Transcript:

00:00:00 Casey: In this episode, I’m going to talk to you about like the actual work we do is for actual CMOs. And I’m going to read a question that came in today inside of the Facebook Fractional CMO group that we run – that you should be joining if you’re not already a member and how I would tackle this problem and it’s around getting a result for a client. So let’s get in.

00:00:19 Casey: Marketers of the world, why do we work hard to solve small problems? Why do we reinvent ourselves and our clients over and over? And why are we giving away marketing strategy for free? With advancements in AI, we’re all seeing the marketing department shrink from the bottom up, and companies need you to serve them as their fractional chief marketing officer. It’s time to solve bigger problems and bring home a bigger paycheck. It’s time to create the lifestyle we deserve and to make a greater impact.

00:00:51 Casey: This is the Fractional CMO Show, and I’m Casey Stanton. Join me as we explore this growing industry and learn to solve bigger problems as marketing leaders. The Fractional CMO Show is sponsored by CMOx, the number one company to teach you how to attract, convert, and serve high paying fractional CMO clients on your terms.

00:01:15 Casey: Hey, it’s Casey. Welcome back. Let’s go. So first of all, this question came up today on one of our calls with a member. And she said to me, “Casey, seems like you spend so much of your time talking about like, creating these really great boundaries for your clients, like trying to live a life of like a lot of balance, being able to do family, being able to do personal life,” being able to do work stuff and like being able to kind of do it all. And she asked like, “Do you ever kind of work outside of the contract? Is there ever any scope creep?” And I want to give you some actual examples of where I have allowed for scope creep. And it happens.

00:01:53 Casey: But before I tell you the kind of specifics of things that have happened, I want to tell you the bigger picture of what my intention is, what I’m building as a fractional CMO. So you might know that I am a fractional CMO, I have a couple clients that I serve as the fractional CMO. And I do think that a couple is really your limit. You want to work with between three and five clients. If you do that right, you’re going to be able to have a really great lifestyle. And if you want to make more money instead of adding more clients, just cycle out your lowest paying client with a higher paying client. Okay, so that’s the big idea.

00:02:26 Casey: So first of all, let me tell you what I wanted to build. Years ago, I worked at this marketing agency. And it was a time in my life when I could afford just to work. I mean, I put in long hours. I don’t really remember if I worked hard on Fridays. But I certainly worked hard Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, I worked weekends, I worked nights with the product launches. I was a part of some really fun and exciting product launches like we launched Jordan Belfort’s Wolf of Wall Street. Specifically, when the movie came out, the Scorsese film, Jordan hired our agency to help him launch his straight-line persuasion system.

00:03:00 Casey: Well, that comes to a big launch, you have to do all the prep for it. There’s a ton of copy, there was no AI at the time to help us. We were building software to do the launching and the tracking and all sorts of things. It was a big project. I also learned a lot. But I spent a lot of hours working on it. Then I was doing some book launches. I helped Peter Diamandis with like his New York Times bestselling book launches for Bold and Abundance. Abundance was first, and I was just kind of a fly on the wall. And then when it came for Bold, I wrote most of the copy, did most of the structure, most of the launch strategy for it.

00:03:31 Casey: And I like learned a ton. And it was really fun. And while those events were happening, I was servicing all the other little clients. So, I’m like living this agency life of like, wow, I’m learning, I’m doing this big launch, I’m having fun. We’re getting this big win. What a New York Times bestseller. That’s amazing. Like it felt so good. Peter got on national TV. It was just like a ton of fun to be a part of all that. But I also noticed like all of the noise around, which was like all of these other clients who had needs. And if I was the client, I’d be pretty frustrated that my marketer, my agency wasn’t focusing on my needs.

00:04:06 Casey: So there I am, like doing the launch, doing the thing that kind of felt like at the time, like significant innovation. I mean, so innovative in fact, that I attempted to go to get an MBA and I realized that there was nothing an MBA could teach me about marketing that I wasn’t learning right now in the game. And I really felt like I was in this like, special place. And I loved that. And I still love that. I love that excitement and eagerness to like, learn and play and grow and do new things and challenging and hard and teamwork and big outcomes and that whole thing. I love that game. It was just the noise.

00:04:37 Casey: The noise of the client who was like, well, you guys said you’d write me five emails. And I was like, damn, I gotta write those emails right now. So there I am at seven o’clock at night realizing that the deadline is… I’m on East coast time deadlines, 5pm Pacific. And I’m like, yeah. And I got to like rip those and deliver it to the client and make sure that they’re good. And like that stuff was just so hard for me. All of these small tasks that I had to do, it was never doing the big thing. It was always the small stuff. Cause the small stuff was unlimited. It’s just so much.

