Strategic guidance for marketing leaders who would rather fix what happens inside the funnel than spend more at the top. Hourly, sessional, or retained. No long-form proposals.
Advisory is fractional CMO and senior-marketing-advisory work, delivered by people who have run marketing functions themselves, not by consultants who read about it. We bring evidence-led judgement on the decisions that actually move the numbers: segmentation, retention, channel mix, organisational design, and a worldview that prefers fixing the funnel’s flow to widening its mouth. Plain English. No 60-page deliverables.
In rough order of how often the conversation comes up.
First 90 days. Inheriting a team, a budget, a stack, and a set of expectations. You need a quick read on what is working, what is not, and where the political minefields are.
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£2m–£20m businesses where the founder is running marketing and starting to feel the ceiling. Often the right answer is not a CMO. It is a senior advisor for six months while you figure out who to hire.
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New agency. New tech stack. New compensation model. Restructure. Acquisition due diligence. Sometimes you are about to make the call. Sometimes you want a sense-check on one already made. We function as the outside marketing voice in the room.
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A fractional CMO is a senior marketing leader who works with you on a part-time, ongoing basis (typically 4 to 16 hours a week) and functions as the most senior marketing person in your business, without being a full-time hire.
Things a fractional CMO does well: sets the marketing strategy and gets it agreed with the leadership team; hires, manages, and develops the existing marketing team, even if that team is one person; owns the relationship with agencies, freelancers, and platform vendors; translates marketing into board language and the board's strategy into marketing terms; and, often most importantly, stops the team doing the wrong work.
Things a fractional CMO does not do, despite what some pitches imply.
Replace a hands-on doer. Fractional CMOs are senior; they direct, they do not execute. Solve a problem that is actually a product problem, a category problem, or a leadership problem dressed up as a marketing problem. Build the team you would hire in a year's time. The fractional CMO is a bridge, not a destination.
If the work you need is execution: running campaigns, building landing pages, writing copy, managing the email programme. What you need is not a fractional CMO. It is a senior marketing manager or a specialist contractor. We will tell you honestly if we are not the right answer.
Two-page SOWs maximum. If it needs more than that, the engagement is not right.
Better segmentation usually beats more spend. We start with who, then with how much.
Every engagement is led by a named principal. No handover to juniors after the pitch.
Most marketing organisations spend the majority of their budget on filling the top of the funnel: paid media, demand generation, awareness work. The maths is reassuring because every campaign produces a number.
Most of the leverage sits elsewhere. It sits in who you target, what happens to them after they enter, which segments are worth retaining, and which acquisition channels bring in customers who actually repeat.
The unfashionable share of marketing budget. The part that goes on segmentation, retention, and customer intelligence routinely outperforms the larger share that goes on the top of the funnel. Most marketing leaders know this. Most organisations spend as if they did not.
Advisory engagements lean toward the work that has been under-resourced.
When a marketing leader asks us where to spend the next pound, our answer is usually "not where you think". When a board asks us to evaluate a new media-buying agency, our answer often is that the media-buying agency is fine and the problem is upstream of them. When the funnel conversion rate is flat, our first instinct is to look at who is in the funnel, not how to push more people through.
That does not mean spend never matters. It means spend without a clear answer to who, why, and through to what is mostly wasted. The Advisory conversation starts there.
Indicative rates, benchmarked against published UK fractional CMO pricing for 2026. Final scope and rate confirmed in the first conversation; they almost always sit inside the bands below.
Most engagements begin with the free audit, a shared, evidence-based starting point. Or skip the audit and book a 30-minute conversation directly.