A fractional CMO
A fractional CMO is a senior marketing leader who sits in your leadership team part-time rather than full-time. I work on a retainer, usually three days a month, with businesses that have outgrown ad-hoc marketing but do not yet need, or cannot yet justify, a full-time CMO. If you are weighing up whether to hire one, train into it, or do neither, I have written about what fractional CMO training covers and what it misses.
I am based in Yorkshire and most of my work is here, in Leeds and across the North, alongside national groups run from further afield. I have been doing search and visibility work for 27 years, since setting up my first e-commerce site in 1999, and I still do the technical work myself rather than describing it.
What you are actually buying
Not a plan. A seat at the table, and someone in it.
Plans are cheap, and most businesses I meet already have one sitting in a folder. What is usually missing is someone senior enough to decide which part of it to stop doing.
So the seat looks like this.
01
I sit in the room
I am in your weekly leadership meeting, holding my own objectives alongside everyone else’s. Not reporting in from the outside.
02
I start with the commercial question
Where the business makes and loses money comes first. Where the marketing looks weakest comes second. They are rarely the same place.
03
I challenge the brief
Including the parts I proposed. If the evidence changes, the plan changes, and I would rather say so early than defend a decision.
04
I handle your suppliers
The agencies and freelancers already on your payroll get managed properly, and where it is warranted I help you exit them.
05
I build your team
A fractional seat that leaves nothing behind is an expensive way to rent an opinion. Your people should be stronger when I go.
When it is worth it,
and when it is not.
This works best for businesses somewhere in transition. A funding round, an acquisition, a founder stepping back, or a capable marketing manager with nobody senior to think alongside. Revenue is real, the team is decent, and what is missing is clarity about which of the fifteen possible next moves is the one worth making.
It is not worth it if what you need is delivery. If the strategy is settled and the campaigns just need running, put the money into an agency or a doer instead. I would rather say that on a fifteen minute call than after an invoice.
And it is not worth it if the bottleneck is not marketing at all, which happens more often than you would think. The second example below is exactly that.
What it costs
Advisory seat
Two days a month, from £3,000 + VAT
Fractional CMO seat
From £4,500 + VAT
per month
Three days a month. This is the shape most engagements take.
Embedded seat
Five days a month or more, from £7,500 + VAT
That is a floor, not a price list. What an engagement actually costs depends on how many days it needs and how long it runs, and both of those come out of the first conversation rather than a rate card. Larger engagements run well above it. If you want the longer version, including what the wider UK market charges and where those figures actually come from, I have written how much a fractional CMO costs in the UK.
I would rather quote you properly once I understand the problem than anchor you to a number before I do.
What this has looked like
Three engagements. Three different things proved.
Hometree
Bought as a 3 month go-to-market contract across four acquired installer businesses. It became a 23 month embedded fractional CMO role inside a private equity backed roll-up, sitting in the weekly senior leadership meeting with full access to group financial data.
Across FY26 against FY25, on those four businesses: sales up 28.2%, volume up 38.2%, lead volume up 69%, and customer acquisition cost held to a 4.9% rise while all of that scaled. Every quarter beat its FY25 equivalent, into a difficult market for heat pumps and solar.
What produced it was not a campaign. It was mandatory lead source capture so the board could finally see where sales came from, profit per pound spent replacing cost per lead as the measure that moved budget, external SEO and paid agencies exited and rebuilt in house, and lead generation deliberately throttled whenever local installation capacity could not absorb it.
Large Housing Association
A West Yorkshire housing association came to me with a lead generation problem. Too many empty properties, not enough applicants. One member of the senior team had already decided the answer was bus advertising.
Within a few weeks it was clear the problem was not awareness. Applicants were arriving at the top and then sitting on a waiting list for more than a year before anyone contacted them. By the time a property was ready they had housed themselves elsewhere. More leads would have poured straight through a leaking bucket.
So the work became the lettings process, the waiting list, how customer services triaged and communicated, and internal comms across the silos. 2 years, embedded. The marketing that did happen served the operational fix rather than the other way round.
If you take one thing from this page, take that one. The brief you walk in with is not always the problem you have.
DCS
A Leeds cloud hosting and disaster recovery business. It started in 2011 as a one-off SEO workshop for their in-house marketer, and it has run continuously ever since.
In that time DCS has been through three ownership eras, including a private equity acquisition in March 2025. The relationship survived the transaction and the scope grew on the other side of it. A rebrand and full website rebuild went live in January 2026, with the AI and answer-engine structure built into the templates at build time rather than retrofitted afterwards. In the first quarter after launch, clicks were up 115% and site engagement rate up 55%.
Fifteen years is the point of that one. Strategy that only holds while the person who wrote it is in the room is not strategy.
“Jonny is growth focused, not marketing focused. He embeds in the team rather than sitting off to the side, and no task is beneath him. I have not often worked with senior people willing to roll up their sleeves and just get things done.”
Pran, Chief Commercial Officer, Hometree
What clients say, and where it sits
4.9 out of five
from 113 Google reviews
That is Fleek Marketing, the agency I founded in 2010 and still own. The rating belongs to Fleek and to the team who earned it, not to me personally, and I would rather say so than quietly borrow it.
The fractional CMO seat is a different engagement under my own name, and the three engagements above are what it has actually produced.
Who commissions me, and who has recognised the work
I have not paid for a single one of these. Public bodies, universities and business support programmes commission the training, and the recognition below came from other people’s judging panels.
Named in Insider Media’s 42 under 42, Yorkshire 2016.
The White Cross Vets website I built won the Digital Award at the 2015 Veterinary Marketing Association Awards.
Top trainer, ILM train-the-trainer course, University of York.
Start a conversation
Fifteen minutes, in my diary, with me rather than an account manager. Bring the commercial problem rather than a brief. If a fractional CMO is not the right answer for where you are, I will tell you, and tell you what I think is.
More about how I got here is on my story page. I also run training and speaking. The questions that come up most often are answered on the FAQ.