Marketing Leadership Without the Full-Time Hire

The gap this fills

You are past the point where marketing can be something you get to on a Saturday. You are not near the point where hiring a chief marketing officer makes sense — that is a $200,000 decision before benefits, for a job that does not need forty hours a week at your size.

So most owners land in the middle. They hire vendors. An SEO company, an ads person, a web designer, someone for social. Each one is competent at their own piece and none of them is responsible for whether the whole thing works. When it does not, nobody can tell you why, because nobody was watching the whole board.

Part-time, on retainer, accountable for the strategy and for whether it actually happens. For most businesses between $1M and $10M that is the right shape — senior marketing judgment, without a senior salary or a full-time seat to fill.

I do the work as well as the thinking

Most fractional CMOs will tell you they advise and never implement, and that they hire execution out. It is close to an industry rule.

It is also written for a company with a marketing department to direct. If you have six people and one of them does marketing between other jobs, a plan that arrives with instructions to go and find an agency is a plan that sits in a drawer. The gap between a good strategy and a good quarter is almost always execution nobody had time for.

So I do both. I build the website, write the content, run the campaigns and the automation, do the local SEO and the AI search work — and I am the one who decided those were the right things to do, which means when something is not working I do not have to negotiate with a vendor about whose fault it is.

Which half matters more is worth being honest about. You can hire execution almost anywhere; there is no shortage of people who will build a page or post to Instagram. What is hard to buy is the judgment about which of those things is worth doing this quarter, and the willingness to be wrong about it in front of you. That judgment is the part of this you cannot get from a vendor, and it is the part the price is built around.

The trade-off is honest: I take a small number of clients. There is a limit to how much of this one person can do well, and I would rather tell you that than hand your account to someone junior.

What a month actually looks like

One part of this is the same for everybody. The rest is not, and I would rather say that plainly than publish a list of everything included and let you assume you are getting all of it.

Everything below depends on you. Some of it you may already have handled. Some of it you may not need. We go through the list at the start and agree what is mine and what is yours, and that is what the rest of the invoice is built from.

What this has looked like

In January 2025 Tim Mallory, who owns Advantage Roofing in Cincinnati, downloaded a website wireframe from my site, filled it in for his own homepage, and emailed me asking what came next.

On the call I asked whether he had invested in SEO. He had spent thousands, over years, with several different providers, and was fairly sure none of it had worked. His plan was to stop and try something else.

Instead we ran a diagnosis. What it found was not what either of us expected: his SEO was working. Advantage Roofing was pulling more traffic than any other roofer in the Cincinnati area. But the homepage was bouncing 98% of the people it brought in — because the first thing on the homepage was a form offering a shingle upgrade, aimed at someone who had already decided, shown to people who had not yet worked out whether this company could help them.

Then we mapped the customer journey and found the shape of the business: excellent at repeat and refer — the way they treat existing customers is genuinely unusual — and almost nothing at know and like. Plenty of people arrived. Almost nobody arrived already knowing who they were.

Estimate requests doubled in the first month after the new homepage went up. So everything built afterwards was aimed at those two stages. A homepage rewritten around the homeowner instead of the company. A presence on Facebook and LinkedIn. Neighborhood campaigns around booked inspections. Email and text nurture. Ads written to real homeowner fears rather than to shingle brands.

“If you’re a business owner like I was — struggling and throwing money at marketers with no results — take a look at Tim Yates. He really cares about your business. He flipped my marketing on its head, and it works.” — Tim Mallory, CEO, Advantage Roofing

Read the full case study, including Tim telling it himself on video.

How this starts

Not with a retainer. It starts with Strategy First — a paid diagnosis that runs 30 to 45 days and ends with a written 90-day plan. That step is required, and there is no version of this where we skip it.

There are two reasons for that order, and only one of them is about you. The first is that I cannot lead marketing for a business I do not understand, and a diagnosis is how I come to understand it. The second is that it gives us both a low-stakes way to find out whether we work well together before either of us commits to something ongoing.

Plenty of people stop there, and that is a fine outcome. The plan is yours either way — you can hand it to your own team or to another agency. Strategy First will never conclude that what you need is a retainer with me. But a retainer will never start without it.

Why this one is by invitation

Every other service on this site can be bought. You read the page, you decide, you book a call, we start. This one works differently, and it is worth explaining rather than being coy about it.

The retainer is not a bigger version of a project. It is a business handing over responsibility for something that matters, to someone who then has to be trusted to act without asking first. That only works when both people already know it will — which means it cannot be sold on a first call, by me or by anyone.

In practice the conversation almost always starts from the client's side, somewhere in the middle of Strategy First or the months after it. Someone says a version of can you just run this. That is the invitation, and by then we both have enough evidence to answer honestly.

If you are reading this cold and it sounds like what you want, that is fine — it just means the next step is Strategy First rather than a retainer.

What it costs

Who this works for — and who it doesn’t

It works well for owner-led businesses somewhere between $1M and $10M, usually with a team of five to fifteen, where the owner is still the person who decides. Service businesses and the trades especially — roofing, home services, contractors, professional services — because the customer journey there is long, local and heavily referral-driven, which is exactly where the gaps hide.

It works whether or not you enjoy marketing. One of my clients thinks like a marketer and we develop strategy together. Another wants to do his own job and let me handle the rest. Both are good.

It does not work when every decision needs sign-off.

Early in my StoryBrand years I worked with a cleaning company whose owner said he trusted me and plainly did not. Every recommendation was second-guessed. Every call felt like I was a step away from being accused of something. The day I had enough work to end that relationship was one of the best days I have had in business.

I do not need to be left alone — I never want to surprise a client, so you will always hear what I am planning before I do it. But if you need to approve every post and every page before it goes out, the thing you are paying me for cannot happen, and we will both be frustrated.

It also does not work when the answers are already decided. I have worked with people who held very strong opinions about what does and does not work in marketing, formed some years ago, and were not open to revisiting them. There is no version of a diagnosis that helps if the diagnosis is not allowed to say anything new.

Common questions