00:05:09 Casey: So when I left the agency, it wasn’t because I didn’t want to do the work I was doing. It’s just because I wanted to do just some of the work I was doing, like just the fun stuff, just the strategy and leadership. And I don’t mind a little implementation, but really, it’s a strategy and leadership. So there I am leaving the agency, like making my plan to escape. And I win a client that pays me 7,500 bucks a month as a fractional CMO. And the contract stipulated 10 hours a week. I worked 20 hours a week, at least every week when I sold that client.

00:05:39 Casey: And I had Raph, who still is on my team here, the CMOx accelerator. He ran alongside of me, and I paid for him as a full-time employee. So, if you can imagine, my nut was pretty big. I had to cover Raph, a full-time employee. Plus, I had to make money. Plus, I was working 20 hours a week instead of 10. It was crazy. And those are really poor boundaries. I also sold a client that had a lot of needs that he had one fee that he wanted to pay to solve all of his problems, not one fee to pay for me to identify the problems and the people to solve them and oversee them solving them.

00:06:13 Casey: So I felt like I kind of had to do it. Yet it was still a better outcome for me. Working with one client that paid me well, and I got to keep that money, I didn’t have to pay it up to the agency. And I paid for Raph’s time, which was okay, because I had hired him and like that was an agreement I made instead of the agency dictating how much I made, I got to choose these things. That was a good relationship for me. And it was definitely an improvement. Yet there was still a lot of implementation.

00:06:38 Casey: So over the next few years, I moved myself to work with companies, I wouldn’t say better companies, I really like that initial client and we’re still keeping in touch with them today. I just started working with companies that could afford me at the role I wanted to be in. And as I did that, I had direct reports that reported to me and said, let me do the work to make the dreams come true, the marketing strategy come true. And that’s a really good place to be. That’s where you want to be. You want to be living in that role where the CEO says what they want.

00:07:04 Casey: They say, “Hey, on the ship, we’re going over there, we’re to call that America.” And you’re like, “All right, you go to the marketing department, say, hey, crew, we got to paddle, we got to do shift work, we got to build this, we got to do all this stuff, and we’re going to get there.” My job is to make that CEO’s dream come true again and again and again. So having those direct reports was a requirement. If I didn’t have the direct reports, I had to do the work myself. So over the course of years, I put myself in a position to not be the one guy that did everything, or the one guy that shouldered the expense of Raph that Raph did everything.

00:07:34 Casey: No way I needed to move to a place where I was working with better clients or with clients that were more maybe affluent or had larger budgets that would afford teams to do the work. So that shift changed a lot for me. And I find today in my day-to-day life, I’m not doing implementation work by and large, I’m not doing it. But I am still doing some. And I’m doing some for a couple reasons. Two episodes ago, I talked about the secret to being successful is to have fun. And I do find a lot of marketing to be fun. I love good copy.  I love good ads. I love a good landing page. I love a good VSL. Man, I would watch a VSL like Dr. Gundry had a VSL.

00:08:11 Casey: If you don’t know Gundry MD, go look them up. The marketer behind it is Craig Clemens from Golden Hippo. Amazing, amazing copywriter. They have a VSL that I can still remember. It’s about foot fungus, toenail fungus, and it is so good. And I just like watch something like that. And to me, good copy like that is infectious, to use a gross word about foot fungus, but it is fun and exciting for me to consume and like learn about and I feel just like, I don’t know. There’s just something about it to me that feels magical. Good copies magical.

00:08:42 Casey: So I wanna go play and consume and have fun and like learn this stuff. And when I work with clients, sometimes we reach an edge where my experience has ended. Like I don’t know, I don’t have the answer. I know what it tastes like. I know what it smells like, but I don’t know what it looks like. So I gotta do a little bit of work to make it happen. So what do I do? I’ll tell you; I spent a lot of time on YouTube. And my YouTube feed is a mix of all sorts of stuff. As of late, as you can imagine, I’ve got a lot of stuff on high-speed Morse code contacts.

00:09:15 Casey: If you’re following along, I just got into CWops, which is like a high-speed community of fast Morse code folks. So super cool. I’ve got also videos on these microcontrollers. I just find interest in them. The Xiao ESP32, [inaudible], that kind of that tech stuff. I don’t know. Kind of fun for me. The third thing I’m really into these days is like the technical side of AI development. So MCPs, I mean, really MCPs, vector databases, just like learning how those things work and all that. Am I an expert? No. Do I have the, I don’t know, like the discipline right now to sit down and watch a two-hour long video on it? No. But I’m piecing together pieces of it, right?

