Ep #134: The State of the Fractional CMO Union - Part 1

Transcript:

00:00:00 Casey: All right, welcome in. So I want you to get something to take notes on. And my preference is that you mute notifications on your phone. Just do that swipe from the top corner and go on do not disturb mode. This is one of those things that I think like, I spent a lot of time preparing this and I wanna give you some information that I’m pretty confident is gonna help you get to the next level. Gary might be in the airport. All right, I’m just gonna mute you all. Michael, if you can mute anyone who’s just not chatting, that’d be great. 

00:00:30 Casey: So I want you to take notes. I want this to be something. I want this to be a learning moment. Like there’s two things that we can do in life when it comes to like information. One is we can watch Netflix and we can just like hang out and we can just like passively, you know, absorb some of the stuff and forget most of it. And that’s definitely something you can do here. Or you can be a bit more active and you can take notes and you can write down the ahas and you can write down if this is a thing for you or not. Because by the end of this, I wanna make a really clear kind of offer to you to like be a fractional CMO or don’t. And I wanna give you the opportunity to let go of this idea of being a fractional CMO if it’s not for you. 

00:01:02 Casey: And if it is for you, I wanna show you why now is really the absolute best time to build your fractional CMO practice to win your first client or win your next client. I think it’s a really important conversation that we’re getting into. All right, so with that, I’m gonna start my slides. And if you can see them… one second, just say yes in the chat. Mark from Sioux Falls. Cool, I’ve never been there. A Sodakian, is that what we call you? Okay, cool, thanks, Andrew. Great, you guys can see it, great. All right, welcome to State of the Union. All right, let’s just dive in. 

00:01:42 Casey: I’m going to share some information and then we’ll transition to open Q&A. I’ll answer any questions that y’all have and I’m here just to be helpful. I really want you to win in this. I think that there is an opportunity here for us to help more people than anything else we can really do. I think that’s like a really magical thing. And we can do it while making a bunch of money and helping our communities and people that we love and stuff like that. So let’s dive in.

00:02:05 Casey: All right, so it was March 11th, 2020 and the world began to shut down. You might remember this. I got a call from my buddy who owned an SEO firm. Hey man, did your clients cancel on you today too? He was upset. He had a family to take care of. But me, I was okay. My wife was pregnant when we had just moved to Philadelphia and I was worried about what would happen. Yet I was surprised throughout the height of the pandemic, my clients didn’t push me away. As a fractional CMO, they pulled me in closer. 

00:02:47 Casey: So while companies started mass layoffs, especially in their marketing departments, as a fractional CMO, I was needed more than ever. My clients needed me to figure out how to keep their business afloat. That’s the moment I realized the difference between being a vendor and being a leader inside the company. You see, vendors get cut and leaders, they get kept. And today’s environment feels a bit like early 2020. Maybe you’re feeling it too. This time it’s not a virus, it’s AI and the market is shifting. 

00:03:24 Casey: For most folks, they’re not paying attention to what’s happening below the surface. And as a result, they’re gonna be caught off guard. In our limited time together today, I wanna share what I’m seeing and how you can win your first or your next fractional CMO client so that you can have a business that provides for you and your family. Maybe you wanna own a home, right? You wanna like have a real lifestyle. Maybe one that gives you freedom so that you can travel or play. Maybe some of you have family members with special needs and you wanna spend more time with them or your parents are aging and you wanna spend more time with them. You want some sense of freedom. You want something that pays you well and keeps you relevant in a time of great uncertainty. 

00:04:08 Casey: And I think relevance is big. One of the things I hear from our CMOs, especially our older CMOs inside of the CMOx Accelerator is that they find relevancy. Like they’re wanted, they’re useful. I think it’s like all of our fear if we really kind of consider it that as we get older, we become less relevant. We talk about the olden days and we’re not actually useful today. By being a fractional CMO, you’re useful now. Today, I’ll share what I’m seeing in the market and I’ll give you the brain upgrade you need to skate where the puck is going. I love that Wayne Gretzky’s father’s quote. Don’t skate where the puck is, skate where the puck’s going. Being a fractional CMO is where the market is heading.

00:04:47 Casey: But first, if you guys don’t know me, I know a lot of y’all are new here, you may be wondering who the heck is this guy and why should I listen to him? And that’s a fair thing to ask. It all started back in 2017. So here I was living in an RV, a 25 foot Coachman Freedom Express. My girlfriend, Adelaide, and I at the time had left New Orleans where we kind of met and were living. We got this RV and we drove around the country for two years while I was working at a marketing agency. And we got married in 2018 in February. But in December, December 10th of 2017, I had this idea. What if instead of working at the agency, what if I was the CMO for multiple companies? That sounds interesting. I didn’t know it was called a fractional CMO. I didn’t invent the term, but I just thought, I wanna be like well-paid and stick around with these clients.

