Perspectives · The fractional model
What a fractional CMO should deliver in the first 90 days.
Audit, competitive assessment, go-to-market diagnostic, and work already shipped. The first-quarter checklist to demand from anyone in this seat.
Audit, competitive assessment, go-to-market diagnostic, and work already shipped. The first-quarter checklist to demand from anyone in this seat.
In the first 90 days, a fractional CMO should deliver four things: a full audit of your brand and funnel, a competitive assessment, a go-to-market diagnostic that ranks your real growth constraints, and a twelve-month plan with the first work already live. If a candidate cannot tell you what you will have in hand at day 90, the engagement will be as vague as the answer.
One calibration before the checklist: a fractional CMO is on your business a day to a day and a half per week, not five. That is the model working as designed, and it is why this sequence runs a quarter rather than the sprint a full-time hire would claim. What you should not accept is the timeline stretching because the thinking is slow. The constraint is hours, never urgency.
Full review of your brand, messaging, website, funnel, and analytics. Every claim your company makes, tested against what a skeptical buyer would believe. Every dollar of spend, traced to what it produced. This is archaeology, and it is usually uncomfortable. Good.
Your top competitors mapped on positioning, pricing signals, content velocity, and how AI engines describe them versus you. That last one surprises founders most. Your prospects now ask ChatGPT about you before they visit your site, and the answer is often wrong or empty. I wrote up why that matters in how AI engines describe your company.
Where revenue actually comes from versus where you think it comes from. Which segments close fastest, which channels carry real cost per acquisition, where the pipeline leaks. The output is a ranked list of growth constraints, because at $5M to $30M you do not have ten problems. You have two or three, and everything else is noise.
A twelve-month marketing agenda ranked by expected impact, with the first quarter fully resourced. And by day 90 something real is already live. A repositioned homepage. A working outbound sequence. A fixed analytics stack. In my engagements, deployed AI agents compress this phase hard: the kind of standing infrastructure I describe in the Monday morning brief can be producing before the plan is even final. Strategy that has not shipped anything is a hypothesis.
Two things: a deck with no delivery dates, and a discovery phase that bills for a quarter before an opinion shows up. Senior judgment forms an opinion fast and revises it in public. The dates can honor a one-day-a-week cadence. They cannot be missing. If you are still deciding between fractional and full-time, the cost side of that decision is in fractional CMO vs. full-time CMO.
Audit before advising. The first month belongs to a full review of brand, messaging, website, funnel, analytics, and spend, because every recommendation that follows is only as good as the diagnosis underneath it.
Shipped work should exist by day 90: a repositioned page, a working outbound motion, or a fixed reporting stack. Revenue impact follows the constraint being fixed, which varies by business, but visible output inside the first quarter is a fair bar for any senior operator working a fractional cadence.
At minimum: a written audit, a competitive assessment, a go-to-market diagnostic with ranked growth constraints, a twelve-month agenda with the first quarter resourced, and at least one piece of market-facing work already live. All with delivery dates attached.
Todd Henderson is a fractional CMO for founder-led companies, pairing 30 years of brand and marketing leadership with a deployed team of AI agents for market intelligence, outbound, reporting, content, and GEO. He is a Co-Founder of Defining.com, the naming and branding agency, and runs his fractional practice as a separate embedded-leadership engagement.
The 90-day diagnostic is part of my base engagement, and it is the easiest way to evaluate whether the model fits before committing to more. Book a call and I will walk you through a sample. Or run the free GEO assessment first and see one slice of the audit applied to your company today.