The old model was simple: marketing problem arises, you hire a specialist, you move on. For a long time, that worked. But the economics have shifted. Locking in a €150k salary plus charges on a 12-month contract — when your ARR can swing 40% in either direction next quarter — isn’t prudence. It’s exposure. CEOs who still default to full-time or nothing aren’t being rigorous. They’re just being slow.
At some point, every founder hits the same wall. You need real go-to-market leadership, not someone who “does content.” But a proper CMO runs seniority trap territory: upward of €150k+ annual salary per year before you add the 45% on top. So you compromise. You hire junior, you fill the gap yourself, or you wait. We still see founders running their own pipeline at €10M ARR. Not by choice, but because they never found a senior partner they could actually hand things to. And the access over ownership model is gaining ground fast — because the best talent has decided it prefers it that way too.
The wrong hire at the wrong stage cuts both ways. That’s the real skillset gap. A Seed-stage company needs a “mercenary” who builds from nothing. A Series B company needs a “General” who can orchestrate a real army. Bring in the heavy-hitter too early and you’re paying for vision you can’t execute yet. Wait too long and your team spends months tinkering without direction — the classic bricolage. We call it the Plateau Effect: MRR flat for twelve months straight, solid budget, nothing to show for it. Nobody was building the engine. They were just pouring fuel into a broken one.
Fractional marketing is embedded leadership, not consulting. A fractional CMO works one, two, or three days a week, and actually works with you. They’re in your Slack. They’re in your board meetings. They own your KPIs. This isn’t the consultant who ships a deck and disappears. The model sits between strategy and execution: someone with the vision to set the direction and the instinct to get their hands dirty building it. Which is exactly the gap most scale-ups can’t fill with a single full-time hire.
As Forbes has documented in its analysis of the rise of the fractional executive, the best marketing talent has largely moved on from the idea of spending five years inside the same company. They want variety. They want leverage. And for you, that’s good news: you get access to people who have taken companies from €10M to €50M ARR without having to own their time full-time. You stop paying for a person. You start paying for a playbook, and the judgment to know when not to use it.
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