Days 1 to 30
Decide
People, Brand and Budget. Buyer interviews, your leadership team aligned on what makes you different, and a budget sized to win.
The short answer. A 10Louder fractional CMO owns your marketing from the first decision to the last report: who you serve, why you win, what to spend, what to measure and who does the work. Brad leads. Specialists execute. Your leadership team gets one plan and one scoreboard.
When to hire one
Lots of people working on your marketing. Nobody leading it.
- You’ve outgrown doing it yourself. Marketing needs senior attention, but a full-time CMO isn’t justified yet.
- You have vendors, not a plan. An agency here, a freelancer there, someone on social, a web developer, each optimizing their own piece.
- Spend keeps rising. Nobody can say what it’s producing, or what to stop.
- Sales and marketing tell different stories. Leadership can’t agree on what makes you different, so buyers and AI can’t either.
More activity isn’t more growth. Someone has to connect the decisions.
Where you start
Before the plan, find out how your marketing actually works.
Before 10Louder, Brad led digital transformation work for Dell and NTT Data, helping marketing teams change how they work, not just what they buy. That work produced the maturity model 10Louder uses at the start of every fractional CMO engagement.
It scores four things: culture, people, process, and tools and technology. Each one sits at one of five stages.
- 1Foundational
Nobody owns it. Work is ad hoc, roles are informal, and technology gets in the way more than it helps.
- 2Emergent
Headcount grows, and so does the workload. Some processes appear, but people follow them differently, and new tools sit half adopted.
- 3Structured
Roles are clear, processes are written down, and results are measured against benchmarks. New tools focus on the customer experience.
- 4Scaling
Governance works. Marketing and IT plan together, deliver in short cycles and keep improving the process.
- 5Optimized
Technology enables the work instead of blocking it. Teams test and learn quickly across every channel, and decisions run on data.
Companies rarely sit at one stage. A team can have Scaling tools on a Foundational process, which is how expensive software ends up half used. A fractional CMO finds the weakest of the four and moves it up one stage at a time. Skipping stages is how transformation budgets disappear.
Connecting the steps
A fractional CMO connects every step of the staircase.
Strategy runs top down: business strategy, then brand, then marketing, then channel, and only then the tactic. Agencies and specialists each live on one step. The fractional CMO’s job is to connect all of them, so the ad on the bottom step serves the business goal at the top.
Every step depends on the one above it, and every step starts with the customer.
That’s where PB² GOST³ comes in.
Brad has taught it at Southern Methodist University every semester for eleven years. It turns the staircase into nine decisions, made in order, so nothing gets bought before it’s needed.
The plan picks the team
A fractional CMO who brings a bench.
Most companies hire a fractional CMO expecting one person to wear every hat. That isn’t how good marketing gets done.
Brad brings a vetted network of specialists, partners and contractors he has worked with: media buyers, conversion specialists, designers, developers, writers and analysts. The plan decides who gets called in, for what and for how long. Nobody is added because they happen to be on someone’s payroll.
On one engagement, that meant a paid media team in Toronto and a conversion specialist in the Netherlands, assembled for exactly what the plan called for. Your in-house people stay at the center. The bench fills the gaps the plan exposes.
Specialists are scoped and priced to the plan, so you pay for what it calls for and nothing it doesn’t. That’s the rule a fractional CMO should live by, and it’s the last of the nine decisions.
How it works
Nine decisions, in order. Then the work.
01 · People
Who is the buyer, and what problem do you solve for them? Brad runs the buyer interviews and personas.
02 · Brand
Why you, not the alternative? Your leadership team agrees on what makes you different, usually through the Brand Truth Workshop.
03 · Budget
What will it take to win? A budget sized to your goals and your category, split across paid, owned and earned.
04 · Goal
Where is the business going? Growth from existing buyers, new markets or new offers, decided before marketing is asked to deliver it.
05 · Objective
What must marketing move, and by when? SMART objectives become the scoreboard your leadership team reads.
06 · Strategy
How, and what first? The balance between harvesting demand now and building the brand that creates future demand.
07 · Tactics
Which channels and tools? Chosen late, and only the ones the plan calls for.
