Tag: fractional CMO

Breaking the Silos: Why Nonprofits Need Fractional Leadership
Most nonprofits I’ve worked with already have a version of marketing running. It just doesn’t look like marketing, and it definitely doesn’t look like one thing. Development runs its own donor campaigns. Communications handles storytelling and press. Volunteer engagement builds its own outreach. Advocacy pushes policy on its own timeline. Each team is doing real, often skilled work. Almost none of it is talking to the others.
I saw this clearly at a large statewide food bank where I led marketing and communications for two years. Fundraising, comms, volunteer programs, and advocacy all ran in parallel, each competent on its own terms, none of it connected. Advocacy in particular had always operated at arm’s length from the rest, the kind of distance that builds up over years without anyone deciding it should. Bringing the pieces closer together wasn’t something anyone assigned me to do. It happened by becoming useful to each team on its own terms first, then finding the places where one team’s work was already quietly helping another’s, whether anyone had noticed or not.
The cost of running this way isn’t just inefficiency, though there’s plenty of that. It’s that donors get mixed signals from an organization that is, underneath, only telling one story. Volunteers rarely see how their Saturday morning connects to an advocacy win six months later. Media coverage doesn’t get reinforced by a fundraising push that could have ridden alongside it. Each function optimizes for its own version of success, and the organization as a whole ends up smaller than the sum of what its people are actually doing.
This isn’t a failure of effort or talent. Teams that have run their own lane for years develop real expertise in that lane, and real ownership of it. Nobody hands that over because an org chart says to. What breaks the pattern is usually a person, not a policy: someone with enough standing across functions to notice the overlaps, and patient enough to build trust with each team before asking anything of them. Take that person away, and the pattern tends to reassert itself, not because the earlier integration was wrong, but because nothing structural was holding it in place. I’ve seen an organization return fully to separated teams years after a real period of cross-functional work, simply because that had always been “how it’s done” in that corner of the sector, not because anyone showed the separated version worked better.
A fractional CMO or equivalent growth leader can provide exactly this kind of standing without the overhead of a full-time executive hire most nonprofits can’t justify, especially as U.S. donor funding contracts and international grants grow more competitive. The value isn’t more campaigns or louder messaging. It’s one person accountable for noticing where the pieces already connect, and building the connective tissue between them before it collapses back into five separate efforts.
It’s worth separating this from a more familiar role in the sector: the interim executive director. Third Sector Company’s 2025 State of the Profession report, drawing on more than 100 interim leaders across the U.S. and Canada, describes interim leadership as a full, temporary executive placement, usually stepping into a vacancy at the top, averaging around ten months, often brought in specifically because a board waited until crisis hit rather than planning ahead. A fractional CMO isn’t filling a vacancy. The executive director role stays occupied the whole time. What the two roles share is less about title and more about function: both step in as an outsider positioned to name what’s actually happening without the politics of having been there for a decade, and both are meant to leave the organization stronger than they found it, not dependent on staying. A fractional leader can, in that sense, act as a bridge to a stronger full-time hire down the line, much the way an interim executive prepares the ground for whoever comes next. The difference is which gap each one is actually built to close.
None of this requires a reorganization or a board mandate. It usually starts as one relationship at a time, not a stated plan, which also means it can unwind just as quietly once the person holding it together moves on. That’s probably the real lesson: this kind of integration is never structurally locked in. It holds only as long as someone is actually paying attention to it.
2026-08-26
From Panic to Purpose: Integrating Systems at Northwest Harvest
Role: Marketing Communications Manager
Duration: August 2014–December 2016
When I joined Northwest Harvest as Marketing Communications Manager, Washington’s largest food bank ran its outward-facing work the way a lot of large nonprofits do: fundraising, communications, volunteer engagement, and advocacy each moving on its own track, each staffed by real people doing real work, almost none of it connected to the others. Donor acquisition costs were climbing, repeat donor growth was flat, and a statewide footprint wasn’t being used for much beyond delivering food. This was full-time employment, a decade before I founded Cedar Collaborative, not a Cedar Collaborative engagement.
Finding where the work overlapped
Nobody hired me to unify those teams. That’s not really how it worked, and it’s not how it could have worked, people who’ve run a program for years don’t hand over turf because an org chart says to. What actually happened took longer: getting to know each team on its own terms, understanding what they were already trying to do, and looking for the places where helping one team’s work also helped another’s. Advocacy took the longest to bring in, understandably, since it had always operated at more of a distance from fundraising and communications than the other functions had from each other. The rest came together faster than expected, mostly because nobody had really tried before.
