20M in annual revenue — large enough that marketing run on instinct is costing real money, but not yet large enough to justify a full in-house executive team.
Does a fractional CMO replace my marketing coordinator or in-house hire?
No. A fractional CMO adds senior strategic direction; your existing marketing person still executes. Most companies keep their in-house hire and use the fractional seat to give them a plan and a senior sounding board instead of guessing alone.
