Fractional CMO for founder-led companies. Powered by a human bench and a deployed agentic team.
Todd Henderson · Santa Barbara, CA
30 years inside brands like these
Anyone can prompt their way to a first draft now. That is the new floor, and it all sounds the same. What separates work from the herd, and from AI slop, is the 20% that machines cannot supply: taste, judgment, and thirty years of knowing what great looks like. My value is not just mastery of these tools. It is using them in a way that makes my clients impossible to confuse with anyone else.
You can hire a full-time CMO. That’s a $300K commitment before benefits, recruiting, and ramp time, with no guarantee they’re right for your stage.
You can hire a fractional CMO. Most are strategists who deliver decks and disappear when it’s time to ship.
You can hire an agency. Most charge agency margins for execution your team could do in-house if it had the bandwidth.
What you actually need is one operator who runs the function, ships the work, and brings the AI infrastructure with them. That’s the model I’ve built.
I run brand and marketing for founder-led companies as an embedded operator. Strategy from a senior leader. Execution from a hybrid team of humans and AI agents, deployed task by task to whichever delivers higher quality at lower cost. One point of accountability. One invoice.
I’ve spent the past few years building and deploying AI agent systems alongside my team. They run outbound campaigns, produce content at scale, optimize paid media, monitor competitors, and generate the kind of analysis that used to take a senior analyst a week. I deploy those same systems for my clients. The result is the output of a marketing department at the cost of a senior hire.
An accountable operator at the table for every brand, marketing, and growth decision. Function leadership, vendor oversight, executive reporting.
Deployed for the work that demands a human touch. Senior designers, writers, strategists, and marketers I trust to ship at quality.
Outbound, content, paid media optimization, competitive intel, analysis. Built, tuned, and run by an operator who uses them daily.
Every agent runs with human review gates and tiered permissions matched to blast radius. Nothing client-facing ships without a person signing off. That discipline is the difference between AI leverage and AI liability.
Positioning, messaging, and identity that turns under-recognized companies into category leaders. The approach behind 350+ brands at Defining.com.
Outbound and demand systems: agents handle the volume, my team handles the strategy, you handle the closing conversations.
A human-directed engine producing blogs, social, and campaign assets at agency quality, at founder pace.
We audit your marketing operations, deploy AI where it accelerates, and train your team to run the new stack.
Particular depth in two sectors: financial services (Cantor Fitzgerald, Griffin Capital, LegacyFirst, Radiant Mortgage) and technology, from PKWARE and Dell to Cisco and Ingram Micro.
Cantor Fitzgerald
Yokohama
LegacyFirst
Benefits All In
Griffin Capital
Radiant Mortgage
PKWARE
Phoenix Group
Full portfolio at Defining.com
A base retainer plus modules you stack only as you need them. No bundles you don’t use. No agency markups on work you didn’t ask for. One contract. One point of accountability.
Senior marketing leadership embedded in your business. Strategy, function leadership, vendor oversight, executive reporting, and a dedicated communication channel. The first 60 days include a competitive assessment, brand audit, and go-to-market diagnostic delivered as part of the base.
I live in sunny Santa Barbara with my fianceé Kate and our two Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, Murphy and Lila. I’ve spent thirty years building brands. I co-founded Defining.com, the naming and branding agency, 19 years ago. I’ve led brand and growth work for over 350 companies, from startups through public companies like Cantor Fitzgerald, Dell, Yokohama, Cisco, Edwards Lifesciences, and many more.
Two years ago I started building AI agents to handle the work my team didn’t have time for. These agents got good, really good. Then they got better than most humans at certain tasks. So I built more of them.
Today I run my own business on a deployed agent team alongside a human bench with whom I’ve worked for decades. I bring that same model to my clients. It lets me deliver work that used to require a large department, at a price founder-led companies can actually justify.
Hands down the best agency at building billion-dollar brands.
You took a beloved brand and positioned us for our next phase of growth. The best team I’ve worked with in the past 20 years.
Todd helped strengthen existing relationships and facilitated hundreds of interactions with brand new potential clients. Very impressive!
Having worked with Todd for five brand launches, I can honestly say he’s an invaluable extension of our executive team and one of my most valuable growth partners.
Like having another trusted employee in the conversation, that also happens to be an expert.
ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are already answering for you. GEO is how you take control of that answer.
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AI gets every company to competent, and competent is camouflage. The separation is taste.
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Real year-one costs, time to shipped output, and who owns execution. The honest comparison.
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Audit, competitive assessment, go-to-market diagnostic, and work already shipped.
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One agent on my roster, torn down: what it monitors, what it ships, and what it replaced.
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Direction is scarce. Volume is not. Three hires versus one operator with agent infrastructure.
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Good drafts, zero replies. Quality of output is not evidence of effectiveness.
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Five diagnostic questions that surface value creation early in the hold.
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A WordPress-to-static migration measured in days, verified live, with full SEO parity.
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Four observations on where AI is actually reshaping the industry, and what separates the firms winning the next cycle.
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Why positioning belongs in the C-suite, not the marketing department.
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The structural shift behind how senior marketing gets delivered now.
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What marketing leaders are getting wrong about the current moment.
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Why brand work moves the needle on valuation, not just visibility.
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When defining a new category pays off, and when it’s a way to avoid the harder positioning work.
ReadI take on a small number of clients at a time. Engagements begin with a 30-minute call. No deck, no pitch. We can discuss where your marketing actually stands, and whether there’s a fit. If there is, we’ll talk next steps. If not, you’ll leave with two or three things worth acting on.
See how AI engines actually describe your company. Submit your site and I’ll run the same GEO/AEO audit I run for clients: how ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity surface you against competitors, scored, with the top three gaps to close. Yours within a few business days.
No list, no drip. One assessment, then it’s your move.
Best fit: founder-led companies between $5M and $30M.