A fractional CMO is priced as a monthly retainer. Engagements with me start at $20,000 a month, or $240,000 a year, and scope, the size of the team and the mandate set where one lands above it. I work with companies past product market fit, usually $15 million or more in revenue. A full-time CMO's loaded cost runs $250,000 to $450,000 a year.
A founder I talked to this spring had three quotes on his desk for what he described as the same job, which was someone senior to own growth. An agency wanted $4,000 a month. My own quote came in at $22,000, a little above where engagements start, because his scope included leading the two marketers he already had. A recruiter came back with a comp range for a full-time hire that worked out near $40,000 a month once everything was counted. A tenfold spread across three documents, and nothing inside any of them that explained the gap.
So he did the reasonable thing and lined the three up on the only column all of them shared, which was time. Hours a week from the agency. A slice of a week from me. All of it from the recruiter. Time is the easiest field to compare across three proposals and it carries almost none of the information you are actually buying.
Price-shopping works when you have bought the thing before. You know what a good one costs because you once paid for a bad one and still remember the shape of the regret. Almost nobody hires their first head of growth twice. So the founder ranks the quotes on the variable he can read, and that variable turns out to be the weakest predictor in the stack.
How much does a fractional CMO cost?
Engagements start at $20,000 a month. That is $240,000 for a year, and I publish no ceiling because scope decides the rest. Two lighter shapes sit alongside it. An advisory arrangement, a few hours a week where I am a sounding board and nobody's number belongs to me, runs $5,000 to $7,500 a month. A standalone workshop or a single board session is quoted for the day, at $2,500 to $3,500.
That floor does a job beyond covering my time. The businesses it fits sit past product market fit, generally above $15 million in revenue, where growth is large enough that leadership is the constraint rather than headcount. Underneath that line a founder rarely needs somebody to own the growth number; they need hands on keyboards, or they need to keep selling until the market answers. Publishing the floor settles that question before anyone books a call, which saves us both a month of polite conversation.
There is a third shape, and it is the one most founders actually start with. The growth audit is $12,500, fixed scope, paid once. It buys the same thirty-day diagnosis that opens a retainer, plus the ranked roadmap that falls out of it, and then it is finished, with nothing to renew. That is the front door for most of my engagements, and the reason goes back to the founder holding three quotes. Somebody buying this role for the first time has no way to price it and no way to judge it, so asking them to sign a retainer cold is asking them to buy on faith. A fixed scope at a fixed price lets them find out first.
The ongoing work bills as one flat monthly figure, and I do not sell hours. What gets bought is a sequence of decisions about where money goes and in what order, and an hour is a strange unit to price that in. Inside a retainer that same diagnosis is simply month one, and no fresh spend goes out while it runs, so the thirty-day audit lists exactly what gets pulled and graded before anything moves.
The retainer covers the whole arc rather than a channel: the diagnosis, the build, the hiring, and the handoff that ends the engagement. The engagement guide walks that arc phase by phase. For pricing purposes the thing to notice is that all of it sits inside one number, so there is no menu to add to, no change order when the priority moves, and no separate fee for the quarter where the right answer turns out to be spend less.
Put all three quotes on the same axis
There are two columns worth building, and time is neither of them. The first is loaded annual cost, meaning everything the option takes out of the company in a year with nothing left off the total. The second is who is accountable for the growth P&L, meaning whose name is attached to the number when the board asks why revenue came in under plan.
Annualizing is the easy half. The agency retainer runs $48,000 a year at the quoted $4,000 a month, and it climbs with how many channels you buy, because agency retainers are built out of channel scope and the billable hours underneath it. Mine starts at $240,000 and climbs with scope from there. The full-time hire reaches $250,000 to $450,000 once base pay, bonus, equity and benefits are all counted, and that total tends to run about a third above the salary line everyone anchors on.
The second column is the one that sorts them, and it is harder to fill in because none of the three proposals volunteers it. An agency owns execution inside the brief it was handed. I own the brief, the sequence, and whatever number comes out the far side. A full-time CMO owns all of that permanently, plus brand, communications, and every hire in the function. The gap between the first two is a whole separate decision, and the compressed version is that the expensive mistakes tend to live in the brief rather than in the work.
Walk down that second column and the three stop looking like three prices for one job. When the quarter lands light, the agency asks you for a revised brief. I bring you a revised plan and an account of why the last one was wrong. The executive you hired eight months ago says it needs more time, and the genuinely hard part is that they may be right, which is how a year gets away from a company.
