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FRACTIONAL MATH · ISSUE 006

Most marketing strategy dies in a slide deck. It gets admired in the room, saved to a drive, and never touches the P&L.

Every operator I work with already has a strategy, usually a good one. What they do not have is the thing that turns it into revenue: a sequence, an owner, and a date. A deck is a point of view. Shipping is a different muscle.

I have read a lot of these documents. The good ones are genuinely sharp, full of real insight about the market and the brand. They are also, almost always, dead on arrival. And the reasons have nothing to do with how smart the thinking is.

Three things keep most audits and strategies from producing a single dollar.

First, they audit the function instead of the business. A page-speed score, a channel breakdown, a list of broken tags. All true, none of it tied to where the next dollar of revenue comes from. An audit that does not open with how this company makes money and where that is stuck is grading homework, not finding revenue.

Second, they end at the deck. The work product is the artifact: a polished deck, a tidy roadmap, a handshake, and then nobody owns the next move, so the next move never happens. A roadmap with no owner is just a nicely formatted opinion. The strategy gets filed and the calendar rolls on.

Third, there is no number on the seller's side of the table. The person who wrote the strategy carries no exposure to whether it works. When the upside is a fee at delivery and nothing after, the incentive stops the day the deck lands.

Notice that none of these is a thinking problem. The strategy can be brilliant and still ship nothing. Admiration and revenue come from different work, and most of the market only sells the first.

Shipping looks different from the first week. The order matters: you size before you build, and you build a sequence, not a wish list. It starts with a short diagnostic that sizes the opportunity, not a forensic audit of every pixel. Five pillars, a 60-minute working session, and an honest read on where the money is and is not. Then a sequenced 90-day plan with a named owner next to every action. An owner is not a department, it is a person with a name who is accountable for that line by that date. The test is blunt: the first action is live in week 3 to 4, not week 13. If your plan cannot point to something that shipped inside a month, it is a document, not a plan.

Who does that work is its own decision, and the math is not close. For a company doing $3M to $50M, a full-time CMO runs all-in roughly $300,000 to $450,000 a year before equity, midpoint about $375,000. The conservative loaded number, base plus bonus plus benefits plus payroll burden, is about $320,000. Year one runs closer to $400,000 to $450,000 once you add a retained-search fee, about a third of first-year cash with a $75,000 to $100,000 floor, plus 6 to 12 months of ramp before that hire makes a decision that pays for itself. And average CMO tenure is about 4 years, among the shortest seats in the C-suite, so the recruiting clock restarts sooner than you would like.

For most operators in that band, a full-time hire is too early and an agency is the wrong shape. An agency sells output: more posts, more campaigns, more reports. You wanted a number on the P&L and you got a content calendar. A fractional CMO is the third option. It runs about $96,000 to $264,000 a year, 40 to 60 percent less than a full-timer, with no search fee, and it buys senior judgment aimed at the few moves that actually change revenue, not a body to fill an org chart. The point is not that agencies are bad or that a CMO is a mistake. It is that both are answers to a question most operators in this band are not asking yet.

The free Operator's Scorecard is the next step. It is a 5-minute self-assessment across the same five pillars, and it will show you where your marketing is leaking revenue before you spend a dollar fixing it. Start there.

If you want someone to size the opportunity with you, that is what the diagnostic is for, and it carries our $75K Revenue Opportunity Guarantee: we identify at least $75,000 of annualized incremental revenue, or there is no fee. Reply to this email and tell me where you are stuck.

See you next week.

Will Gray
Founder, Graystone Consulting

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