Cedar Collaborative
Cedar Collaborative

Tag: fractional CMO

  • Why founders fund marketing last

    Why founders fund marketing last

    Founders hear early and often that marketing should start sooner than feels comfortable, and many fund it last anyway. The reasoning holds together on its own terms. The product needs work, and early sales can come from the founder’s own network. Runway matters, so marketing waits until the company feels established enough to justify it. Founders who make that call are making a sequencing decision with the information they have, and the costs of that decision arrive later and less visibly than its savings.

    What the delay does to the founder’s time

    The case for waiting tends to treat the founder’s own effort as free. In an early company the founder is often the marketer and the closer at once, and the two jobs compete for the same hours. McKinsey found that high-performing sales reps spend 20 to 25 percent more time with customers than lower performers. That research is about sales teams, but the mechanism seems to carry over to a founder doing both jobs: every hour spent improvising campaigns or chasing lukewarm leads is an hour that didn’t go to the conversations that close business. A sales-led company can win its first customers this way. The strain shows later, when growth starts to depend on a pipeline nobody has been building on purpose.

    Timing makes it worse. Marketing systems need a runway of their own before they produce anything readable; positioning has to be tested in the market, and a CRM needs enough history to say something useful. When a founder finally decides marketing is needed, it’s often because a quarter is already going badly, and work started then will mostly pay off in the quarter after. The cost accumulates over a stretch of months in which the company grows more slowly than it could, for reasons that are hard to see from inside the sales numbers.

    Why the wait feels rational

    Part of the reluctance comes from how marketing gets classified. It tends to sit in the budget as a discretionary cost, the line that gets trimmed when cash is tight, while sales hires are framed as investments in revenue. Founder networks reinforce that view, because early traction from personal relationships is real and inexpensive. What those networks rarely do is scale, and the point at which they stop producing is hard to predict in advance.

    The cost of senior marketing leadership adds to the hesitation. Salary.com puts the average U.S. CMO salary at about $374,000, and for most early-stage companies that number settles the question. It’s an understandable response. The trouble is that the choice gets framed as a full-time executive or nobody, which leaves out the period when a company most needs someone to build the systems a future CMO would inherit. That gap is where fractional leadership fits, and I’ve written separately about the trade-offs between a fractional and a full-time CMO.

    One example

    The clearest case I can point to involved a founder who had been the sole marketer and salesperson for almost two years. Early growth had been solid, but leads slowed as the product matured, and by the time I started working with the company the pipeline was weeks from running dry. The work that followed was unglamorous: clarifying positioning, putting a simple CRM in place and launching foundational demand generation. For that client, inbound rose 36% within three months. The founder’s own view afterward was that they wished they had started six months earlier.

    I’m cautious about drawing too much from one company, since several things changed at once and some of the gain came from basics that had never been set up. What stays with me is the timing more than the number. Nothing in the work required the company to be larger or better funded than it had been a year earlier. The harder question is how a founder would recognize that moment while it is happening, when the signals that marketing is overdue look, for a long while, like ordinary sales friction.

  • Preparing for a recession that never came

    Preparing for a recession that never came

    Around 2019, when I was Global Marketing Director at Funnelback, recession forecasts were everywhere, and we spent part of that stretch preparing for one. The downturn everyone was predicting didn’t arrive on schedule. What came instead, in 2020, was a different kind of shock, and the preparation turned out to matter more than anyone planning it could have known. This was a full-time role, years before Cedar Collaborative existed, not a Cedar Collaborative engagement.

    What we did then

    The work itself was unglamorous. We cut experiments that weren’t paying their way and moved that spending into channels where the signal was clear. We simplified the stack so fewer things changed hands between tools and people, and we built lightweight automations where manual steps had piled up. We also stress-tested the budget against a 50 percent cut to see what would break first. The least visible piece was making sure everyone on the team knew where the data lived and how to read it, which sounds minor until you need it quickly. None of it would have made an interesting slide, and if the year that followed had stayed quiet, it would probably have been remembered as housekeeping done under a cloud.

    What 2020 did to the plan

    Then 2020 arrived, and higher education, a very core vertical for us, lost its footing. We were selling to teams that had lost their playbook almost overnight. Because we had already built the operation to run lean, we kept shipping and kept the trust we had with those customers. We had prepared for a recession; the disruption that came had another shape entirely, and the preparation held anyway.

    That mismatch is the part I find most instructive. Plans built around one specific scenario tend to fail when a different one shows up. Ours didn’t, and I think the reason is that very little of what we did was really about the recession.

    Why the plain parts held

    The usual account of recession readiness is financial, centered on reserves and runway. The budget stress test fits that account well enough. The effect I’d point to now, years later, is structural. A simpler stack meant fewer handoffs to break when people were stretched. A team that could read its own data didn’t have to wait for a report to know whether something was working, and the budget stress test had already shown us which pieces were load-bearing, so when decisions had to come quickly, much of the argument about priorities had already happened.