New channels, without leaving donors behind
Channel modernization ran alongside that relationship-building, not ahead of it. We expanded into Instagram and stronger SEO while keeping the print and traditional media relationships that longtime donors still responded to, since abandoning one generation of supporters to chase another wasn’t the point. Partnerships with the Seattle Seahawks, local grocers, Washington banks, and regional media extended reach without adding real spend. The organization’s 50th anniversary became the moment it all came together: a statewide campaign built around celebration rather than the usual crisis appeal, on the theory that supporters can be moved by progress as well as by need. That turned out to be true. Even the brand refresh followed the same logic, extending to places nobody had thought to put it before, including a fleet of distribution vehicles that had been crossing the state for years without saying anything about who they belonged to.
What it added up to
None of this was dramatic on its own. Together, it added up to donor acquisition costs dropping by roughly 35%, repeat donor growth climbing more than 10% year over year, and a level of statewide visibility the organization hadn’t had before, especially among younger donors who’d never encountered Northwest Harvest through the channels that had worked for decades.
The lesson that stuck with me wasn’t really about marketing tactics. It was that integration is slower and more personal than an org chart implies. Adding headcount would have been the easy move, and probably the wrong one. What actually worked was spending enough time inside each team’s version of the mission to find where their goals already overlapped, then building the connective tissue by hand. It’s the same instinct behind every fractional engagement I take on now, though nobody at Northwest Harvest would have described it that way at the time. They just needed someone willing to become useful to five different teams instead of useful to one.
2026-08-10
The Quiet Work of Retention
There is a particular silence after a contract is signed.
Sales celebrates. Slack lights up. The founder might even join the welcome call. Then the energy shifts. The customer moves into onboarding. The account manager takes over. The dashboard updates. The team exhales.
Acquisition feels visible. Retention feels administrative.
It isn’t.
Over the past year, I’ve had several versions of the same conversation. A SaaS founder in Seattle told me churn was creeping up, though pipeline looked healthy. A professional services partner in Sydney admitted they were winning new work but struggling to generate repeat engagements. A nonprofit executive director in Canberra shared that donor acquisition campaigns were strong, yet multi-year commitments were flattening.
Different sectors. The same structural pattern.
Retention rarely collapses all at once. It erodes quietly. Underutilized features. Renewal conversations that begin too late. Follow-ups that feel reactive rather than anticipatory. Customers who are satisfied, but not anchored.
In uncertain economic environments, this erosion accelerates. Procurement teams review subscriptions more closely. Clients question discretionary spend. Donors reconsider recurring commitments. If your organization has not made its value explicit and ongoing, you feel it.
Retention is often treated as a product or customer success issue. Marketing hands off the lead and turns back to pipeline. But retention lives at the intersection of expectation, education, communication, and narrative. It begins long before renewal.
In New York, a growth-stage B2B company initially believed churn was driven by pricing pressure. Competitors had entered the market and negotiations were getting tougher. When we mapped the lifecycle, something else emerged. Onboarding was functional but thin. Customers were shown how to access core features but not the broader system or long-term use cases. Marketing emails were built entirely around acquisition. Once someone became a customer, communication dropped sharply. Renewal reminders began thirty days before expiration.
From the company’s perspective, the product was strong. From the customer’s perspective, value was episodic.
The infrastructure was there. CRM. Email automation. Retargeting capabilities. These systems were built to generate pipeline. They were not configured to reinforce value.
Retention work is rarely glamorous. It looks like lifecycle sequencing, usage nudges, and educational content delivered at the right moment. It is marketing that pays attention to what happens after the first invoice.
In Melbourne, a professional services firm had a respected brand and strong relationships, yet referrals had slowed. Once a project concluded, there was little structured follow-up. No periodic insight, no strategic check-ins, no reminders of adjacent capabilities. Partners assumed satisfied clients would return when the need arose. Some did. Many did not.
Retention in professional services is not about automated renewal notices. It is about remaining cognitively present in a client’s world without overwhelming them. That is marketing.
In nonprofits, the pattern shows up differently but follows the same logic. A mid-sized North American organization invested heavily in donor acquisition. Events were well attended and campaigns performed. Yet multi-year retention lagged. Donors were thanked. They were not consistently shown the arc of impact over time. Marketing focused on the next campaign rather than closing the narrative loop for existing supporters.
Across sectors, organizations optimize for the visible win. Retention feels like maintenance.
But in uncertain markets, retention is stability.
Cost per acquisition makes this clear mathematically. If you fought to earn a customer, losing them prematurely multiplies the burden on pipeline. The subtler effect is cultural. When renewals become unpredictable, teams grow anxious. Sales pushes harder for new deals. Marketing increases campaign volume. Leadership questions pricing or product-market fit.
Sometimes those are the right questions. Often, value reinforcement simply was not systematic.
Marketing can change that. Not through louder messaging, but through intentional sequencing.
Onboarding that anticipates confusion before it appears. Communication that reflects actual usage rather than generic announcements. Content that highlights depth, not just breadth. Touchpoints that begin months before renewal discussions.
