What is a fractional CMO?

I left a VP role at the world’s largest wind energy company earlier this month. Now I’m a Fractional CMO.

Most people I tell that to nod and then ask a follow-up question that tells me they have no idea what it means. And honestly, that’s fair. It’s a relatively new model, especially here in Europe, and the name doesn’t exactly explain itself.

So let me try.

A Fractional CMO is a senior marketing executive who works with your company part-time, on a retainer. Not a consultant who writes a strategy deck and disappears. Not an agency selling you deliverables. Someone who actually owns the marketing direction, shows up to leadership meetings, and is accountable for what happens next. The “fractional” part just means you’re not paying for five days a week when you don’t need five days a week.

The companies that need this most are usually the ones who don’t have a name for what’s wrong yet. They’ve got someone executing marketing, maybe a small team, maybe an agency relationship. But there’s no one above them setting direction. The brand drifts a little every quarter, the pipeline is inconsistent and the CEO is still making the big marketing calls in between everything else they’re doing.

What’s missing isn’t more output, it’s leadership.

I spent 15 years at Vestas doing this at scale. EUR 10M budgets, a global team, campaigns that ran in TIME and The Economist and shaped EU energy policy. I also built a brand completely from zero in under a year when we launched a digital marketplace called Covento. Both of those experiences taught me different things, and both of them matter for this work.

The companies I want to work with now are somewhere between 20 and 200 people. Post-product-market fit. Starting to feel the cost of not having a senior marketing brain in the room. Not ready, or not willing, to hire a full-time CMO at a full-time price.

That gap is real. It’s expensive. And it’s exactly where I work now.

If you lead a business and something in that description sounds familiar, I’d genuinely love a conversation. Not a pitch. Just a coffee, or a call, and an honest look at whether this is even the right thing for where you are.

One Thing Worth Your Attention

The question I’ve been asked most in coffee meetings this month isn’t “what do you do?” It’s “how does it actually work in practice?”

So here’s the honest answer: it depends on what the company needs, but a typical engagement is one to two days a week, on a monthly retainer, with a clear scope that we agree on upfront. I’m not billing by the hour, I’m not disappearing between calls, I’m embedded enough to know what’s actually going on, available enough to make a difference, and senior enough to push back when the strategy isn’t right.

The thing that makes it work is trust. Which is also why the first conversation always matters more than the contract.

Something To Try

If you lead a business and you’re not sure whether you have a marketing problem or a marketing leadership problem, ask your marketing person to explain your positioning in one sentence. Then ask them who you’re not for.

If they hesitate on the second question, the gap probably isn’t their skill set. It’s that nobody above them has ever made that call. That’s worth knowing.