“Dear Rich,
Quick summary. I left a Head of Marketing role eight months ago to be a fractional CMO. Before I made the move I had done my research, spoken to a few people who had done the same, and felt it was the right next step. I had strong experience, a clear specialism, and my first two clients lined up before I handed in my notice.
Eight months in, the work is interesting, but I am not enjoying some elements. Both clients treat me like a senior contractor rather than a strategic partner. They do not ask for my opinion on commercial decisions; I am just told after the fact. They do not include me in conversations where my perspective could genuinely add value. They schedule and delegate me into execution calls and seem surprised when there is no strategy.
One of them in particular books me for three long execution calls per week. When I have tried to introduce more strategic thinking, I get thanked for it and then ignored. The same tactical requests keep coming.
I do not want to blow up the revenue by resetting the relationship badly as it’s income I rely on. But I also did not leave a good salary to become a very expensive task manager. I have read about fractional CMOs who operate at board level, who are genuinely influential, who shape the direction of businesses they are not employed by. I am not sure how they got there or what I am doing differently/wrong.
How do I fix it?
Helen, Manchester
Rich’s reply
Helen, you are not doing anything wrong, you have simply walked into one of the most common and least discussed problems in fractional work: the client has hired the label but not bought the concept.
They called the role fractional because that is what they saw advertised, or because a peer mentioned it, or because it sounded more interesting than “external marketing resource.” But in their minds, they hired someone senior to help them do things. Not someone to tell them what things to do, or whether the things they are doing are the right things at all.
Being balanced, this is almost never the client’s fault. It is almost always a scoping and onboarding problem, and it starts before you send your first invoice.
You are selling access. They are buying execution.
This is the most important distinction in fractional work. When a client hires you, they have a mental model of what they are getting. Unless you actively change that model in the early days of the engagement, it will default to the most familiar thing: a senior person who does what they ask, faster and smarter than a junior would.
If you walked in on day one and immediately began executing, however sensibly, you confirmed that model. The three execution calls per week were not imposed on you. They grew because no one drew a different boundary for them to understand and agree to.
The fractional CMO who operates at board level did not arrive at board level. They established it before they walked through the door.
There is a framework I use and teach in my course on this called the Diagnostic Bridge. The idea is simple: before any fractional engagement begins producing outputs, there should be a defined discovery phase. Not weeks of auditing for its own sake, but a structured period where you are explicitly operating as a diagnostician rather than a doer. You are asking questions. You are mapping the landscape. You are building an Authority Map of who holds what decisions, what is broken, and where your leverage actually sits.
Crucially, you are doing this visibly and out loud, with the client watching. You are demonstrating that your value is in the judgement you bring before any work is produced, not in the speed at which you produce it.
If you do this properly, by the time the engagement shifts into execution mode, the client has already experienced you as a strategist. That experience is very hard to undo. The problem you have, Helen, is that you accidently skipped this phase, or were not given space for it. So now you need to retrofit it, which is harder but not impossible.
How to reset the relationship without blowing it up
You have two clients, so I will speak generally, but you will need to calibrate this for each one because the dynamics will be different.
The reset does not start with a conversation about your role. It starts with a deliverable.
In the next few weeks, produce something they did not ask for. Not a task from the list. A piece of strategic thinking that reframes something they are currently working on. A short document, maybe two pages, that says: here is what I am observing, here is what I think it means, and here is what I think we should do about it.
Do not send it as an attachment in an email at the end of the day. Request a short call to walk them through it. Say you want fifteen minutes to share some thinking you have been developing. When they read it, they will either push back, in which case you have a strategic conversation, or they will be interested, in which case you have opened a door.
Do this once and it might feel like a one-off. Do it consistently and it becomes how they experience you. You are gradually rewriting the contract in their minds without ever having to say the words “I am not just here to execute your brief.”
The most powerful thing a fractional CMO can do in the first ninety days is make one observation that the client had not made themselves. That single act does more for your positioning than any amount of good execution.
The three execution calls are a symptom, not the problem
I understand why three long calls per week feels like the wrong shape. It probably is the wrong shape. But I would not make the calls themselves the issue you raise.
What you are really trying to change is the nature of the relationship, and the most direct path to that is demonstrating that your thinking is valuable, not that your time is being wasted. The moment you raise the calls as a complaint, even a polite one, you sound like a contractor protecting their hours. That reinforces the very dynamic you are trying to escape.
Instead, use the calls to, subtly, reinforce the role of the wider internal team to focus on the execution, whilst you ask the strategic questions and enquire as to how you can help them manage upwards.
This is not manipulation. It is the job. You are reminding both of you what you are actually there for.
On the clients you have and the ones you should have
There is a harder question underneath all of this, Helen, and I would be doing you a disservice if I did not name it.
Some clients are genuinely not capable of having a strategic relationship with a fractional CMO. Not because they are unsophisticated, but because the founder or CEO is not ready to share thinking with someone who is not on their payroll. They do not trust it, consciously or not. They will always default to telling you what to do rather than asking you what to think.
I am still a practicing Fractional CMO myself, to ensure I stay current and practice what I preach. Before I take on any engagement now, I run what I call a red flags check. The questions I ask are not about the brief. They are about the relationship. Is this person genuinely curious? Do they ask me questions in the sales conversation or just answer mine? Do they talk about decisions they have made differently because of external input? Have they worked with a senior consultant or advisor before and found it valuable?
If the answers are no, no, no, and no, I still might take the work, but I go in knowing the ceiling. And the ceiling tends to be execution.
You are eight months in with two clients who may both have low ceilings. That is useful information. It does not mean you cannot improve things, but it does mean you should be building pipeline for your third and fourth engagements simultaneously and filtering harder next time.
What the fractional CMOs operating at board level did differently
They positioned the engagement before they signed it.
In the sales conversation, before any discussion of deliverables or day rates, they established what they were being hired to do. Not the tasks. The outcome. And they were explicit that achieving the outcome required them to be in the room when commercial decisions were made, not just when campaigns needed running.
This sounds obvious. Most people do not do it because they are worried about losing the client before they have them. But the clients who push back on that framing are the ones with low ceilings. Losing them in the sales process is not a failure. It is your system/filtering/funnel, whatever you want to call it, working.
The other thing they frequently do differently is price by outcome rather than by time. Day rates and hourly fees are a contractor signal. They tell the client you are selling access to your hours. Outcome-based fees or retainers scoped around a defined commercial goal tell the client you are selling a result. The psychological difference in how you are perceived from day one is significant.
I know you are eight months in and changing the pricing model now can feel quite daunting. But it is something to build toward, and it is the right model to try for the next client you bring on.
The short answer
You are not stuck. You are in a very common transitional moment where the label you have and the role you are playing have not yet aligned. The majority of fractionals go through exactly this. It’s almost like a rite of passage.
Retrofit the Diagnostic Bridge by producing unsolicited strategic thinking. Use your calls to demonstrate that your judgement is the product. Start building pipeline with better qualification criteria so your next clients come in with the right expectations from the start.
And if either of your current clients turns out to have a ceiling you cannot raise, that is not a failure of your positioning. Some clients are not ready. The skill is learning to identify them earlier.
Onwards,
Rich
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