The infrastructure many organizations already use for acquisition can be reoriented toward retention with discipline. CRM is not only a pipeline tracker. It is a visibility tool for lifecycle risk. Email marketing is not only a lead nurture channel. It is an education engine. Retargeting is not only for prospecting. It can remind current customers of features they have not yet explored.
None of this replaces product quality or customer success. It reinforces them.
In volatile economic periods, customers review their spend carefully. You do not want to be the subscription they vaguely remember. You do not want to be the firm associated with a single project rather than an ongoing relationship. You do not want to be the nonprofit someone supported once but cannot clearly describe.
Retention is about narrative continuity. It asks whether your organization remains legible to the people who already chose you.
When retention is strong, growth feels steadier. Acquisition becomes additive rather than compensatory. When retention weakens, acquisition has to carry too much weight.
Churn is rarely only a pricing issue. It is rarely only a feature issue. It is often a clarity issue.
The quiet work of retention does not produce fireworks in Slack channels. It does not always generate dramatic quarterly headlines. It produces stability.
In uncertain markets, stability compounds.
2026-03-19
On Inflection Points and Layoffs
The Zoom room always feels slightly too bright after layoffs.
Cameras on. Shoulders squared. The kind of careful optimism that comes after something has already broken.
I have been in a handful of these rooms over the past year. Seattle. Sydney. New York. London. Different industries. Different balance sheets. Similar tone.
Someone says, “We’re still strong.” Someone else says, “We just need to be more efficient.”
No one says what everyone is thinking, which is that something subtle has shifted.
The pipeline feels thinner.
Sales cycles stretch.
Renewals require more explanation than they used to.
Marketing is usually part of the reduction. Sometimes it is the reduction. A demand gen lead let go. A content manager not replaced. Paid channels paused. Agencies cut.
From the outside, it looks rational. Trim spend. Extend runway. Protect margin.
Inside the system, the effect is quieter and more complicated.
I remember a B2B SaaS company in the Seattle area last spring. Strong product. Technical founder. Good early traction. They cut paid acquisition first. It had been expensive and inconsistent.
Three months later, the CEO said, “Demand just isn’t what it used to be.”
It wasn’t demand.
It was visibility layered with confusion.
Paid ads had masked deeper issues. The ICP had drifted slightly upmarket. Messaging still reflected an earlier, scrappier buyer. Sales was compensating with longer demos and custom proposals. The CRM was intact, but lifecycle emails had not been touched in a year.
When acquisition slowed, the system underneath was exposed.
In Sydney, a professional services firm told me something similar. They had weathered the first half of a rough year well. Referrals were steady. Reputation strong. Then two large clients paused work within the same quarter.
“Marketing hasn’t been our focus,” the CEO said on a call. “We’ve always grown through relationships.” And, of course, that was true. But it was also incomplete.
Relationships are a form of marketing. So is positioning. So is the way you articulate your value when clients are scrutinizing budgets more carefully than they did two years ago.
In that firm, no one owned the narrative. Each partner described the firm slightly differently. Case studies were outdated. The website still reflected pre-pandemic assumptions about buyer urgency.
Nothing was broken in isolation. The system, however, was drifting.
The reality is that inflection points rarely arrive with fanfare. They show up as small asymmetries.
A Slack channel that goes quiet after an announcement.
A sales rep asking for “just one more deck.”
A board member pressing for clearer attribution.
An account manager mentioning that renewals now require two extra conversations.
In volatile markets, many organizations respond by narrowing focus to cost control. That is understandable. It is also when marketing becomes most structural.
Marketing is not just a channel mix. It is the connective tissue between how a company understands itself and how the market experiences it.
When headcount changes, that tissue stretches.
After layoffs, I usually start in unglamorous places.
Sales meetings. Listening for where explanations get long.
Customer onboarding calls. Hearing which features require too much justification.
CRM dashboards. Looking for renewal visibility that has quietly eroded.
Board decks. Watching which metrics generate tension.
In New York earlier this year, a founder insisted the problem was purely top-of-funnel. Website traffic had dipped. LinkedIn engagement was inconsistent.
Yet in the same conversation, a customer success lead mentioned that several clients were underutilizing the platform.
Underutilization is not a demand problem. It is a clarity problem.
Churn and expansion sit downstream of positioning, onboarding, education, and expectation setting. When those are weak, acquisition has to work harder. In uncertain environments, customers are quicker to question value. If you have not reinforced that value consistently, you feel it.
Inflection points surface these interdependencies.
What looks like a marketing slowdown is often a systems misalignment.
The founder who believes the issue is ads.
The partner who assumes it is pricing.
The board member who fixates on pipeline velocity.
Each sees a piece.
Marketing, at its best, sees the system.
This is one reason I am drawn to these moments.
Not because contraction is comfortable. It very much isn’t.