00:05:36 Casey: Then a couple months later in July of 2018, I got my first kind of offer. Someone wanted to hire me. Now this came in from a guy that I knew, a guy named Jason said, hey, I want you. I’m in need of a CMO for a fast-growing business. I’d love to hear about your services. We talked the next day and I closed him on a $7,500 a month engagement. That was in 2018. So while I was living full-time on the road, I built my fractional CMO practice up to $46,500 a month. It’s a half a million dollars. It was awesome. They didn’t come without problems. I built it up to about $23,000 and then I lost everything kind of overnight. I had a contract that just kind of reached its expiration. 

00:06:23 Casey: And then I had another deal that I was working that I was supposed to stick around for a long time. I flew out to California. I met the… if you can meet that person. I flew out to California and I met the board of directors, the chairman at his place. It was crazy. It was in the Oppenheimer building in Beverly Hills and out back was like the gravestones of Hugh Hefner and Rodney Dangerfield. It’s just a wild place. Marilyn Monroe, very strange. So I’m there and I like pitched this guy and he’s like, I love it. And he shakes my hand. The CEO is like, you did a great job. We’re locked in for the next year. Little did I know that when I got home and told my then wife, my newlywed wife, everything would fall apart and I lost all that business. So there I go from 23,000 a month, boom, down to just a couple thousand dollars a month.

00:07:09 Casey: And it hurt, hurt, hurt. And I worked to build that back up to that $46,500 a month mark. That’s when I knew I made it, when I doubled that previous best and I did it not based on the relationships I had, but being able to talk to strangers and really build a pipeline that wasn’t based on the people I had already known. When my buddy called me to check in during March of 2020, they asked me if I would hire them. They’re like, hey, dude. I lost my business, my SEO firm, my PPC firm. Oh, I’m a funnel builder. I lost all my business. 

00:07:41 Casey: Because previously I worked at an agency and I was a contractor. So we were all kind of contractors and we all kind of felt when the market would shift, we’d all kind of get impacted. And I realized that they didn’t really want to hire me. They didn’t want me to hire them. They wanted to have their own fractional CMO practice. They wanted what I had. They didn’t want to be my employees. So I want to ask you, do you want to be an employee or do you want to own your own company? It’s a difference here. And being an employee comes with a feeling of security. 

00:08:13 Casey: Owning your own company allows you to maybe make more money, have more freedom, but it does come at some risk. And I want you to write in the chat, tell me, do you lean towards the safety and security of being an employee? Or do you lean more towards owning your own business? Where are you at on that? Own, yeah, sweet. Dana, you’ve been for 19. Michaela, own your own business. Yeah, sweet. So some of you want to own it. I love it.

00:08:36 Casey: And I think being an employee sounds great, but when I think of being an employee, I think of my dad. I think of my dad at IBM for 25 years and then having a pension. Like that doesn’t exist today. The freedom and – excuse me, the security that we get as an employee, I don’t think really exists anymore today. We’re seeing mass layoffs happening. I mean, we’re even seeing it like Meta, they laid off their AI team because it wasn’t their super intelligence AI team. So just like the run of the mill, cutting edge AI team got laid off. 

00:09:05 Casey: So if you want to own your own business and you want to do this thing on your own and you want to be able to stand up by yourself, in the US we worry about things like health insurance. Let me just tell you, it sucks. I think our health insurance market is terrible. It’s frustrating, but it’s a small price to pay for freedom. So often that is the thing that stops people from moving from being an employee to being on their own, it’s health insurance, or it’s convincing their spouse that it’s okay. It’s worth the risk. And if it’s health insurance, I’ll just tell you, it sucks, you’re right. But honestly, it’s a margin of error. 

00:09:40 Casey: I was talking to one of our members today and she was telling me about a deal that she had just pitched. And I said, what’d you pitch it at? And she goes, I don’t remember. It was like 10,000 or maybe 12,000, I don’t know. It’s like, it’s a margin of error and that’s per month. So when you think of numbers like that, the annoyance of a $600 a month health insurance plan kind of goes out the window, right? You can kind of factor that in and it’s just like a little bit of, like a little bump that you put on your rates to cover those fees. 