    Research on earlier downturns points in a similar direction. Ranjay Gulati, Nitin Nohria and Franz Wohlgezogen studied 4,700 public companies across three recessions for Harvard Business Review and found that only about 9 percent came out stronger than they went in. The firms with the best odds of pulling ahead afterward, about 37 percent, were those that cut costs through operational efficiency while still investing in marketing, R&D and assets. Firms that only cut costs had odds of about 21 percent. The line the study draws runs between two kinds of cost cutting, and the efficiency kind is what leaves room to keep investing.

    Our experience was one company in one vertical, and I’d be wary of treating it as proof of anything. Still, the pattern is familiar. The work that let us keep going to market in 2020 was efficiency work, mostly fewer tools and cleaner handoffs, and the marketing kept running in part because the system underneath it had become cheaper and easier to run.

    Preparing for something that doesn’t come

    The awkward thing about readiness work is that its value is hard to see when the predicted event fails to arrive. If 2020 had been an ordinary year, our prep would have looked like a tidy-up with a slightly anxious motive. Budget conversations tend to reward spending against the most likely forecast, and a forecast that doesn’t materialize makes the people who prepared for it look overcautious.

    I still don’t have a clean answer to how a leadership team should account for work whose payoff depends on a shock nobody can name in advance, or whether that work can be defended in a planning meeting without a crisis to point to. Our case resolved itself only because a shock arrived, and nobody planned that part. And if the preparation that mattered turns out to be efficiency that would have been worth doing in any year, was it ever really recession prep at all?

  • Stability at scale in wholesale SaaS

    Stability at scale in wholesale SaaS

    Industry: Wholesale ordering SaaS

    Project Duration: Ongoing partnership

    Engagement Type: Fractional CMO

    The context

    When the client was acquired, the new ownership faced a daunting reality: no website, customer data living in Word docs, and marketing that had been left largely untouched for years. At the same time, aggressive, well-funded competitors were entering the wholesale ordering space. The new CEO needed to stabilize the business fast: protect existing customers, stop churn, and build a credible brand presence, with no room for a bloated team or slow experimentation.

    The approach

    I stepped into the engagement as both strategist and operator, standing alongside the CEO as a trusted advisor while putting systems in place the team could use immediately. The work balanced quick wins, a customer newsletter, sales collateral, a HubSpot cleanup, with foundational systems: CRM setup, retention workflows, competitor positioning.

    Underneath it sat a simple set of principles: react to real market moves instead of manufacturing content for its own sake, build materials that serve customers and prospects at the same time, design every deliverable to lay groundwork for what comes next, and favor building trust over generating noise.

    The breakthrough

    The real turning point was realizing retention and acquisition didn’t need to live in separate silos. Newsletters that retained existing customers could double as technical material for prospects, which meant every effort had multiple payoffs instead of one. From there, stability started to compound: HubSpot cleanup and contract renegotiation reduced costs while giving sales better visibility, competitor landing pages helped fend off new entrants, and a blog and SEO program put the client on the map for the first time. All of it fed the same engine: protect the base, then grow with confidence.

    Results

    By focusing on clarity and credibility first, the client bought the breathing room it needed for its next chapter: zero churn during the engagement despite heavy competitor activity, stronger brand credibility in prospect conversations and at trade shows, weekly new prospect conversations driven by collateral and web presence, HubSpot costs cut by roughly $350 a month through contract optimization, 3,200-plus new website users since April 2025 largely from new email campaigns, and early SEO traction of 100-plus organic search hits and 30-plus organic social hits within months of launch.

    What’s next

    With tariffs shaking customer budgets across the industry, the client made the deliberate call to pause a full-scale growth push and invest in product improvements that help their own customers save money. Marketing never stopped through that shift, it moved to holding ground and building credibility while the foundation strengthened. The partnership continues, with acquisition work resuming as conditions allow.

    What it taught

    Stability comes before scale, especially after an acquisition. Dual-use content multiplies return when resources are thin. And a CEO under pressure needs a partner who can move between strategy and execution without needing a handoff every time the ground shifts.

  • What local soccer gets right on brand

    What local soccer gets right on brand

    Ballard FC and Salmon Bay FC aren’t just playing soccer. They’re investing like brands, building scalable identity on limited budgets, with strategic sponsors and design-forward merch that gives them a playbook most startups could learn from.

    The result shows up in small ways that add up. Fans who double as brand ambassadors. Merch that pays for itself instead of draining the budget. A sense of identity that no billboard could buy at any price.