00:09:54 Casey: And then I have other YouTube videos that are like, whatever. But like, that’s kind of like the majority of the stuff that I like watching YouTube. I’m like enjoying that stuff. It’s like passive education, and it’s fun. There’s some really great folks that are releasing high quality content talking about really nerdy stuff. And I like tune into that and I’m having fun. So that’s one of my passive approaches to education. The other approach that I have is, I hire developers oftentimes on Upwork to take a weird idea that I have, and to kind of babysit me and play with me with it, play with it with me

00:10:24 Casey: So the idea here is I’ve got an idea, I want to take this, and I want to mix it with that. And I watched a YouTube video on it. I get the idea, and I want to make it but my idea is a little bit different. Example is, I watched a video on how to make an apple pie, but I want to make a cherry pie. So, I’m going to hire someone to oversee me making the pie and they’re going to help me figure out how to do it. And I hired a guy recently to do that. And then I was just like, you know what, dude, I don’t care. I don’t care about the details of this because I feel like they’re going to change so rapidly in the MCP LLM space. I was like, just do it for me. And then afterwards, record me a video on how it works.

00:10:57 Casey: You got it. Three-phase project. You just completed phase two today. Phase three, maybe it’ll be done by the end of the week. So exciting for me. So fun. I get to learn, but I don’t have to do it myself. Like I don’t have to like open up the textbook and read, right? I get to like learn. I get the dopamine. I get the fun. And then when I reach a roadblock, that’s just like a lot of these roadblocks, they’re things that I’m like, I can probably figure it out, but I don’t want to. So, I’m just going to go hire someone who knows this stuff or just like have them spend the 20 hours in it and then me spend the 20 minutes and understanding what they did. That’s all.

00:11:29 Casey: So, I’m learning at a faster pace. I’m having fun. I’m staying in the game. So, I am doing, you could say a little bit of implementation work in as much as I’m learning these things. Like, let me tell you a big idea that I’ve been playing with really for like the last year, which is, if you’re working with a client that has a marketing CRM, and then they have a sales CRM, and they don’t talk to each other, how do I get them to talk to each other? And I’ll tell you that the answer is, the best way is like an API integration between the two, but sometimes you can’t do that.

00:11:58 Casey: So, what I was able to do with one client was we were able to get an Amazon S3 bucket dump every morning at 3am dumps to like a folder of ours. We’re able to get this whole database and then we hired a developer who took that database, pulled it into our own database, deduplicated it and pushed it into the marketing CRM and then push marketing CRM data through an API because we could update records, but we couldn’t exfiltrate records into the sales CRM. I find that interesting. I find that fun. I also think because I find those things interesting and fun, that that becomes a bit of my edge.

00:12:31 Casey: You know what I don’t find fun? Branding. I don’t design. I appreciate good design, but I don’t find fun in it. I know other people who love good design and they want to like spend time in it. That’s great too. My wife, for example, she loves interior design. I’m actually driving on Friday a couple of states away to go pick up some chairs that she won in auction. They look super cool. Very excited about them. Maybe I’ll let you know in the next podcast episode if they’re a good size or not. Cause right now they seem very small. They seem like children’s chairs, but we’ll have to see. All right.

00:13:03 Casey: So she enjoys design and she enjoys paint swatches and like that world. I don’t. Part of me is like, I can’t see the color difference. Like I have some color acuity issues, like some light color blindness, other parts of me, like I just don’t have the language to say it. And I just struggle with it. And I just don’t find interest there or energy. She does. I don’t. That’s fine. As a result, if you’re the kind of person who’s like, I like branding, I really like the history of that stuff, whatever. And I’m like, I kind of like the technical side. You’re not better than me. I’m not better than you. We’re just different. And our differences make us unique and make us more attractive to clients.

00:13:38 Casey: So one of the reasons a client’s going to hire us is because you’ve solved a problem like theirs before, or they like you, they trust you, and they want you to help them, or because you have a discipline for the thing that they’re struggling with the most, right? There’s like different reasons that you’re interesting. That’s why I think you developing your personal interests and playing and having fun is more important than me like prescribing to you exactly how to be the perfect CMO. It’s like be yourself, very organically, very authentically with your experience, chase your interests.

00:14:11 Casey: Also have a little bit of discipline here that some of your interests like I could just goof off the whole time and do stuff with music and art and whatever. But instead, I do business stuff, which is helpful because then I can like get better at business. So, you want to direct yourself a little bit to choose the thing that can be profitable for you that solves problems for clients. But also, it’s cool to like to have these other interests and work on them. So big idea here is like, I’m doing implementation, because sometimes I’m just playing, I’m taking this idea with a client, I’m saying, “Oh, how do I do this for you? How do I do it?” Like, I want to solve this problem.

