You've outgrown DIY marketing. You're not ready for a $200K full-time CMO. So what do you hire?
Most $10M+ contractors pick the wrong answer. They hire a Marketing Coordinator without a strategist. Or they sign with an agency that treats them like every other client. Or they keep trying to run marketing themselves while building a company.
Here's the honest comparison.
Option 1: DIY (You)
Who it's for: Solo Hustle (under $1M)
The constraint: Decision quality. Every hour you spend wrestling with Facebook Ads is an hour you're not directing the parts of the business only you can run. The growth ceiling here is your attention, not your budget.
When it breaks: The moment you cross $1M and a second channel goes live. You literally don't have the focus to coordinate them.
Option 2: Marketing Coordinator
Who it's for: Scaling Engine ($5M–$10M), paired with a strategist.
The constraint: A coordinator without a strategist becomes a very efficient producer of marketing busy work. They'll post on Facebook, run email campaigns, and update the website. They won't build a revenue architecture or hold vendors accountable to it.
When it breaks: When you expect them to set strategy they're not equipped to set.
Pick the right marketing leadership model.
Get the Marketing Leadership Decision Guide — a side-by-side comparison of your 4 options, with the math.
Send Me the GuideOption 3: The Agency
Who it's for: Specific tactical needs (PPC, SEO, web design) — never as your marketing leadership.
The constraint: Agencies are specialists, not architects. Your PPC agency blames the web dev. The web dev blames the SEO agency. Nobody owns the overall result, and the owner becomes the referee between vendors.
When it breaks: The moment you need one person accountable for whether marketing — across every channel — is actually working.
Option 4: The Fractional CMO
Who it's for: Marketing Ownership Stage to Scale and Leadership Stage ($2M+)
The constraint: Requires trusting an outside operator with a critical function. That's it. That's the only real trade-off.
When it works: When decision quality across channels has become your growth constraint, and you need senior strategic leadership, vendor accountability, and a single architect for the plan — without a $200K+ full-time hire on the leadership team.
The leverage math
A full-time CMO is a leadership seat that costs $180K–$250K per year, plus benefits, plus the search and ramp time. A Fractional CMO is the same seat at a fraction of that — and the engagement starts producing decisions inside week two, not month four.
At $2M+ revenue, the decision-quality compounding is where the real return lives: one bad cross-channel call avoided per quarter usually pays for the engagement.
Closing
The Fractional CMO model exists for exactly this stage — the gap between outgrowing DIY and needing a full-time executive hire. It's not a compromise. It's the right answer for a specific stage.
If you're in that stage, pick the model that matches it.