I'll be honest — I don't expect a CEO to hand over their marketing function to someone they've seen a few posts from.
That’s not how real responsibility changes hands. Not in founder‑led, investor‑backed businesses where every misstep shows up in the numbers.
Trust is earned in layers.
It starts with a simple question: does this person understand my world?
Do they see the same problems I see? Do they talk about pipeline, sales cycles, CAC, and board pressure the way it actually shows up in my week — not as theory, but as trade‑offs?
Then it moves to: do they have a point of view I respect?
Not just “marketing should be more strategic,” but a clear sense of what to do first, what to stop doing, and how to make decisions when there isn’t enough data and there’s too much noise.
Only then do you get to the third layer: do I believe they can actually deliver?
Can they move from sharp commentary on LinkedIn to a plan my team can execute? Can they handle the politics, the constraints, the reality that this is a living business, not a clean case study?
That’s why I write about the real stuff.
The misalignment between sales and marketing, where each side thinks the other is the problem and the CEO is stuck in the middle.
The founder who’s still approving every piece of content, because they don’t yet trust that anyone else can tell the story properly — and is quietly burning out as a result.
The marketing team that is working hard, producing assets and activities, but not building anything that compounds: no coherent narrative, no clear ICP, no repeatable motion that makes selling easier quarter after quarter.
It’s not theory. It’s what I walk into.
Those are the rooms I’m invited into, the problems I’m hired to untangle, and the situations where fractional leadership actually earns its keep.
So if any of that sounds familiar — if you recognise your own business in those examples — then we’re probably already closer to a conversation than you think.