But because clarity matters more when noise fades.
When enterprise companies reduce spend broadly, space opens. Cost per click shifts. Attention reallocates. Competitors pause initiatives they once funded aggressively.
For smaller growth-stage companies and professional services firms, this can be an opportunity. Not to outspend larger players. But to out-clarify them.
In a SF-based SaaS team I spoke with recently, the founder had assumed they needed to “wait out” the market. Instead, we found that their ideal customers were still buying. They were simply consolidating vendors and asking harder questions.
The work was not to increase volume. It was to sharpen articulation.
Who exactly is this for now.
What pain does it address in a constrained budget.
Why does it remain essential.
Those are marketing questions. They are also leadership questions.
In uncertain climates, employees look for coherence. Customers look for reassurance. Investors look for signals of discipline.
Marketing sits at the intersection of all three.
It shapes the story internally and externally. It determines whether cost reductions feel reactive or strategic. It influences whether a renewal conversation feels defensive or grounded.
Fractional leadership can be useful in these environments not because it is temporary, but because it is embedded without political baggage. It can listen across layers. It can see where narrative and operations diverge.
But even without that structure, the principle holds.
Inflection points are diagnostic gifts. They expose what was masked by growth.
They reveal whether your CRM is a database or a decision tool. Whether your messaging reflects today’s buyer or last year’s assumptions. Whether your lifecycle is intentional or accidental.
The Zoom rooms eventually relax.
Shoulders lower. Cameras angle down slightly. The tone shifts from brittle optimism to cautious realism.
That is usually when the real work begins.
Not louder campaigns.
Not sweeping cuts.
Clearer sequencing.
Stronger alignment.
A system that can hold under pressure.
Markets will continue to oscillate. They always do.
The organizations that navigate inflection points well are not the ones that avoid contraction. They are the ones that use it to see themselves more clearly.
Marketing, when treated as connective infrastructure rather than surface activity, makes that possible.
2026-02-24
What a Fractional CMO Actually Does in the First 30 Days
When companies hire a fractional CMO, they often imagine a strategic planning exercise. Workshops. Frameworks. Long presentations.
In reality, the first month tends to look very different.
The goal is not simply to design a marketing strategy. It is to understand how the business actually operates, where customers come from, how sales conversations unfold, and where the organization’s understanding of the market has begun to drift.
Strategy begins with observation.
What a Fractional CMO Does First
The first request I usually make is access to the CRM.
If the company has a functioning CRM, it is one of the fastest ways to understand how the business sees its customers.
A CRM reveals what the company considers important enough to measure. It shows what information sales teams capture, how pipeline stages are defined, how long deals typically take to close, and where prospects tend to stall.
Patterns appear quickly.
Sometimes churn appears earlier than leadership expects. Sometimes pipeline stages reveal that the sales process is longer or more fragile than assumed. Occasionally customer service cases or notes attached to deals reveal friction that marketing messaging has been masking.
If a CRM does not exist, the next step is usually sales calls and analytics. Listening to how sales teams describe the product and how customers respond can be just as revealing.
Listening Before Changing
During the first weeks I spend a great deal of time listening.
That means leadership conversations, but also conversations across the organization. Product teams. Sales representatives. Customer support. Occasionally people who are not formally involved in revenue generation but who still see patterns others miss.
A front desk employee who fields complaints.
A sales representative who hears the same objection repeatedly.
A support manager who sees where expectations and reality diverge.
These conversations rarely produce a single revelation. Instead they reveal a system.
Marketing, sales, product, and customer experience each hold part of the picture. The role of marketing leadership is to synthesize those perspectives into a coherent understanding of the market.
The Pattern That Appears Most Often
Across many engagements, one issue appears more consistently than any other.
The company has customers, sometimes many good ones, but the organization lacks a clear and shared understanding of its ideal market wedge.
This is not always about industry. It may be about company maturity, technical sophistication, organizational structure, or the particular problem the product solves best.
When that wedge becomes clear, many other things become easier.
Messaging sharpens. Sales conversations become more focused. Marketing investments become easier to prioritize.
Most importantly, leadership alignment improves.
Aligning the Organization
One of the earliest outputs in many engagements is a simple articulation of the company’s ideal customer profile and core messaging.
Sometimes this takes the form of a structured document. Occasionally it takes the form of a short manifesto that captures the company’s purpose and direction in language that resonates internally.
The goal is not simply to produce marketing material. It is to align the organization.
When leadership and external-facing teams begin speaking about the market in the same language, the difference can be dramatic.
Marketing reinforces sales. Product decisions reflect customer reality. Messaging becomes clearer across every touchpoint.
Momentum returns quickly.
Small Changes, Early Momentum
While discovery is happening, there are often opportunities to make small improvements that help the business immediately.
These are rarely dramatic initiatives. More often they are practical adjustments that remove friction.
