A fractional CMO is priced as a monthly retainer. Engagements with me start at $20,000 a month; scope, the team handed over, and the mandate set the rest. A full-time CMO's loaded cost, for comparison, runs $250,000 to $450,000 a year.
A founder I talked to this spring had three quotes on his desk for one job: someone senior to own growth. An agency wanted $4,000 a month. Mine came in at $22,000, above where engagements start, because his scope included the two marketers he already had.
A recruiter's range for a full-time hire worked out near $40,000 a month, loaded. A tenfold spread across three documents, and nothing in any of them explaining the gap.
So he ranked them on the one column all three shared: time. Hours a week from the agency, a slice of a week from me, all of it from the recruiter. Time is easy to compare and tells you almost nothing about what you are buying.
Price-shopping works when you have bought the thing before, and almost nobody hires their first head of growth twice.
How much does a fractional CMO cost?
The growth audit is $12,500: fixed scope, paid once, a thirty-day diagnosis plus a ranked roadmap. Advisory runs $5,000 to $7,500 a month; I am a sounding board and own nothing.
A workshop or a board session is $2,500 to $3,500 for the day. The full engagement is the retainer quoted up top.
The floor does a job beyond covering my time. It fits companies 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 needs hands on keyboards, and publishing a floor settles that before anyone books a call.
Most founders start with the audit. Buying this role for the first time, you have no way to price it or judge it, and a fixed scope at a fixed price lets you find out before you sign anything recurring.
I do not sell hours. 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.
One fee covers all of it, including the quarter where the right answer turns out to be spend less.
Put all three quotes on the same axis
Two columns sort any stack of quotes, and time is neither. Loaded annual cost, meaning everything the option takes out of the company in a year. And who answers for the growth P&L when revenue misses plan.
The agency retainer runs $48,000 a year at the quoted $4,000 a month, and climbs with each channel you add. The full-time hire's loaded total runs about a third above the salary line everyone anchors on.
None of the three proposals volunteers the second column. 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. The gap between the first two is a whole separate decision: expensive mistakes live in the brief, rarely 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 for a revised brief, and I bring a revised plan plus an account of the last one.
The executive you hired eight months ago says it needs more time, and they may be right.
Days a month is the wrong unit. What you are buying is who owns the number when it moves the wrong way.
Is a fractional CMO cheaper than a full-time CMO?
At the entry point the two land in the same order of money, so price will not settle this one. Any pitch selling fractional as the budget option is hoping you skip the arithmetic.
What the same money reaches is what differs. A permanent seat buys all of one person's week, and which person depends on who your market, stage and equity story attract against everyone else bidding. Most companies lose that search.
A retainer buys part of a more experienced operator's week, working on your business from the second week rather than the seventh month. No search, no notice period, no quarter of ramp.
A senior marketing hire that does not work takes about twelve months to fail, and the months are predictable. Six go to the search, three to ramp while a new executive learns the business.
Then a final quarter passes where nobody can separate a wrong strategy from one that needs longer. By then 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 never appears on a proposal. A retainer closes out with a month's warning. An executive seat does not, and the runway behind it is finite in a way an offer letter never says.
What makes one fractional CMO cost more than another?
Three dials move the number above the floor, and seniority is none of them. Scope comes first: owning paid acquisition on a funnel that already converts is a smaller job than owning lifecycle, the site, analytics, pricing and the offer.
The second is the team led. Two contractors make a different week from eight people with two open roles among them. The third is whether hiring and board reporting travel with the mandate, and that one carries an engagement furthest above the floor.
Trying to buy a full-scope mandate at the floor does not make the work smaller. It defers it. If your budget sits below the floor, cut scope instead: hand over one function completely rather than three partially.
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 the correct purchase.
The trouble starts when a founder reads the low number as a cheaper route to what the other two were selling. A retainer at that level executes a brief, and that presumes somebody upstream wrote one worth executing.
If that somebody is the founder, setting growth strategy has quietly become the founder's second job. That is the arrangement I most often find running when I open an account.
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
The checklist 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 who answers for the growth number.
- Write what happens in each option during the month revenue comes in 20% light.
- Add the exit cost: a retainer closes inside a month, an executive seat takes a year.
- Rank on those answers, then let price break the tie rather than make the call.
You are choosing between buying execution, buying ownership for a stretch of time, and buying a permanent officer. Sorted that way, the figure on each proposal becomes the least interesting thing about it.
What leaves the building at the end of my own engagements is a system: measurement finance will sign off on, unit economics that survive a hard question, and a weekly decision rhythm the team runs without me.
The monthly figure buys 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.
Working on this inside your own company? See how a fractional CMO engagement with me works.