    Most B2B companies treat merch as a cost, the stress ball or branded pen handed out at a booth and forgotten by the parking lot. These clubs treat it as a revenue stream. Limited-edition scarves, kits, hats and shirts, often designed with local artists, matter because owning one means something. Ballard FC’s flash drops feel like direct-to-consumer retail, local and specific. The lesson is that merch tied to real identity behaves completely differently than merch tied to nothing.

    The local specificity is what makes it travel. These clubs bake their actual place into the design: cultural symbols, local materials, references only someone from Seattle would fully get, and somehow that specificity is exactly what makes someone wear the hoodie on a plane or mention it on Reddit halfway across the country. The instinct in B2B is usually the opposite: sand off anything that feels too specific in order to appeal to a broader market. It’s the wrong instinct. The most portable brands are usually the most rooted ones, not the most generic.

    Sponsorship works the same way. One of Ballard FC’s sponsors, Dick’s Drive-In, throws burgers into the stands every time the team scores (The Stranger). It’s a small thing, and it’s the difference between a sponsor and a logo on a banner nobody reads. A sponsorship that does something gets remembered, and one that only buys visibility rarely does.

    None of this required a large budget. It required treating brand as a place to invest rather than a line item to cut when things get tight, which is usually exactly when competitors pull back and specificity starts to matter more, not less.

    Local soccer clubs aren’t just playing. They’re quietly writing a brand playbook that scales further than their size would suggest, and it has very little to do with the size of the check behind it.

  • Billboards in Minnesota

    Billboards in Minnesota

    Industry: SaaS search solutions

    Role: Global Marketing Director

    Duration: 2017–2021

    This was a full-time role, years before Cedar Collaborative existed, not a Cedar Collaborative engagement.

    The starting point

    When I joined Funnelback, marketing barely existed. A partner had once helped craft a core brand and some collateral, but the effort was brief and dated. Sales carried most of the weight: a talented salesperson moonlighted as a copywriter, but without design or marketing support, her work had no chance to scale.

    Leadership was skeptical that marketing could drive revenue. It was seen as a cost center, if it was seen at all. Still, the mandate was clear. Australia was increasingly saturated, the UK team was faltering, and North America was the real bet. Success meant proving marketing could create focus, credibility, and growth.

    Building it from scratch

    I stepped into a hybrid role: strategist, operator, team builder. I was the first US-based marketing hire, joining a tiny Seattle office full of good ideas shipped over from Australia that didn’t quite fit the American market. Positioning, sales collateral, and the partner approach all needed rethinking.

    Higher ed became the breakout vertical. We pitched the product team in Canberra on building a higher-ed template, cutting implementation time and giving sales a running start. Around that same push, targeted account-based campaigns made Funnelback look far bigger than it was: enough that one sales engineer came back from a prospect meeting convinced we had billboards in Minnesota. There were no billboards. The account had simply been hit with ads, email, and content everywhere it turned.

    Instead of spending heavily, Funnelback invested in trust with higher-ed associations like HighEdWeb, showing up every year even on a small budget, which earned the credibility to outlast better-funded competitors. Underneath it, we migrated off a patchwork of SugarCRM, Mailchimp, and spreadsheets and onto Salesforce and Marketo, so sales and marketing could both actually see what was happening instead of walking into prospect calls blind.

    The team itself was built the same way: generalists first, specialists added only when the work actually demanded it, with enough shared ownership that designers, copywriters, and martech staff covered for each other rather than working in separate lanes.

    When the pandemic hit, the technology got repositioned as a crisis-communication channel. Customers moved to all-digital fast, industry partners got support, and the company doubled down on community at exactly the moment competitors pulled back.

    What it produced

    The higher-ed template became a repeatable engine for new business. The ABM approach gave a small company outsized visibility and credibility it hadn’t earned through size alone. Customers and partners stayed loyal through a genuinely disruptive stretch. And the growth was real and attributable to the work, not just to a good market.

    The merger

    Funnelback was acquired by Squiz during this period, which was both validation and a real trial. It proved the marketing had built something worth acquiring. It also meant colliding with a different culture and a different system, at a moment when teammates were anxious, leaders were stretched thin, and pandemic uncertainty made everything harder than it needed to be.

    As the de facto senior marketing leader through the transition, the job became keeping communication open, steadying morale, and making sure what Funnelback had built actually carried into Squiz rather than getting lost in the integration.

    What carried forward

    Scrappy ABM works: smart targeting can make a small brand look much larger than it is. Tool sprawl is worth avoiding on principle, not just for cost, since a stack that scales with the team beats one that needs replacing every eighteen months. Credibility comes from steering strategy and still showing up on the conference floor, not one or the other. And in a crisis or a leadership inflection point, retention and credibility are what buy you the time to figure out what’s next.

    Funnelback was the training ground for what I bring to Cedar Collaborative clients now: building marketing where none exists, standing up systems under real pressure, running ABM that punches above its actual size, and getting leaders and teams through turbulence without losing what they built.