Engagement
Fractional Chief Growth Officer
What a CGO owns that a CMO doesn't
The distinction is not seniority, it is scope. A CMO owns demand creation. A Chief Growth Officer owns the whole economic path a customer travels: what you charge, what it costs to acquire someone, how long they stay, what they are worth, and which of those levers to pull next quarter.
| Fractional CGO | CMO | Agency | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Owns the revenue number | Yes | Partly | No |
| Pricing and packaging | Yes | Rarely | No |
| Retention and lifecycle | Yes | Sometimes | If bought separately |
| Acquisition channels | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Analytics and attribution | Yes, owns it | Consumes it | Supplies it — and grades its own work |
| Hires and structures the team | Yes | Yes | No |
| Typical cost | $18k–$32k / mo | $240k–$350k + bonus | $15k–$100k+ / mo |
| Time to productive | 1–2 weeks | 4–6 months to hire | 2–4 weeks |
The row that matters most is the analytics one. An agency that supplies your measurement is grading its own homework, and it is remarkable how often a reporting layer quietly evolves to flatter whoever built it.
The first thirty days
The opening work is never a channel plan. It is a model: contribution margin by cohort, payback period, the honest version of lifetime value rather than the one that assumes nobody churns, and therefore what you can actually afford to pay for a customer.
Then an audit of whether your current numbers are capable of telling you the truth — the serving and tracking layer, not just the dashboards. On one engagement this surfaced that a $135M retailer had been planning against an in-store average purchase value 24% higher than the real figure, which had propagated into every forecast and every agency brief in the building.
Only after those two does the channel conversation earn its place.
How the work is sequenced
Clients almost always want to start at the top of this list. Starting there is how a company spends two million dollars and cannot say what it bought.
- Foundation. Analytics, call tracking, SEO, paid search, retargeting. The instrumentation that makes everything above it measurable.
- Engagement. Landing page optimisation, content, email capture, lifecycle programmes.
- Expansion. Conquesting, broader media, social.
- Leadership. Outreach, partnerships, affiliate.
Why this practice specifically
I founded a performance marketing agency, ran it for a decade with enterprise healthcare, energy, automotive and retail clients, and wound it down. That means I know exactly where the bodies are buried in agency reporting — which numbers are constructed to look like performance, which fees are defensible, and which activity is real versus billable motion.
It also means I am on the other side of the table now. I have no media to resell and no margin on your spend.
Common questions
Do we need to fire our agency?
Usually not. A meaningful share of audits conclude that the agency is competent and the brief is bad — which is a cheaper problem to fix, and one only the client can fix.
What if we don't have clean data?
Nobody does. Fixing the measurement layer is normally the first month of the engagement, because every decision after it inherits whatever error is in it.
Is this just a fractional CMO with a different title?
No. If your problem is brand, positioning and demand creation, a fractional CMO is the right hire and costs less. Buy a CGO when pricing, retention and acquisition economics all need to move together and currently report to three different people.
What size company?
Roughly $5M to $150M in revenue. Below that, the fee rarely clears the return. Above it, you want someone full-time.
Next step
The audit is the cheap version of this question.
Four to six weeks, fixed fee: what your unit economics actually are, whether your measurement can be trusted, and where the next dollar should go. No obligation to continue.