Fractional Cmo - Realistic Longevity As A Biz Model?

I have 20 years of digital marketing experience. I took a job recently with a company that outsources fractional CMO services. I was excited about the job, but one thing became obvious very quickly. Instead of doing actual fractional cmo-level consulting work, I was tasked with agency execution work. Writing social media posts. Writing website content. Shit I have no interest in doing tbh.

The issue stems from sales. Sales was desperate to land clients and keep their sales pipeline going, so they make a bunch of promises to land $10k/mo clients.

The next problem was actually providing $60k worth of value along those 6 months, which almost never happened because they were b2b companies, and all we were doing was launching Meta or Linkedin ads and they never ended up working for a variety of reasons…the main one for me being…we were designing ads ourselves in canva and relying on claude for copy, vs utilizing a professional graphic designer and carefully crafting ad creatives which you would expect when you pay $10k/month for cmo-level marketing.

So clients would stay with us for 4 months and leave.

Clients would also be less than up front about their actual business situations. They’d say everything was fine in the onboarding, and then 2 months in they tell you how they dramatically need things to change or you’re basically the first one they cut loose.

I was let go today and I’m still pretty upset, because I always got great feedback from clients and we worked together to obtain some great results. But in terms of looking at the overall fractional cmo business model, a few things I learned:

1. ⁠If you do 6 month engagements, and all of your clients’ engagements end around the same time, that causes issues. You have to create new scopes for multiple clients at once. You have to constantly come up with new ideas across a 6 month period and hope those ideas are implemented perfectly, they work, and they align with where the business is at that given time. It’s impossible to predict everything that will happen in 6 months.
   
2. ⁠If you aren’t able to clearly explain how your business offering is different from every other digital marketing agency- running ads and hoping leads come in, and at a lower level than digital agencies with expanded design capabilities at their disposal- your average client isn’t sticking around past 6-12 months, creating additional stress on sales to keep signing clients or risk layoffs. Then your employees are noticing the constant employee and client turnover, and who is going to be motivated in that environment knowing they are likely the next to go?
   
3. ⁠What leverage do you realistically have? The client will end the agreement early and you have no real chance of legal action. In a normal digital agency environment, clients might hesitate to leave because you host their website, you manage their ads, you don’t always own their proprieties but the fact that you help them manage and maintain everything in itself provides leverage. When you’re just a CMO you get access, but you’re not driving the ship. You’re doing execution a lot of times, but what keeps the client from cutting your 10-20k/mo engagement the first month where they can’t measure an ROI?

This is from personal experience, maybe it’s not the same for everyone but I feel like some might agree that “fractional cmo” might just be digital marketing agency in disguise. So naturally I’m now going to focus on starting my own fractional CMO and agency and hope to be clearer about expectations and ROI vs “let’s over react to everything a client says bc we have to keep them around”.