I talked myself out of some work last week.

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A founder came to me with a good business. AI transformation and software engineering, launched at the end of last year, first big paid project going live, one more proposal out the door. He needs 1 or 2 new leads a month to fill his capacity. Budget of around £3k a month, ongoing.

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That's usually the point where a founder starts looking for a fractional CMO. The gap in his business was somewhere else entirely.

He'd already done the thinking he needed for this stage

He'd revised his business model a few months earlier. He knew who he was selling to. He'd spotted the awkward bit of his positioning. He could explain all of it clearly on a first call, without notes.

£3k a month buys direction or delivery, not both

This is the part I want to be blunt about, because it's where founders at this budget get caught.

Strategic direction and hands-on delivery tend to be different people - a CMO is too expensive to write your social posts whilst a marketing manager is yet to gain the skills and experience to set the strategy. 

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What we do at Scale Up is both: a fractional CMO sets the strategy, then our delivery team executes it. Paid, content, brand, web, all the skills under one roof, so the plan and the people running it are the same conversation. That model needs a budget that can carry both.

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You can literally hand over your marketing to us.

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At £3k a month you can’t fund everything. A fractional CMO at that number gets you a day or so a fortnight of thinking, and then the money's gone. You'd have a plan, a sensible view of your market, and nobody to build any of it. The plan sits in a drive while you carry on doing the marketing yourself in the evenings.

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His direction was already sorted, so what he needed was purely delivery. That's a different hire to the one we do, and it should cost him less. I introduced him to an experienced marketing manager outside our team instead. Around a couple of days a week at roughly £2,400 a month, which leaves £600 for an event or a bit of ad spend, and the marketing manager can run content and events for a software business before so she'll just be able to get on with it.

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When he's chasing 10 leads a month rather than 2, and the strategy needs rethinking to get there, that's the point our model earns its money. Today his constraint is output, and no amount of seniority fixes output.

Then the opposite call

Same week, different founder. Bigger business, recent acquisition, brand work that's visibly pulling new business in.

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They have a couple of people doing the marketing. In their own words for how it feels: operational rather than strategic. Not massively proactive.

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Underneath that, the questions piling up are all decisions. Whether two products at different price points can share one funnel. How can you demonstrate the value of brand work for moving pipeline, when he's asking a fair question in a form the data can't currently be answered.

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What's missing is someone whose job is to decide and then a team to fill the gaps around the current skillset.

Fractional CMO or in-house: what actually decides it

Both founders are brilliant and both opened with a version of "we need marketing help".

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What separates them is where the work is stuck.

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If you already know what to do (and this is proven in activity) but it isn't happening fast enough, you need more hands. If plenty is happening and you can't tell whether it's the right stuff, you need judgment. Hire for the wrong one and you end up paying for the privilege of staying frustrated.

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The second founder had been round this loop before. A hire who arrived with the best intentions and, by the end, was generating work rather than absorbing it. That happens far more often than anyone says out loud at conferences, and it's rarely about the person. It's a role that got defined by budget or job title rather than by the gap it was meant to close.

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Both failure modes look busy from the outside, which is what makes them hard to spot. A strategist with nobody to execute produces beautiful documents. An executor with no strategy produces a full calendar.

The one thing to do this week

Write down the last 5 marketing decisions your business made. Decisions, meaning: what you stopped, what you doubled, what you said no to.

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If you can't get to 5, or every one of them was yours, you have a deciding gap.

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If they come easily and all 5 are still sitting there waiting to be built, you have a doing gap.

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Then hire for that gap, at the smallest size that closes it. You can always add later. Unwinding a mis-hire takes a lot longer.

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Drop me a line and tell me which one you are. I'll tell you honestly what I'd do, including when the answer is that you don't need us yet.

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‍PS. The reason we built Scale Up the way we did is that handing a strategy over to someone else to run is where most of the value leaks out. So we do both: your CMO sets the direction, and the team who deliver it sit alongside them. If you're weighing up a hire at the moment and you're not sure whether you need direction, delivery or both, reply and I'll tell you what I'd do in your position, even if that means pointing you somewhere other than us.‍