A website page that loads slowly.
An analytics system that was never connected properly.
A social channel that no one has updated in years but still creates confusion.
Addressing these details early helps the organization move forward while the deeper strategic work continues.
Good marketing leadership balances both perspectives: understanding the system while improving the parts that are clearly underperforming.
Why the First Month Matters
The first month of an engagement is less about delivering answers and more about building a shared understanding of the business.
Leadership teams often know that something is misaligned. They feel the friction in sales cycles, marketing performance, or customer feedback.
What they lack is a coherent view of how those signals connect.
A fractional CMO’s role in those early weeks is to assemble that picture quickly and help the organization begin acting on it.
Because when a company understands where it truly fits the market, the next set of decisions becomes far easier.
And the path to growth becomes much clearer.
2026-02-12
What Is a Fractional CMO, and When Does a Company Actually Need One?
A fractional CMO is a senior marketing executive who works with a company on a part-time or contract basis, providing the strategic leadership of a full-time CMO without the cost or long-term commitment of a permanent hire.
The phrase “fractional CMO” appears more often now than it did even a few years ago. Yet the meaning has become surprisingly fuzzy.
For some companies it simply means part-time marketing help. For others it refers to an outsourced marketing department. Sometimes it describes a senior marketer who works across several clients.
Those definitions capture the structure of the role, but they miss the purpose.
A fractional CMO is not primarily a capacity solution. It is a leadership solution.
Companies bring in a fractional CMO when marketing exists but is not operating as a coherent system, when strategy, execution, and revenue outcomes have drifted apart.
This tends to happen during moments of growth or transition. The company has real traction. A product works. Customers exist. Sales activity is happening.
But the path forward feels less clear than it once did.
Growth slows. Messaging drifts. Sales begins improvising. Marketing activity increases, but momentum does not.
At that point, the organization rarely needs more activity. It needs marketing leadership.
What Is a Fractional CMO?
The Situations Where Companies Usually Call
In my work with growing organizations, three patterns appear repeatedly.
First, the founder is still running marketing.
This often works early on. Founders know their customers deeply and can communicate the product with conviction. But as the company grows, the marketing system becomes more complex. Sales expands. Channels multiply. Messaging fragments. The founder’s attention shifts elsewhere.
Second, growth has stalled.
The company is still selling, but the previous momentum has softened. The market response that once felt clear now feels uneven. Sales cycles lengthen. Messaging begins to drift across channels.
Third, a sales team exists but lacks marketing infrastructure.
The salesperson may be talented and hardworking, but they are operating without the systems that allow sales to scale: clear positioning, strong product marketing, and a coherent go-to-market strategy.
In each of these situations, the problem is rarely effort. It is alignment.
What Usually Appears During Discovery
The first weeks of an engagement are focused on understanding how the organization actually works.
That means more than leadership conversations. I listen to sales calls. I review CRM notes and pipeline patterns. I speak with people across the company, sometimes including individuals who are not formally part of marketing or sales but see patterns others miss.
A front desk employee who fields customer frustration.
A salesperson who notices competitors using nearly identical messaging.
A support agent who hears the same confusion from new customers every day.
Patterns emerge quickly.
Almost always there is confusion around the ideal customer profile. The company has customers, often good ones, but the shared understanding of who the business is truly built for remains fuzzy.
Product marketing gaps are common as well. Teams know what they have built, but the articulation of why it matters and how it fits the market has not been fully developed.
Most importantly, different parts of the organization are often operating from different assumptions. Product, sales, marketing, and customer experience are each interpreting the market in slightly different ways.
This is where leadership matters.
What Changes First
One of the earliest outputs in many engagements is a clear articulation of the company’s core ICP and messaging.
Sometimes this takes the form of a structured document. Occasionally it takes the form of a short manifesto that captures the company’s purpose and direction in language the team can rally around.
The goal is not simply a marketing artifact. The goal is alignment.
When a leadership team sees its business reflected clearly, who the company serves, why customers buy, and where the market opportunity lies, the reaction is often immediate.
“Yes. That’s it.”
Once that clarity exists, execution becomes dramatically easier. Marketing efforts reinforce one another. Sales conversations become sharper. Product decisions become easier to prioritize.
Momentum returns.
When a Fractional CMO Is Not the Right Fit
Not every company needs a fractional CMO.
Some organizations simply need execution. They know what they want to do and require additional hands to produce campaigns, content, or marketing assets.
Others face challenges that sit outside marketing. If financial systems are unclear, if product fundamentals remain unresolved, or if leadership is unwilling to engage in strategy, marketing leadership alone will not solve the problem.
Very early-stage ventures can fall into this category as well. A visionary founder with an idea but no established product or customer base is often still discovering the business itself.
In those cases, a fractional CMO is unlikely to be the right starting point.
