There are four situations where hiring me wastes your money: nobody to execute, a single-channel gap, no decision-maker between sessions, and a revenue base too small to pay leadership back. I decline retainers over each of them, and this page is the reasoning, so you can run the test before we ever talk.
Every vendor you are evaluating right now claims to fit your situation. The agency fits, the marketplace match fits, the consultant fits. Universal fit is the one claim the whole industry agrees on.
It is also false, and everyone selling knows it is false. Some engagements are wrong on the day they are signed, and the seller is the only party with enough information to know in advance.
So here is my version of the disclosure I wish every vendor published: the four gates I run on an intro call, what failing each one means, and what to buy instead. Two of them disqualify more companies than any other reason I hear.
Publishing your own disqualifiers is bad short-term salesmanship, which is why almost nobody does it. The gates filter out the deals that close fastest: companies in enough pain to buy anything. Those are also the engagements most likely to fail, and a failed engagement costs me more than a filtered lead ever will.
Gate one: is there anyone to execute?
My output is decisions: what to build, what to stop, where the next dollar goes. Decisions have to land in somebody's hands, and the hands cannot be mine five days a week, because that is a different job at a different price.
A company with no marketer, no contractors, and no agency has nowhere for direction to land. The roadmap gets written, everyone agrees with it, and it ages in a drive while the quarter passes.
Direction with nobody to build it depreciates weekly.
If this is you, hire a doer first. One strong generalist marketer, or a scoped agency engagement, changes this gate's answer in a month. Leadership makes sense as the thing that multiplies hands, which requires hands.
Gate two: is the gap actually one channel?
"Our paid accounts are underperforming" is a specialist problem. So is deliverability, and so is a checkout page that leaks. Each fits inside one discipline's vocabulary, and a person who does that discipline all day will fix it faster than I will, at a fraction of the cost.
Bringing in cross-channel leadership for a one-channel problem buys you an expensive week of diagnosis followed by the referral I would have made on day one.
Leadership earns its cost when the problem refuses to stay in one lane: positioning, pricing, channel mix, and measurement pulling on each other, with nobody owning the combined number. If your problem statement needs three departments to describe, that is the shape I take on.
The problem statement itself is the test. "Acquisition cost is up and we cannot tell whether it is the funnel, the offer, or the channel mix" spans the whole system. "Our search ads got worse this quarter" does not, and pretending otherwise would cost you a quarter of my diagnosis time.
Gate three: can anyone decide between sessions?
Fractional means part-time by definition. The model works when decisions keep moving through the days I am elsewhere, because someone inside the company is empowered to act within the direction we set together.
In some companies every marketing choice routes through the founder, and the founder's calendar is why marketing is stuck. Adding a part-time leader to that structure adds a second stop to the queue.
Part-time leadership plus centralized approval equals a paid bottleneck.
The fix costs nothing: name one person who owns day-to-day marketing decisions, and define what escalates. Companies unwilling to do that get more value from monthly advisory sessions than from a leadership retainer, and I tell you that on the call.
Gate four: is there enough business to pay leadership back?
Senior leadership is a multiplier, and multipliers need something to multiply. The way I work, the line sits near $15M in revenue, for reasons I laid out honestly in the piece on first marketing hires: below it, a company usually still needs its first repeatable channel, and its budget does more in the hands of builders.
This is the gate sellers least like naming, because it excludes the most buyers. It also produces the worst engagements when ignored: a serious retainer consuming the budget that should have funded the actual work, while the leader writes strategy for a team that does not exist yet.
If you are below the band, spend on execution now and revisit leadership in two quarters. The timing signals are a separate question with its own honest answer.
What to buy instead
Turning someone down without a forwarding address is theater, so every no comes with a specific alternative.
I keep a short list of specialists and doers I trust, and introductions are free. A company I turned down at the right time tends to come back at the right time, and those become the best engagements on my calendar.
If you passed all four
Then the conversation is short, because the hard questions are already answered. You have hands, a cross-channel problem, someone who can decide, and a base worth multiplying. What remains is whether my track record convinces you, and whether the economics work for your P&L.
Run the gates before you book me or anyone else. If you pass and want them run against your actual numbers, that is what an intro call is for. Let's talk.