00:14:46 Casey: So that is one form of implementation I do. It’s the kind of implementation that in my role, no one else can do. I’m very special at it because I have the interest in it. I have like a level of understanding that others don’t maybe in the industry. So, I’m just like playing and having fun. Sometimes I identify a problem. I don’t know the answer. They don’t really have the interest in kind of like learning about it. So just go find the expert and I pay them for an hour or two and have them come in and teach me and the team. The client pays for it. We all get smarter and say thanks. You know, like that’s cool too.

00:15:17 Casey: I’ve done that with SEO. I don’t really care. I’m ambivalent to the changes in SEO. They don’t excite me. But for someone they excite. Someone is really interested in how they E-E-A-T algorithm or what would you call it? E-E-A-T is like a protocol. But I don’t know how to describe it, but how E-E-A-T works in SEO. If that’s cool to you and you want to dive into it, please do it. Be that nerd. Everyone needs those nerds in their life. I’m not that nerd. I’m the nerd on some of the stuff, some more of the, I don’t know, LLM stuff or whatever. So you play, you have fun. And then I’m willing to like roll my sleeves up and be like, “Hey, I identified this problem in the business.While you all are working on that stuff, I’m gonna go noodle on this thing over here and just play.”

00:16:00 Casey: So I do some implementation out of a sense of joy and play, but it is to solve a business problem. I would say at my worst, sometimes I identify problems that aren’t a big deal, and I go play with them. And maybe my time is in best spent there, but it’s something to do. So it pushes the business forward. Maybe it’s not the most efficient, most effective, but it’s still fun, right? And sometimes I need a little bit of fun in my life to stay focused. So that’s one that’s some implementation. That’s like the implementation I do when everything’s going well, and the team just kind of cruising. It’s like I want to stay in the game.

00:16:31 Casey: I want to stay. I just want to learn. I want to like, you know, study and play and have some fun and get smarter and get better. Because I’m in a process of always getting better at what I do. Day over day, week over week, month over month. The things I’ve said to clients a year ago, I’m embarrassed about. The fees I charged a year ago, I’m embarrassed about, right? Every day I get better, every day I try to get smarter. It’s a good approach to life. And remember that getting smarter also means understanding how the world works.

00:17:00 Casey: So you think something’s going to happen, you do it, doesn’t work, doesn’t work. If it doesn’t work, what did you learn from it? Oftentimes those learning moments are really valuable for you. You just get better. That’s why they say like someone in their 40s and 50s is way more likely to launch a successful business than someone in their 20s. Maybe the person in their 20s can work more hours, but the person in their 40s understands how the world works better than someone in their 20s. They understand the concreteness of the world instead of the abstraction, and maybe the 20 world lives in. That’s an idea.

00:17:29 Casey: So that’s one level of implementation, which is fun. What’s the other level of implementation? It’s just like roll my sleeves up and pitch hit with the team because something happened. Totally. I’m going to do it. I’m gonna do it every time. I don’t love doing it, but I got to do it. And it’s just part of the role. So, what does that look like? I was working with the team a couple years ago. Love the team built a great team. Actually got a text message from some of the OGs from the team. I haven’t read it yet today. But how fun, how fun to see messages from like an old team that he used to work with and we all still have fun and we text each other and say hey on the social media to each other.

00:18:04 Casey: You built that kind of team. That team, one of the guys, one of our core team members, wife was pregnant. So, we were all planning for him to take paternity leave, which was not typical in the business. Like they didn’t have a paternity leave thing. But I was like, “Hey, listen, my department. I’m a new father, I understand the value of paternity leave.” Like, this guy deserves it. So, you know, I fight for him, he gets pat leave. I don’t know how much of my say mattered. But he got it, he got pat leave scheduled. And then his wife had like a complication, and she had to go to the hospital for a long time.

00:18:38 Casey: And I forget, so time is probably stretching in my mind, but it was weeks, like multiple weeks. So instead of him being out for two months for pat leave, it was out for two months plus pre-pat leave, or we were going to lose him. And that came like, we couldn’t really prepare for that. He was like, “Hey guys, my wife’s got this thing. We’re going to the hospital.” We’re like, “Oh, we’re thinking about you, dude.” And the next day he’s like, “We’re still at the hospital, still at the hospital.” And then like maybe a week later, he’s like, “Hey, the doc says we’ve got to stay in the hospital until his baby comes and they’re not going to induce.”

