My entry to marketing consulting work began with two fractional CMO gigs. I think I charged $3,500 and $4,000/month respectively.
My intent was to advise on and manage my clients’ marketing. The reality looked much more like actual production work.
I was an order-taker, not really a trusted advisor. There’s a big difference.
Instead of outsourcing everything and being a manager, I just outsourced the big stuff and did a lot of execution work myself. Things like setting up software, doing surveys, email campaigns, briefs, proofs-of-concept, website tweaks, reporting, and more.
Sound familiar?
On top of that, clients dumped every idea they had onto my plate because they saw me as an employee-shaped figure.
It was also a fixed-fee engagement with flexible scope—what did I expect?
And that’s all fine if you want to make a “quick” six figures but don’t care about things like key client risk, scaling, or enjoyment considerations.
These gigs consumed almost all of my time and mental bandwidth. I knew I had to change what I was doing and how I sold my services. It wasn’t a sustainable model.
That’s what led me to focus more on advisory work and accepting FCMO gigs for only very particular kinds of clients.
I also set specific guardrails to ensure my gigs didn’t take over my business. I learned how to manage scope to prevent things from going sideways on day one.
On Wednesday, I’m going to share the lessons that I wish I knew back then about how to package and run a fractional CMO engagement—without it becoming a full-time job shoehorned into a part-time engagement.
If you are curious about doing fractional marketing leadership work as a step on the journey to other more leveraged consulting offerings, you’ll want to consider joining the membership for access to this and much more, or sign up for the single training.
It’s under $100 for either option, which is a good deal when you consider the value of saving yourself from even one of the mistakes I made and the upside of closing one good-fit CMO client.
You won’t get training like this anywhere else. These are 100% my own ideas and have been battle-tested since 2017.
Full details: https://kevin.me/right-way/
Hope to see you inside!
—kw