You are not buying days a month. You are buying who owns the number when it moves the wrong way.
Is a fractional CMO cheaper than a full-time CMO?
At the entry point, barely, and it is worth being blunt about that. My floor works out at $240,000 for a year. The cheapest full-time CMO you could realistically land, counted honestly with bonus, equity and benefits, is $250,000. Ten thousand dollars separates them on a quarter-million-dollar decision, which is noise. Take on more scope and the retainer climbs from there, so any pitch that sells fractional as the budget option is quietly hoping you skip the arithmetic.
Which means the case was never a discount. Spend $250,000 on a permanent seat and you recruit whichever executive that figure attracts in your market, at your stage, against everyone else bidding. Spend roughly the same on a retainer and you get part of a week from an operator that search would probably have lost, working on your business from the second week rather than the seventh month, with no quarter of ramp in between. The permanent seat buys all of somebody's week, and the retainer buys part of a more experienced one, starting now.
A senior marketing hire that does not work takes about twelve months to fail, and the months are predictable. Six go to the search, because that is simply what filling an executive seat takes. Three more go to ramp, since a new executive spends a quarter learning the business before changing anything inside it. Then a final quarter passes where the strategy has yet to land and nobody can separate a wrong strategy from one that needs longer. By the time the answer is obvious, the year is gone and the search restarts at month zero.
The salary is the visible half of a full-time CMO's price. The twelve months you lose to a wrong hire is the other half.
Reversibility is the part of the price that never appears on a proposal. A retainer can be closed out with a month's warning, and the worst case is one more invoice and a bruised ego. An executive seat does not close that cleanly, and at an early stage the runway sitting behind that seat is finite in a way an offer letter never communicates.
What makes one fractional CMO cost more than another?
Above the floor, three dials move the number, and seniority is none of them. The first is scope. Owning paid acquisition for a company whose funnel already converts is a smaller job than owning the entire growth function, which pulls in lifecycle, the site, analytics, pricing and the offer itself. The second is the team being led. Two contractors make a different week from eight people with two open roles among them, and management load is what quietly fills a senior operator's calendar. The third is whether hiring and board reporting travel with the mandate, and that one on its own carries an engagement furthest above the floor.
Those three interact in a way worth understanding before anyone negotiates. Trying to buy a full-scope mandate at the floor does not make the work smaller. It defers the work, and everything downstream of it lands later. If what you can spend sits below the floor, the honest move is to cut scope instead: hand over one function completely rather than three functions partially, and let the operator finish something.
Back to the $4,000 quote
That agency quote was real work at a real price. Four thousand dollars a month buys a competent team running one or two channels against a brief, and when the brief is right that is frequently the correct purchase and the efficient one. The trouble starts when a founder reads the low number as a cheaper route to the thing the other two quotes were selling.
The mismatch is structural. A retainer at that level is priced to execute a brief, which presumes somebody upstream wrote a brief worth executing. If that somebody is the founder, then setting growth strategy has quietly become the founder's second job, and the retainer is buying hands for a plan nobody has ever graded. That is the arrangement I most often find running when I open an account for the first time, and it has usually been running longer than anyone in the building realized.
Cheap senior marketing is the most expensive thing you can buy. It bills for activity and leaves the number exactly where it was.
How to price the three against each other
Here is the arithmetic I would hand any founder holding a stack of quotes.
- Annualize every quote, and price the full-time option at loaded cost rather than base pay.
- Write one sentence per option naming the person who answers for the growth number.
- Write what happens in each scenario during the month revenue comes in twenty percent light.
- Add the exit cost: a retainer closes inside a month, an executive seat takes about a year to unwind.
- Rank on those three answers, then let price break the tie rather than make the call.
Run that and the spread stops reading like a spread. The $4,000 quote and the $40,000 quote are answers to two different questions, and the one in the middle answers a third. You are choosing between buying execution, buying ownership for a defined stretch of time, and buying a permanent officer of the company. Those cost different amounts because they are different purchases, and once they are sorted that way the figure on each proposal becomes the least interesting thing about it.
The reason my own number sits where it does is that what leaves the building at the end is a system: measurement finance will sign off on, unit economics that survive a hard question, a funnel that earns its traffic, and a weekly decision rhythm the team runs without me. What the monthly figure actually buys is the growth operating system itself, built once and left behind.
If you are holding quotes and cannot tell what separates them, that is a short conversation worth having before you sign one of them. Let's talk.