00:19:03 Casey: So what do you do in that situation? Well, the first thing I do is I make sure that we like play to not lose. That’s super important. Rocks, the quarterly outcomes must come true no matter what they must. Maybe we don’t hit our stretch goal, because we lost one of our key team members, but I’m not going to let us lose. So I’m going to step in and do what’s necessary. I’ll pull the reports, I’ll do some of his work, I’ll help the team offload their work. He was specialized, he was doing like data analytics, which was kind of beyond me, how he’s pulling these reports. So really, what I did was, I had other people fill in for him, and then I kind of filled in for them.

00:19:37 Casey: So there I am doing some implementation work. I’m on extra meetings for the next couple of weeks just to support because we didn’t have a plan in place. I’m like doing what’s required. I’m on calls with some folks that are unhappy that usually I’m shielded from like my team would take it or whatever. I’m joining on extra calls, working extra hours, and I’m not charging a dollar more. And I think if it persisted for months, I would have talked about changing my contract a bit and adding an additional fee for the extra hours or whatever, or maybe more appropriately, finding someone else to hire.

00:20:07 Casey: But it was one of those weird situations where like the team was getting cross trained preemptively for paternity leave. That was cut short. The dude wasn’t completely offline, but he was like working from the hospital on mediocre internet. We just did what we had to do. So, I showed up and I worked and I’m not looking for like an attaboy or congratulations or a bonus or whatever. It was just like, I had to do it. I look back on it. It’s like, there was just no other option. I could have hired someone else, but like, I couldn’t hire someone for a couple of weeks. You know, it’s a stop gap. We just like had to deal with it. We all had to work a little extra hard.

00:20:44 Casey: And I think we all felt proud of it too. Like given the opportunity to pitch it and join and help and be part of the team and like rally and text each other after dinner and saying, “Hey, I’m going to finish that after I put the kid to bed.” And like, you’re kind of having that vibe. It’s not forever. I’m going to do it for a short amount of time because it’s the requirement of the role. That’s what a leader does. A leader is there not just for the good times. They’re there for the hard times too. And you got to lead through example. So that’s an example for me.

00:21:10 Casey: You know, recently working with a company, hired a marketing technician didn’t work out. And as it didn’t work out, we had some downtime after they were let go and we were finding the next one. And then that next one had to get up to speed. And we were like, well, we should probably get them up to speed in a better way than the first one, because maybe that wasn’t like the issue. So as they’re getting up to speed, I’m seeing a major gap in time when I’m getting the support that I need. And I can’t say, hey, give me support because they’re like, I’m onboarding. Do you really want me not to onboard? It’s like, you got to onboard.

00:21:37 Casey: So as they’re onboarding, and I’m seeing that the quarter tick by, I have one of three options. Option one, give them work that they can’t handle. That’s no. Option to let the deadline pass. No. I guess option three, hire someone short term. Well, no, because then I’d have to onboard them, right? And like that onboarding time would just like eat away. So option four is what I chose, which is well, looks like I’m gonna work a little extra over the next couple weeks and just take care of it. Now I’m not doing something that is short term. I’m trying to build a system so she, this new hire can jump in and do this work.

00:22:15 Casey: I don’t want to do it long term. When asked, “Hey, do you want to be doing this work?” The answer is no. And I’m going to do it until you’re ready to take it over. And I’m going to try to get you to take it over as soon as possible, like by Monday or a week from Monday or something. So I’m willing to like saddle up and do what’s required to help the company. And you are too. I think there’s a difference to like if you go work with a company and you go sign a contract for 10 hours, and then that engagement ends up being crazy.

00:22:42 Casey: You see, get in the business and it’s just ugly. Like everything’s broken. And there’s like a toddler running operations, then you’re going to have to work harder than what your contract stipulates. And how do you deal with that? Do it in the short term? You say, well, we’re gonna have to like do this thing. And I know what to do. And let’s get everyone on Monday. And I’m going to work a couple extra hours a week just to get everything on there straight and narrow. And I think in a month, we’ll be good to do that to talk to the client and say, “Hey, this is outside of my scope of work. I won’t do this, go hire someone for this and I won’t help.”

00:23:16 Casey: Is that the kind of person you are? You got to figure out where you are. And there’s no right answer. I would say the wrong answer is not being a team player. But it’s fine to be a team player and saying, this is what’s going to happen. Here’s who we need. I wrote the job post. Can we get it posted? Like you could do that and still be a team player. But you can’t just like walk away and just say, that’s not my problem. That’s not my department. If you’re a team player, if you’re the CMO, we’re not talking about the marketing director, marketing coordinator, or marketing technician. We’re talking about the person who is in the small room of three, four, five, six people for the annual planning.