08 · Tracking
How do we know what’s working and what needs to be fixed? Track, analyze, optimize, with every channel tied back to the objectives.
09 · Team
Who owns each step? Your people, plus specialists from Brad’s vetted network and AI, matched to the plan rather than the other way around.
The first 90 days
Decide, plan, launch. Then run it.
Days 31 to 60
Plan
Goal, Objective and Strategy. A written plan your leadership team can read in ten minutes and agree to.
Days 61 to 90
Launch
Tactics, Tracking and Team. Specialists from the bench in place, tracking live and the first campaigns running.
Every month after
Run
Brad reports to your leadership team, manages the specialists and the budget, and adjusts the plan as the numbers come in.
Fit
Who it’s for.
A good fit
- B2B companies with roughly $3 million to $100 million in revenue.
- No senior marketing leader, or marketing that isn’t performing.
- A leadership team willing to make decisions before spending.
What you get
Brad leading the plan, a vetted bench of specialists matched to it, and reporting to your leadership team, backed by the 10 agreements and the Grown-Up Guarantee.
From $7,000
a month
Wrong fit if
- You need a full-time, in-house hire.
- You want channels running before the strategy is decided.
In their words
What it looks like from the client side.
“His command of digital marketing strategies, adept allocation of marketing spend, and invaluable assistance in vetting potential firms were instrumental in our success.”
“With the same paid budget, our clicks increased by 42%, and CPC dropped by 64%. Even more impressive, we saw a 415% year-over-year increase in demo sign-ups!”
“He quickly and positively impacted our marketing strategy through managing agency resources, creating structure in our marketing processes, monitoring campaign performance, and aiding us in our agency selection process.”
Brad brings 26 years in brand and digital marketing, including Chief Digital Officer at Moroch and work with brands like McDonald’s, LEGO and FedEx Office. Read Brad’s profile.
Common questions
Questions buyers ask.
- When should you hire a fractional CMO?
- When your business has outgrown managing marketing itself but doesn’t need a full-time CMO yet. The clearest sign: several agencies, freelancers and tools working on your marketing, and nobody leading them toward the same objectives.
- What is a marketing maturity assessment?
- A scorecard of how your marketing team works today across culture, people, process, and tools and technology, each rated from Foundational to Optimized. It shows which weakness to fix first, so the plan doesn’t buy software the team isn’t ready to use.
- What is a fractional CMO?
- A senior marketing leader who works part-time for your company. A fractional CMO owns the marketing plan, the budget, the team and the results, without the cost of a full-time executive.
- How much does a fractional CMO cost at 10Louder?
- Engagements start at $7,000 a month. The scope depends on how many of the nine decisions are already made and how much of the team needs to be assembled.
- How is a fractional CMO different from a marketing agency?
- An agency sells activity in its own channels. A fractional CMO decides what the plan needs first, then picks and manages the agencies, freelancers and tools that serve it.
- Should we hire a fractional CMO or a full-time CMO?
- If you need a senior plan and leadership more than a full-time executive, start fractional. If marketing needs someone in the building every day, hire full-time, and a fractional CMO can help you write the role.
- Does a fractional CMO come with a team?
- At 10Louder, yes. Brad brings a vetted network of specialists, partners and contractors. The plan decides who is needed, and each specialist is scoped and priced to the work the plan calls for.
- Will a fractional CMO replace our in-house marketer?
- No. Most marketing teams are one person plus outside help. A fractional CMO gives that person a plan, a budget and a senior partner, and makes the whole team more effective.
- How long does an engagement last?
- Plan on at least 90 days. The first 90 days make the decisions and launch the plan. After that, the work is running it, measuring it and adjusting.
- Do you work with companies outside Dallas?
- Yes. Brad is based in Dallas and works with companies across the United States.
Ready for a grown-up conversation about your marketing?
Keep reading
- People: who buys, and whySegments, the customer journey and the F.R.E.D. persona.
- Budget: how much to spendShare of voice, benchmarks and the 60/40 split.
- Tracking: what’s working and what needs fixingKPIs, UTMs and finding your O-ring.
- Team: who owns each stepThe roles every program needs and why execution wins.