YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS A SENIOR

MARKETING MIND IN THE ROOM

Not a consultant who submits a monthly report. Not an agency managing your channels. Someone embedded in the leadership, in the decisions, accountable to the results.

That’s a Fractional CMO. Significantly less than the cost of hiring one full-time.

SENIOR MARKETING LEADERSHIP

EMBEDDED IN YOUR BUSINESS

As your Fractional CMO, Lucy works as part of your leadership team. Not an external adviser who reads the monthly report. In the room when commercial decisions are made. In the brief when the strategy is being built. In the conversation when something isn’t working and needs to change.

This means understanding your business properly; the history of what’s been tried, the competitive landscape, the team dynamics, the commercial pressure behind the brief. You can’t do that properly across fifteen clients simultaneously.

This is why Ibali works with four businesses at a time.

Not a capacity constraint. A quality standard. The depth of understanding required to make real decisions on a business’s behalf doesn’t scale.

WHAT IT IS AND ISN’T

Are you at the point where a Fractional CMO is someone you need?

A FRACTIONAL CMO IS:

  • In the leadership meetings, not observing them

  • Making decisions, not writing recommendations

  • Building the strategy and making sure it runs

  • Accountable to commercial outcomes

  • Embedded for the engagement, not parachuted in monthly

  • Working with four businesses at a time, not forty

A FRACTIONAL CMO ISN’T:

  • An agency managing campaigns or channels

  • A consultant who submits a monthly document

  • A freelancer handling execution

  • Someone paid to have opinions without being accountable to outcomes

  • A replacement for having a clear brief

FOR BUSINESSES THAT HAVE CROSSED A PARTICULAR THRESHOLD

Typically: 10 to 50 people, real revenue, a leadership team with commercial ambition, and a marketing function that either doesn’t exist at a senior level or exists but lacks the strategic direction to be effective.

Most often: the founder or MD has been carrying the marketing strategy informally alongside everything else; setting direction, briefing the team, making the calls. And that arrangement is starting to create a ceiling on what the business can do.

The ceiling isn’t a lack of effort. It’s a lack of dedicated senior thinking on the marketing. And the cost of hiring a full-time CMO to fix it hasn’t yet made sense.

If you’ve been thinking ‘we need a proper marketing director’ and then looking at the cost of hiring one full-time: that’s usually exactly where this conversation starts.

WHAT 15 YEARS LOOKS LIKE IN PRACTICE

15+ years of strategic marketing leadership across sectors.

Which means: having been in the room when the brief was wrong and the campaign launched anyway. When the strategy looked right on paper and failed in practice. When the positioning that worked at one stage of growth became the ceiling at the next.

It also means having built the strategies that worked. That repositioned businesses clearly enough that pricing went up and the right clients started arriving without being chased. That gave marketing teams a brief clear enough to make good decisions without a manager in every room.

‘Lucy has a knack for anticipating the needs of

both my business and my clients.’

Robert Harris

THE PROCESS

1. START.

A conversation about what’s working, what isn’t, and what the business needs from senior marketing leadership. Not a pitch. A diagnostic. If it’s not the right fit, Lucy will say so.

2. EMBED.

Typically two days per week, minimum three months. In the meetings, the decisions, the team briefings. Building the strategy and making sure it runs.

3. MEASURE.

Commercial objectives set at the start. Measured throughout against those outcomes — not against activity, not against output.

4. EVOLVE.

The engagement evolves as the business does. Some clients work with Ibali for a defined period. Others build a longer relationship as the strategy deepens.

‘I leave our calls brimming with ideas and inspired.’

Andrew Marriot

I only have space to work with 4 clients at a time.

If you’ve been thinking ‘we need proper marketing leadership’ for a while: that’s usually a good indicator that we should talk.

The conversation starts with what’s working and what isn’t. No pitch. No proposal. Just an honest diagnostic about where the story is and where it should be.

lucy@ibali.co.uk - Subject: Fractional CMO

‘I wish we’d met Lucy earlier.’

Laurence Di Sotto