A fractional CMO who owns your marketing, so you don't have to

The problem we solve: marketing with no owner

Most small businesses don't have a marketing problem. They have an ownership problem: nobody senior is responsible for marketing from week to week, so it drifts.

You probably recognise some of these:

• An agency sends a monthly report full of impressions and clicks, but nobody can say how many customers it produced.
• A coordinator or office manager posts on social media, but no one has told them what matters this quarter.
• Ad spend gets turned up when things are slow and off when things are busy, with no plan behind either move.
• The website, the CRM and the Google Business Profile were each set up by different people, and none of them talk to each other.
• You, the owner, are making marketing decisions in the gaps between running the business.

A fractional CMO fixes the ownership gap first. Tactics come second.

What a fractional CMO actually does each month

In plain terms, we act as your head of marketing for part of the month. The work falls into five buckets, and each one has its own page:

1. Leadership. Setting direction, choosing priorities and saying no to distractions. See fractional CMO leadership.
2. Planning and budget. A written 90-day marketing plan with a budget tied to sales targets you can check.
3. Operations. The calendar, tools, tracking and hand-offs, covered under marketing operations.
4. People. Briefing and holding to account your in-house staff, freelancers and agencies, under team and agency management.
5. Reporting. A one-page marketing scorecard you can read in five minutes.

Not every business needs all five on day one. The services overview explains how to pick a starting point.

Fractional versus full-time: the arithmetic

The case for a fractional CMO is mostly a cost-and-fit argument, and you can run the numbers yourself.

Suppose a full-time senior marketing hire would cost you $120,000 in salary. Add benefits, payroll costs, software seats and the months it takes to recruit, and the true first-year figure is higher still. Now compare a retainer at, say, $5,000 a month: $60,000 a year, with no recruiting risk and no severance if the fit is wrong.

The trade-off is time. A fractional lead is not in your office every day. For a business with one to five people touching marketing, that is usually fine: what is missing is direction and accountability, not another full-time pair of hands. Our guide on fractional CMO versus a full-time hire walks through the break-even point in detail.

Proof of the method: results from our HVAC work

Our published results come from our HVAC work, where the same plan-budget-rhythm-scorecard approach has been applied for years. They show what disciplined marketing management can produce. They are not a promise of what it will do for your sector.

• BCWide.ca reached 3× leads in 90 days, which is exactly the window our first plan covers.
• HVACDeal.ca produced 500+ leads at a 12:1 ROI, the kind of ratio a monthly scorecard is built to track.
• HeatLand saw a 300% lead increase in 6 months, backed by 850+ SEO articles that needed a steady editorial calendar to produce.

The full write-ups are on our results page, and the wider portfolio is at HVAC.Agency's case studies.

Who we work with, and where

We work with owner-led Canadian businesses that sell to other businesses or to households: trades and home services, professional practices, local retail and hospitality groups, distributors and growing service firms. The common thread is an owner who wants marketing to be run like the rest of the business.

Coverage is Canada-wide. Market conditions differ sharply between provinces, from French-language advertising rules in Quebec to short building seasons in the North, so we have written a page for each one. Start at areas we serve, or go straight to Ontario, British Columbia or Quebec.

Who is behind MarketingManagement.ca

We are a Canadian consulting practice within the Sedighi.ca and SAZ.ca group of companies, run from our Vancouver, British Columbia headquarters. The practice is led by Ali Sedighi, MBA in Technology Management, who founded his first full-service digital marketing agency in 2007 and has since worked with clients in Canada, the USA and Dubai. He also founded the conversion-rate agency Conv.ca and is Founder & Managing Partner of SAZ.ca.

Read more about how we work on the about page, or see the wider consulting practice at Sedighi.ca and BusinessConsulting.ca.

What to do next

If you want to know whether a fractional CMO makes sense for your business, the first step costs nothing. The initial 30-minute consultation is free, with no obligation.

Before you call, jot down three numbers: what you spent on marketing last year, roughly how many new customers you won, and what an average customer is worth to you. If you don't know one of them, that is useful information too. Check pricing for the engagement models, or read the FAQ for the questions owners usually ask first.