00:23:50 Casey: You guys are planning the whole business. Like if something’s wrong, you’re going to point to it and say that’s messed up. I can think of working with a company and their sales team, their sales leader was not somebody that I felt like was doing a good job. I went to the owner and I was like, yo, the sales leader is like not doing it. They’re like, document it. Tell me how. You got it. And I like showed it. And I was very disagreeable to that sales leader because they were consistently doing a bad job. And I documented it. And I said, this is what it should look like.

00:24:19 Casey: And I wrote SOPs on how to call my leads faster so that my team would get the rewards of the sales being made, because our leads didn’t grow cold. Like that’s above and beyond kind of the role. But also, it’s the expectation that you’re the leader. So, when I look back right now, like if I look back at the last few weeks and say, has this been high output for me, or has it been pretty chill? I would say it’s pretty high output. It’s probably the hardest I’ve worked all year. It’s maybe in the last month. It’s been a lot. Is this lasting forever? Absolutely not. No way.

00:24:53 Casey: But I am working outside of my contract, and I haven’t changed my contract. Because I don’t think it’s right to. For me, there’s kind of a feeling there’s a triggering point, there’s a persistence of a problem that has to exist for me to change my contract. Because similarly, If I’m contracted for 10 hours a week, and I get all my work done in two hours, do I tell the client, pay me less? No, I don’t. So I do have anticipation that some weeks are exceedingly easy for me. Like I don’t even have to show up. I don’t have to do anything exceedingly easy. And other weeks, hard, hard, hard, hard. I’m going to show up and I’m going to work my butt off.

00:25:25 Casey: And I’m going to have dinner with my family and I’m going to put my kids to bed. And I’m going to tell my wife, I probably won’t be coming to bed until after midnight. I’m just going to work and do what’s required. A little bit of both. But I’m in full control of it. And that’s what I think is great. So is it all easy all the time? Absolutely not. The first 30 days, oh, you just get bogged down with calls. People throw calls in your calendars because they think they can. First 30 days is wild. And then also there’s like inflection points. Maybe your client purchases a business. Maybe they get a big cash investment. Maybe something major changes. Maybe there’s a hack. Maybe there’s a malware that gets on the website, like whatever the thing is. Maybe you guys get ransomware. I don’t know. I hope that doesn’t happen.

00:26:07 Casey: But it probably will. Something will happen and you have a choice. Do you go ask for more money? Or do you just like show up and do the work and like build then a fireproof house? Like don’t fight fires, identify a fire, put it out and then build a fireproof house for your team to live in. That’s where I think it should be. Alright, I want to shift here. Dan wrote this in the fractional CMO group. If you go to facebook.com/groups/fractionalcmo. As of recording, we hit the glorious 7,000 member mark. This is a free Facebook group and I go live in it about once a month. So if you ever want to chat with me, you can jump into this group.

00:24:44 Casey: And Dan says, “I’m working with a client, and we have taken a bootstrapped approach where we are running cold email and LinkedIn connection requests. Their goal is to generate leads and build the funnel. We have not had any engagement after many months. Beyond what they’re paying me, they have limited budget. I know they’re frustrated. It’s a complex sales business and highly competitive for long six to seven figure programs. I’m looking for a spark of an idea for them. I will most likely lose the business and rightfully so, but I’m looking to provide some direction.” So I want to say that if you’re feeling this way, like this is a heavy one, right? Dan’s got a lot of self-awareness.

00:27:25 Casey: You know, I’m going to lose the business rightfully so. Him writing this topic, he’s probably been dealing with this internally for how long, months? You know, he’s been worried about it. He made that sale, he felt good. He launched a campaign he felt confident in and then just like zero result, zero result. Oh, it’s this there. Oh, it’s that thing. And then ultimately just no result. So this hasn’t been an easy one, probably for him. I’ve been there working in the agency for sure. I’ve launched campaigns that were duds. And it sucks. So just a couple thoughts on this. One is that me being the CMO identifies the strategy, but I’m going to get someone else to do the work.

00:27:58 Casey: At some level, this does give me a little bit of plausible deniability if they do a bad job. Like I said, a bogey that has to be true. I just did this with one of our members today. How many new customers does the client need? Therefore, how many proposals delivered? Therefore, how many closing calls? Therefore, how many opening calls? Therefore, how many leads do they need? What’s their budget? Therefore, what can they pay per lead? And we back into that. If you can run those numbers for your client, and then you say, “Hey, I think cold email is a good approach.” Cool. Great. Awesome.

