The problems I get brought in to solve
When people ask what a fractional CMO does all day, the honest answer is that it depends on what is broken.
I came to marketing the long way round. I qualified as an accountant, built my career in commercial analytics, and spent two decades inside financial services before I ever ran a marketing team. Those years, across firms including Charles Stanley, Coutts, RBS, BNY Mellon and Aviva Investors, showed me the same gap from both sides: most marketing teams lacked commercial fluency, and most commercial teams did not know how to build advantage through brand. That is usually why a firm calls, and it is almost always why they keep me on past the first brief.
Fractional work is rarely the tidy version of marketing you might imagine. I am brought in when something matters commercially and the usual route, hiring a head of marketing or briefing an agency, has not solved it. Here is what that has looked like over the last six months.
A boutique wealth manager whose growth lived in its founders’ heads
A wealth firm of around £750m, with a discretionary investment arm and a team of planners, came to me disenchanted with its marketing. When I looked properly, the marketing was not the real problem. The firm’s growth still lived where it always had, in the heads of its two founders, and it had never been turned into something the wider firm could run.
I built them a growth strategy across four areas. Organic growth, through a sharper market position and a creative-industries wealth campaign that gave the firm something distinctive to be known for. Referrals, through a voice-of-the-client programme that turned satisfied clients into a reliable source of introductions. B2B, through a structured plan for the firm’s professional partners. And inorganic growth, through a deliberate approach to recruiting experienced planners. I set it out as a phased roadmap the firm could fund and follow in stages, rather than a single bet.
I also spread the firm’s visibility deliberately, across the two founders, the chief investment officer and the planners, rather than letting the profile rest on one person. The result was a growth plan the firm owned and could run in stages, instead of something that happened when the founders found a spare afternoon.
A regulated multi-family office building its flagship campaign
For a regulated multi-family office, I co-authored the firm’s flagship inheritance-tax campaign alongside its head of technical. Inheritance tax is nobody’s favourite subject, which is exactly why the marketing has to work hard and the substance underneath it has to be right. The craft carries the message; the technical and regulatory detail has to hold up beneath it. Everything ran through a proper compliance gate before it went anywhere near a client.
Underneath the campaign will sit a diagnostic tool and a tracked landing page, so the firm can see which conversations the work is actually starting rather than assume. Marketing inside a regulated business is a discipline in its own right, closer to engineering than to copywriting, and it is one I run day to day.
A membership body that had lost the thread of its proposition
A membership organisation knew its members valued it but could no longer say clearly why, or what it should become next. That is a harder problem than it sounds, because the answer cannot be invented in a workshop. It has to come from the members.
I ran a programme of member interviews and listened for the patterns rather than the anecdotes, then turned what I heard into a sharper proposition and a discussion paper the leadership could act on. The work was less about messaging and more about helping a respected organisation decide what it was for, before it tried to tell anyone else.
A pitch that needed a commercial spine
A communications agency shaping a proposal for a major wealth manager brought me in to give the pitch its commercial backbone. The creative was already strong. What it lacked was the argument for why the work would pay for itself, framed in the language the client’s board would actually use to judge it. I built that case and connected the creative to the numbers it needed to stand on.
A technology business with a strong product and a fuzzy proposition
A financial-technology business had built a good product but could not say crisply who it was for or what it replaced. I ran a proposition-development process: mapping the product against its competitors, working out where it genuinely differed, and helping the team articulate a position they could take to the adviser market with confidence. A strong product that no one can describe is a marketing problem before it is a sales one.
The common thread
The brief is always marketing. The reason it works is rarely just marketing.
In each of these, the value came from connecting the marketing to the commercial picture: what it costs, what it returns, and what it adds to the value of the business. That is the accountant and commercial analyst in me, and it is the thing I would want any firm to judge me on. Marketing that cannot show what it is buying you is the most expensive kind, and it is usually where I start.
If that sounds like a problem you recognise, it is worth a conversation. Let’s talk.