What Good Marketing Leadership Actually Does
Marketing leadership is often misunderstood as planning.
In practice, it is closer to navigation.
A strong marketing leader understands the system the company operates within, the market, the product, the sales process, and the financial realities of the business. From that vantage point, they help the organization decide where to invest, what to prioritize, and what to stop doing.
They think strategically in systems and act locally.
Sometimes that means refining positioning. Sometimes it means aligning marketing more closely with sales or finance. Sometimes it means removing activity that no longer serves the company.
Always, it means moving the organization forward with clarity and momentum.
Because good marketing leadership exists for a simple purpose.
To ensure the right work gets done, in the right sequence, so the business can grow with confidence rather than improvisation.
2026-02-06
When No One Owns the Customer Experience in Service Businesses
Why Customer Experience Ownership Gets Lost in Service Businesses
Windows, Winter, and the Problem With “No One Owns This”
We live in Seattle, in a modest house on a very small lot, tucked up against a greenway boulevard. There are big trees and good light, and, most days, a steady stream of bikes and dog walkers enjoying the Queen Anne views. During the school year, there’s also a predictable burst of car noise in the afternoons, when parents speed through the neighborhood to pick up their kids.
It’s a lovely place to live. It’s also loud, and a few of the windows were starting to fail. You could feel it in the winter. You could see it in the condensation that lingered longer than it should have in pale Cascadian light.
Last year, we decided to replace about a third of them. Not all at once. Just the most urgent ones. The windows that needed attention before winter 2025.
We did what most people do: read reviews, looked at websites, and eventually settled on a local company that already worked with the same window manufacturer we had. They talked thoughtfully about sound and environmental considerations, which mattered to us given where the house sits. It felt like a reasonable, careful choice.
The work itself turned out emphatically fine. The experience around it did not.
It started quietly, in the way these things often do. I filled out the website form with rough measurements and some context about the house. Weeks passed. When someone finally replied, it was to say she’d been out of the office. Then there was another stretch of silence. When we did connect, there were more questions. Then the same questions again. A phone call I wasn’t ready for, followed by an email days later that picked up as if none of the earlier context existed.
Nothing was outrageous on its own. Just friction. Small delays. A subtle sense that I was starting over each time.
Eventually, we asked for a rough estimate. Winter was coming, and we needed to move fast. We said we were ready for the next step.
A few weeks later, someone came out in person to take careful measurements. This part felt grounding. He took his time, looked closely at where the windows were failing, and asked good questions. We talked about sound, light, and the character of the house. Whether we wanted the cottage-style lines the old windows had, or something simpler. He made recommendations and said he’d update the order based on what we discussed.
When the final estimate arrived the next day, we balked at the cost a bit, but approved it, put down a deposit, and were given a seven-day window when installation might happen.
I called to ask what that meant in practice. Could the windows arrive any time during that week? Would they be stored on site? Our lot is small, and we don’t have space to stash large materials.
The answer was vague. The tone shifted slightly. I had the sense I was asking the wrong kind of question.
When the crew arrived, it became clear almost immediately that the windows they brought didn’t reflect the conversation we’d had during the in-person visit. The configuration was wrong. The details were off.
I called the office to ask what had happened, and their response caught me off guard. They explained that the paperwork was what mattered. The estimate, not the conversations. The in-person visit, I was told, was for measurements only.
It hadn’t occurred to me that a careful, on-site conversation about what we wanted did not count as part of the decision-making process. But that was my assumption, not theirs.
By that point, trust was already wearing thin.
A week after installation, one of the windows failed outright. Moisture and mold began building up between the panes. I reached out immediately.
I was told that since they didn’t manufacture the windows, I’d need to contact the manufacturer myself. They offered to send me the order paperwork so I could do that.
I pushed back harder than I usually do.
From my perspective, I hadn’t bought a product. I’d hired a company to handle a problem. Noise. Cold. A failing window. I didn’t know how the window had been installed, or how to describe the issue to a manufacturer. Standing behind the work felt like part of the relationship.
At that point, my main contact refused to continue working with me and handed me off to someone else internally. That person submitted the defect claim, coordinated with the manufacturer, and, eventually, the window was repaired.
It worked out, technically. But we will emphatically not be using that window company again.
The strangest part, in retrospect, was realizing who that first point of contact had been. The person I’d initially worked with was their only marketer. Junior. Just back from an industry conference.
I’m sure she’s good at what she does, and I don’t blame her for any of this. I’ve seen this pattern too many times to mistake it for individual failure.
Junior marketers join service businesses without senior marketing leadership, and the organization tells them what marketing is. Intake. Follow-up. Estimates. Conference takeaways. They become a cog in a system they didn’t design and don’t have the authority to change. From the outside, it looks like marketing. From the inside, it’s triage.
What broke here wasn’t customer service, exactly. It was ownership.