00:28:27 Casey: How long will it take you to get a result? So that we know if we’re on track or not. And I say a month, say, okay, what’s it gonna cost? They tell me, okay, got it. All right, so in a month, this is the result you think we’re gonna get. Cool. And you also want to do LinkedIn. So let’s just talk about the email, how many sends, where’s the list, the domains, what are you sending them? What’s the message called action, yada, yada, yada. You chief it, you’re like, okay, cool. I mean, I think it’s a worthy thing for us to try. Maybe what else can we try? Well, LinkedIn. Okay, cool.

00:28:54 Casey: For LinkedIn, what’s the list? What’s the outreach? Are you gonna nag them? Are you gonna hit them with email as well? You know, what’s the whole process here? You try to get that all figured out and just kind of clarify what the plan is and what they think the numbers are. And you then get to a place where you just kind of give it like a, I don’t know, like a test. Like, does this make sense to me? Like, if I think through this, is it likely that these things will happen? You’re better if you’ve done it before and recently and you know what’s gonna work. You’re gonna be better. However, it’s worth testing some of these ideas. So cool. Test it. What the heck? Give it a shot.

00:29:31 Casey: If you want to go cheap, lengthen outreach and cold email is pretty inexpensive. You know, there’s no PPC spend. So, I don’t think they’re like bad ideas, but they are very different than cold calling. They are very different than sending direct mail, sending handwritten letters, meeting people in person, that kind of stuff. And maybe the offer sucks. But after the first month, I would want to… Honestly, the first two weeks of running this, I want to report. Let’s just say we have to get 10 leads a day. If after the first two weeks, we have zero leads, I start to get worried. I start getting worried because now I’m feeling like I have to get 12 leads a day.

00:30:06 Casey: So, if I wait another two weeks, I might have to get 14 leads a day to hit our bogey by the end of the quarter or by the end of the four months or whatever. So, I’m starting to put a lot of pressure on these people and I’m firing quickly. Like I’ll take someone early on who has a good idea that I kind of vet and I’m like, yeah, that seems like it would work. And they say, I’ve got to process whatever, and then they’re going to drive through it. And if they don’t deliver in the first two weeks, I’m like, all right, well, what do you got one more week to prove yourself, and then we got to shift to the next strategy.

00:30:32 Casey: At some point, you know, you got to abandon some of these strategies and just go for something that you know is going to be a win. One way that you can win with this is the CEO can have conversations. You can have the CEO to direct outreach or paid ads or whatever, and maybe the budget’s low. Therefore, maybe the clients a bad fit client for you. But I think too many marketers allow themselves to get too far into a committed campaign without reviewing the data without enough like ownership of it to say like, well, we should can this one because it’s not going to work right now. Well, that’s a bad vendor for us. I’m guilty of it too.

00:31:06 Casey: I’ve spent way too long working with media buyers that just didn’t have it or people who did creative or email copy or whatever. And they just didn’t deliver. They claimed they could. They got that paycheck for two, three months and then they got fired. So, our job is to measure. If we want to generate a result, we have to measure it. If we want to get a faster result, we have to measure it in a shorter time span. So instead of saying, all right, in the next 90 days, drive this many leads and on December 31st, we’ll have discussion if you did it or not. I say in 90 days, this is the outcome. Therefore, this is the outcome in 30 days. Therefore, this is the outcome in two weeks. Are you committed to it? Great, deliver this in two weeks.

00:31:44 Casey: If not, we can maybe extend the contract by a week to see if we can get the results. And if you can’t, then we’re gonna have to end the contract and move on to the next thing. That’s what companies need, that level of ownership of the data and short time horizons. So if we go back to the question of like implementation, if you’ve hired someone to do this work to do the outreach, and it’s not working, are you going to fill in? I hope not. I hope you’re able to find someone else and cycle them in. But you need to like think through all this. Okay, if this person doesn’t work out, then what do I do? Who do I bring in next?

00:32:11 Casey: So there’s a tactical approach about being a CMO. It’s not all about just strategy and that’s it and just say like, oh, I’ll come up with the idea and tell people what to do. Sometimes you got to roll your sleeves up and do the work yourself. The business that I’m building to go back to the initial idea was when I was at the agency, I worked with too many companies. I never had depth. I want to spend more of my time working with fewer companies, solving bigger problems, delegating everything except leadership. And then I want to spend my time practicing predicting the future. That’s it.

00:32:40 Casey: Fewer clients, more spaciousness allows me to generate a better result for my clients. I know if you had 10 hours a week to spend on a client, 10 hours a week to spend on a client and then four hours a month to spend on a client. Those are your three clients. You’re making great money. You’re doing whatever, $250, $300,000 a year. Just on that, working 25 hours a week, let’s say. If you’re like living that lifestyle, I bet you’ll allow yourself to chase your curiosity and you’ll get better at something and you’ll play and the implementation won’t feel like implementation.

