Move from CEO-led hustle to system-driven growth
You built the product. Now build the machine.
You are a technical founder, an engineer, a product visionary, or a big-tech alum. You’ve built something useful and scaled to $10M+ ARR through product excellence, your personal network, industry connections, and grit.
But now, if growth has plateaued or tapered, you may find yourself in the messy middle. If you’re spending time week managing your marketing leader, looking for freelancers, or a coaching a junior marketing manager, it’s time to step back and get serious about upleveling your marketing department.
At CAC Media & Publishing, we provide the strategic leadership to take marketing completely off your shoulders in the form of a Fractional Chief Marketing Officer.
The “Olympic Coach” Model of Marketing Leadership
Marketing agencies can make great athletes; they can run your ads, optimize your site, and generate social content.
We are the Coaches. We provide 5–10 hours per week of high-level fractional CMO leadership. We don’t just “do marketing”; we design a marketing strategy quarterly and develop the tactics and KPIs for each member of the team to get there in focused two-week sprints, while mentor key marketing technicans and syncing with the founder or CEO of the business weekly. We run the Rhythm of Business that allows your company to scale without you needing to be in every meeting or touch every prospective customer.
- Strategic Guardrails: We define the why and where so your team knows exactly what they need to do and the strategy that guides it.
- Systems Over Hustle: We replace the need to create more content or a knee-jerk reaction to do random acts of marketing (like play with a fun new AI tool) with a repeatable process based on performance and proven through testing.
- Peer-Level Partnership: Our team includes veterans from Microsoft, Paramount, and Mayo Clinic. We speak “Product,” “Cloud,” and “Scale”—not just “Marketing.”
Hustle to Systems: The CEO-to-CMO Handoff
| CEO Hustle | Fractional CMO at CAC Media |
| CEO manages a marketing director and is deeply involved in direction and marketing decisions | The CMO manages the entire marketing function ensuring all marketng actions are determined by the strategy and KPIs are tracked at the IC level. |
| Marketing and sales leaders and technicians are trying hard, but markting feels like a Black Box of spend eating margin. | Attribution is clear, CAC is tracked, ROAS is known, spend is justified or cut, reporting reflects the true north revenue. |
| Lead generation is relationship based and have a founder dependantcy, campaigns and A/B testing have unclear or mixed results. | fCMO develops a 90-day strategy and leads the ROB to support execution, mentoring the team. CEO gets time back and certainty that the department is being run by an expert. |
| It is difficult to know how marketing actions influence EBITDA. | Marketing actions directly add to pipeline, reduce CAC, improve ROAS, and increase LTV. We increase top-line revenue while simultaneously enhancing profitability margins. |
Scaling Up After Product Market Fit
For Tech companies between $10M and $100M ARR who have great customers and have achieved PMF, the challenge isn’t finding the marketing plays that work in the industry; it’s knowing what strategies are best for your situation and create velocity and positioning advantages so you can dominate in your category (or make a new one). This requires alignment with the CEO on the strategy, and Strong Leadership to keep the marketing technicians hyper-focused on what needs to be done.
We focus on:
- Narrative Authority: Moving beyond feature-speak to solving high-stakes business problems and a powerful economic value story specific to the buyer (ideal customer profile).
- The MarTech Stack: Ensuring your systems are not duct-taped together. Your integrations for sales, marketing and communication systems should be just as slick as your code base and ready to scale if something went viral tomorrow.
- Team Architecture: Identifying what players on the team need coaching, what players are missing, when and why to use contractors, and when to cut the fat (in-house or agency).
- Performance Mode: Transitioning from trying, testing, pivoting, to a disciplined systems approach.
Frequently Asked Questions for Tech Founders
An agency is an execution shop for specialized technican work (ad agency or SEO for example). A Fractional CMO embeds on your executive leadership team. We don’t sell you packages or mark-up ad buys; we create strategies and lead the rhythm of business to ensure your internal team or external agencies are actually delivering ROI.
Technical founders often struggle to translate complex product value into market demand. We bridge that gap by translating features into an economic story and applying engineering-level discipline to marketing systems, allowing you to return to product innovation.
Our engagement model is typically 5–10 hours per week of focused, high-impact leadership. This is a capital-effecient and velocity-focused option for companies in the $10M–$100M ARR range who would like a $350k-talent level FTE without the $350k-headcount cost.
Insights for B2B Tech Leaders:
Fractional CMO vs. Marketing Agency: The Technical Founder’s Guide
Post-PMF Scaling for B2B Tech: Navigating the “Messy Middle”
Fractional CMO for AI-First Companies: Strategy Over Hype
Ready to get marketing off your plate?
Stop worrying about your marketing and start leading your company. Let’s discuss your challenges and how we can build the systems to move you forward.
Our true north
You don’t have to figure this out alone.
Our fractional CMOs embed on your leadership team, build the revenue systems you need, mentor your technicians, and deliver the growth you’ve been working toward. You get time back. Your marketing works.