At every step, I was trying to answer a simple question: Who owns this? Who is responsible for the whole experience?
Inside the company, a different question seemed to be guiding decisions: What process are we following?
Those two questions rarely point to the same answer.
I see versions of this across service businesses of all kinds. Law firms. Realtors. Banks. Even lawncare companies. Anywhere the work is relational, but the system underneath it is transactional. Conversations that feel like decisions to the customer. Documents that quietly override them. Accountability that points outward when something goes wrong.
Marketing alone can’t fix that. Neither can customer service. The issue lives upstream, in how authority is defined and how responsibility is distributed.
Most organizations don’t intend to design experiences like this. They just forget what it feels like to be on the other side of the system. What customers see first. What they assume counts. What they think they’re buying.
By the time winter comes, it’s already too late to repair trust.
2026-02-03
Marketing Notices the Job Change First
I was walking downtown to a meeting last week. Headphones in, trying to make good time without rushing. Taking space to think. This is how I move through most days. I like the way walking gives my thoughts room to stretch.
As I walked, I listened to a new podcast, “Long Strange Trip“. It’s a series of interviews with CEOs from different industries, at different stages, with vastly different personalities. But the same theme kept coming up in one form or another: The job changes.
Not once. Repeatedly.
What makes someone effective as a founder, or as a first-time CEO, doesn’t stay effective forever. In fact, the very instincts that got them here can quietly become the thing holding the company back.
The Part Founders Rarely Say Out Loud
Across the podcast episodes, whether with a startup founder or a public-company CEO, the most honest moments sound something like this:
I had to stop doing the job the way I used to.
I had to let go of being the person with the answers.
I had to change how I saw myself.
That lands with me because I’ve spent my whole career inside organizations where roles were constantly evolving. (Maybe that’s just marketing. Maybe that’s just the world.) Nonprofits. Hyperscale hardware. Edtech, govtech, fintech, SaaS. International work and very local work. My masters studies, focused on leadership. The throughline across all of it wasn’t industry. It was adaptation.
The leaders who lasted were the ones who held onto their principles while staying flexible about how they showed up. Founders, in particular, often struggle here. I see it all the time. And it’s totally understandable.
Many of them built their companies by being exceptionally good at doing things themselves. Selling. Shipping. Writing. Closing. Fixing. That self-reliance isn’t a flaw. It’s a strength. Until the organization grows large enough that individual excellence stops scaling. (And that’s earlier than many think.)
At that point, the job quietly changes. And pretending it hasn’t is usually what creates the most friction.
Why Marketing Feels So Fraught at This Stage
This is usually where marketing enters the conversation. And it’s where practitioners are most misunderstood.
Founders will tell me, sometimes apologetically, sometimes proudly, that they can handle marketing themselves. They’ve written the website. They’ve run campaigns. They’ve sold to friends and friends of friends. They know their product better than anyone. And all of that can be true. It often is true.
The problem isn’t competence. It’s perspective.
When marketing sits at a leadership level, it does something very specific. It interprets signals across the business and the market at the same time. Sales performance. Financial pressure. Buyer hesitation. Competitive noise. Internal capacity. External trust.
Marketing is often the first place where misalignment shows up. Not because marketing is broken, but because it touches everything.
Here’s the thought I keep coming back to after listening to the podcast & sitting, for years, with leadership teams:
Marketing doesn’t create clarity. It reveals whether it already exists.
When a company is at an inflection point, marketing is where you see the cracks first. Messaging gets fuzzy. Priorities multiply. Sales fizzle. Everyone wants growth, but no one agrees on what kind, or at what cost.
That’s not a marketing failure. It’s a leadership moment. An opportunity.
The Outsider and Insider Role I (Get To) Play
This is where my work as a Fractional CMO lives. I partner with founders, CEOs, and heads of sales or finance who are navigating exactly those moments. Not just as a cheerleader. Nor as a fixer. And never pretending to be neutral.
My role is an outsider and insider, by design.
I’m close enough to understand the pressures, the personalities, and the politics. Far enough away to see patterns without tinted glasses or corporate inertia. I bring what I’m seeing across the organization, what I’ve seen work elsewhere in similar moments, and what the market is signaling, even when it’s uncomfortable.
Sometimes that means reflecting back what leaders already sense but haven’t named yet. Sometimes it means slowing things down when urgency is masking confusion. Often it means helping a founder recognize that the job they’re trying to do is no longer the job the company needs.
This comes up just as clearly in service organizations. Law firms. Professional services. Any place where the business is personality-driven and the leaders have never trained to think about marketing or management as systems. The dynamics are the same. The stakes just wear different clothes.
Reinvention Can Happen Without Burning Everything Down
One thing I appreciate about the Sequoia conversations is how undramatic the best reinventions sound. No grand pivots. No manifesto moments. Just leaders recognizing that the way they operated before wasn’t going to carry them forward.