00:33:11 Casey: You’re not being forced to write a webinar script. You’re saying, oh, let me take a stab at this. Let me have a little bit of fun. It’s just different. It’s different than you being a team member that gets tasked with work versus someone who takes on a hard problem because you’re the kind of person who likes to solve hard problems and just kind of work it and massage it and watch videos and learn and like get to the next level. That is the nuance. And from the outside, it looks like hey, Casey wrote a couple emails last week for a client.

00:33:38 Casey: But from the way I’m seeing it is I’m creating a structure. I’m creating it right. I’m doing it in a way that I think is innovative so that everyone else can write emails for the rest of time without me. If I do that, I’m building a better team. I’m being a servant leader. I’m showing them kind of how I do it. I’m enrolling them in how I think and I’m building myself a future of less labor or really just solving bigger problems continually, which allows me to charge higher rates because I solve bigger problems that are worth more to get solved. That’s the whole goal here.

00:34:08 Casey: I think there’s a lot of folks that say stuff like, you never have to work again, like be a consultant and work with rich, dumb people who move slowly. And while you can do that, and while there might be a time in your life where that makes sense, by and large, you want to be surrounded with fast moving people who are eager to work, who are smart, who are hungry, who are solving a big problem. And when you’re there, naturally, you’re going to want to have fun with them too. And sometimes that fun looks like a little bit like implementation, but it is not because you were tasked in a sauna with a due date to do something. It’s because you’re innovating and playing and having fun.

00:34:41 Casey: All right, if you want my help, if you want to join the CMOx Accelerator to be around these awesome CMOs, we have such heavy hitters right now, people with deep experience all over the market, but also people who have less experience. And they’re just really eager to learn and grow and be that next level. Like they’re good marketers, but maybe they don’t have like the Fortune 500 pedigree. We’ve got a lot of those folks too. And we all get together and we’re all there to support each other and be in a community to help you win. I mean, I just was coaching one of our members today, he just did a half day consult.

00:35:11 Casey: And it’s all about positioning himself for ongoing services with the client. And it’s like this 100 or 200 words that if he says right in the right order, like an incantation, he’ll be able to have that client pay him for years. And if he says it wrong, he’ll lose it. It’s like, that’s the fun of this work. These like incantations, these spells like this, like a Western magic of willing these relationships together by working with people and showing how their future is better and bigger when you’re a part of it. I’m not talking about like taking advantage of people. I’m talking about true value add, and you just taking that value home. And not being like I was in the agency where they would take 55%, 60, 70% of the fee, they would put in their pocket even though I sold it and service the business.

00:35:58 Casey: They would take that because they were the business owner. So if you want to take it all yourself, if you want to be the person who’s building yourself up, if you’re in the agency space and you don’t want to have your 30, 40% margins, but you want to have 98% margins. Fractional CMO is really the move. If you’re a full-time employee, if you’re a C-suite team member, maybe it’s about you jettisoning slowly, maybe winning a client on the side, getting a second one, getting the confidence. And then if you get a layoff, like who cares? Like you’ll go find a third client and you’re fine.

00:36:27 Casey: But you’re committing right now upfront to working a little bit harder right now to build that book of business so that you’re not waiting for a layoff where everyone else is laid off, and then the job market is really tough. You want to start now while you’re thinking ahead and being innovative. If there’s anything that I wish I would have done that I would have left the agency earlier, how much more successful would I be if I had more time doing what I’m doing now? And I already have a couple of years doing this. I’ve been a fractional CMO for how many years now?

00:36:56 Casey: I kinda think like how old my son is. He’s like five and a half. I was a fractional CMO before him. Wrote my first book right around when he was born. So I’ve been in the game for maybe close to 10 years. And if I had an extra three years on top of that, how much more powerful I would have been. Don’t wait, don’t delay. Start now. Go win that client on the side. Build that book of business. You want my help? Go to cmox.com/call, cmox.com/call. Book in a 15-minute call with my team and we’ll see if we think you have what it takes to be a fractional CMO. All right, I will see you on an episode soon, but preferably, I’ll see you on a call sooner. Take care.

00:37:34 Casey: Thank you for sticking around for the full episode. As you know, learners are earners, but you’ve got to take action on what you heard today. For more information and show notes, visit fractionalcmoshow.com. If you’d like me to answer your questions on an upcoming episode, you can share your question at fractionalcmoshow.com. And last, please hit the like and subscribe button so that I know that this content is helpful to you. All right, go get them.