Reinvention doesn’t have to mean chaos. It can be quiet. It can be supported. It can look like inviting in a different kind of perspective, or creating space for someone else’s judgment to matter.
The leaders who navigate inflection points well aren’t the ones who cling to being indispensable. They’re the ones who let the job change without losing themselves or their teams in the process.
That’s the work I’m interested in supporting.
Not louder marketing. Not more motion for its own sake. Just clearer mirrors, steadier systems, and decisions made with eyes open.
Most of the leaders I work with are already there. They just need someone to help them see it clearly enough to move forward.
2026-01-21
Fractional to Full-Time Leadership Transition: How to Reduce Risk and Build Continuity
When your business has matured past the “do-it-all” phase but isn’t yet ready for full-blown layers, hiring your first marketing or growth leader feels inevitable. But that moment carries real risk: misalignment, mixed messaging, and lost momentum.
What if you could move into that next stage (recruit, onboard, and scale) without ever worrying that you’ve lost your grip? That’s where the idea of “continuity built in” becomes your hidden advantage.
The transition trap most leaders fall into
Here’s a scenario that plays out across industries, especially law firms, nonprofits, and startups:
- A firm/cause/scale-up hires someone they know or someone with surface-level promise.
- At first, expectations are high. Campaigns, content, growth plans are discussed. But after a few months, the results don’t match the vision. Messaging feels disconnected. Teams operate in silos. Execution derails.
- The CEO or leadership group suddenly realizes they’re back in “gap coverage” mode with no trusted partner at the table.
- In panic, they reach back to someone they trusted earlier (perhaps a fractional they worked with) asking them to step back in, guide the search, help hire and onboard, and stabilize the mess.
That re-engagement often works because the fractional already understands the culture, the bridges, the brand. But it’s messy, reactive, and expensive in time, morale, and lost momentum.
Why continuity should be a built-in promise, not afterthought
The difference between a smooth transition and a disruptive one isn’t always strategy or creativity. It’s who stays with you during the handoff. That’s what separates providers who deliver and providers who endure.
With continuity baked in, you get:
- Less risk. You reduce the chances of a bad hire derailing your momentum.
- Sharper hires. Someone who already knows your business, narrative, and edge is more likely to lead effectively.
- Lower friction. Onboarding goes faster when the context, tools, and story already exist.
- Executive buffer. As a leader, you’re not alone. You have someone in your corner who’s been with you from the start.
For law firms especially, this matters: reputation, trust, and consistency aren’t optional. Losing your marketing voice during a transition is risky. And if your clients are individuals or other organizations, that risk compounds quickly.
How Cedar Collab thinks about it
Here’s how I guide transitions deliberately, not reactively:
1. Build the Foundation (while fractional).
  Clarify messaging, align systems, map strategies. Make sure the engine works before you bring in someone else.
2. Hire + Transition.
  I partner with you to define role, vet candidates, run interviews, and support onboarding. Because my network and context are leveraged, that new hire has fewer blind spots.
3. Advisory Tail (the continuity leg).
  After the hire, I stay on (at a reduced retainer) to mentor the new leader, field confidential conversations, advise the CEO, and protect momentum.
That’s not a fallback. It’s intentional design. It’s the soft, strategic structure under the growth narrative.
What this looks like
A law firm hires its first full-time marketing leader. They were even referred by a partner. Six months in, things start unraveling: messaging is scattered, campaigns underperform, team morale dips. The CEO is left without a steady marketing voice at the table.
They bring back a fractional they trusted earlier. That advisor steps in, helps refine the job description (so the next hire won’t fail for lack of clarity), supports interviews, and stays in a mentorship loop with the new hire while advising the CEO.
Momentum doesn’t stall, the team doesn’t reset, and the leadership transition becomes far less of a gamble.
You don’t need to see that exact story in your portfolio to know it happens everywhere from nonprofits and SaaS to B2B and legal. What matters is being ready for it ahead of time.
Where this works best, and when it’s really worth it
- Law Firms & Professional Services:
  You have low risk tolerance for a reason, and continuity is a non-negotiable value. The handoff is as much about trust as execution.
- Startups & B2B SaaS:
  Growth phases are fast-moving. When you lose momentum in transition, you risk paying in months (not days).
- Nonprofits / Mission-Driven Teams:
  Strategy + storytelling are tied to mission. You can’t lose clarity during transitions without damaging relationships and impact.
This model helps you scale today while hedging your bets on tomorrow.
Your move (if you’re considering transitioning)
- Audit whether your systems, messaging, and growth engine are ready for a full-time hire. If not, hire early, but design for transition.
- Build a pipeline of trusted advisors (even if they’re not engaged yet).
- Commit to a continuity promise from the start, and make it part of your planning, not an afterthought.
2025-10-28