00:10:08 Casey: All right. So I launched CMOx ultimately to train other CMOs. That’s what I was doing. Years ago, I was a professor at Tulane University when I was in New Orleans. I was an adjunct professor and I had a lot of fun teaching and I really enjoyed the marketing stuff and being a fractional CMO. So it kind of just made sense for me to build CMOx into a training and coaching community. So while serving, like currently I serve two to three clients at a time. Like I’m still in the game. I’m still a fractional CMO. 

00:10:40 Casey: So a little bit more about me. I’ve trained over 450 skilled marketers to be CMOxs. I really love marketing. I love playing with AI and tech. I like to nerd out on this stuff, but I also like to get good results from my clients and help them. I live here in Philadelphia, just in like the Chestnut Hill area. I’ve got a wife and two kids. So let’s talk about CMOx. Let’s get into the details of what I’m seeing and what might be useful for you. I’m sorry, before you, just quick notes. I wrote the bestselling, the Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Fractional CMO Method. And I released that a couple of years ago and then I wrote another book called Find Your CMO. And I released those. I have the number one podcast for fractional CMOs called The Fractional CMO Show. So I’ve been in this game. I really just like live in it. I love the fractional CMO space. 

00:11:24 Casey: I’m also the co-founder of a sister company that we call CTOx. Those are Chief Technology Officers. And we’ve got some heavy hitters over there. I obviously need a co-founder because I’m not a CTO myself, but I’m such a believer in the fractional CMO and therefore fractional CTO model that we built that second company. And I’ve got a great team over there, my co-founders, Lior and Marissa. 

00:11:46 Casey: So let’s talk about what I’m seeing in the market. So first thing, this is big. Data is suggesting that 30% of the C-suite will be fractional by 2030. It’s 2026. We’re talking in four years, a third of the C-suite will be fractional. Current estimates are 30 to 40%. I’m gonna call it 30%. I’m gonna say it’s gonna be smaller. 30% are gonna be fractional. That’s wild. Next, there’s plenty of boring businesses that need a fractional CMO. I love this part. We have folks that come in and they’re like, I try to talk to them about what niche they wanna be in. And they say, oh, Casey, I really wanna be in like B2B SaaS, or I wanna be in like this really cutting edge AI thing. 

00:12:31 Casey: And that’s definitely an opportunity. But then there’s also people that just wanna be in boring businesses that are gonna be around for a long time, like HVAC or window washing, or we have a member who has a client in the Netherlands that have robotic ship hull cleaners, where they drive like these little submarines that attach themselves to the side of a shipping, like a container ship, and they clean the boat. And they do it with kind of like robotics and dudes wearing goggles and stuff. Kind of a boring business. You know, it’s not sexy. It’s not cutting edge. It’s not athletic greens. You know, it’s like boring businesses that are gonna be around for a long time. Those businesses still need a fractional CMO more than ever before.

00:13:16 Casey: The average hourly rate that’s kind of reported is $213 an hour. And I think that that’s probably false. So many people that I talk to who call themselves fractional CMOs, maybe they make that, but I honestly don’t believe them. Because they’re working more hours, they’re not disclosing accurately really what they’re doing. They’re selling project-based work. It’s just not the same. Inside the CMOx Accelerator, our members tend to do, eh, 350. It’s like some of the work is 250 an hour, some of the work is 700 an hour. You kind of fall around 350 an hour. It’s kind of like how it shakes out. These are for the people that have multiple clients. 

00:13:52 Casey: Selling project-based work feels easier, but it makes life so much harder. I’ve seen this issue with folks leaving kind of a corporate job. They’re gonna go sell project-based work, and they’re gonna go work for 60 days, and that’s gonna be their off-ramp out of their nine to five employment. And that work gets completed in 60 days, and then they find themselves kind of screwed. Over time, my engagements are much longer. I just signed an engagement in November for three years. And I run with a company to exit, and at exit, I make a bunch of money. That’s a long-term commitment with a client. That’s what I want you to be able to have, too, because project-based work just sucks. 

00:14:31 Casey: Also, I don’t think you should serve more than three to five clients. We’ve got a member, a newer member, and he’s got a number of clients. He loves it, maybe because he’s crazy. Some of his clients, he just kind of coaches, and that feels good to him. But if you actually wanna have depth and build a team, three to five clients is where you wanna be. And honestly, I think three’s a good number. I think of Dunbar’s number, if you wanna kind of get nerdy. Dunbar’s number states that you can keep about 150 people in your mind, in your memory, to be able to have a meaningful interaction with. 

00:15:03 Casey: Like, I can bump into someone at the co-op that’s getting their milk sandwich, and I can have a reasonable conversation about them, ask them about their kids, kind of remember stuff about them. You can do about 150 people in your life at one time. That’s what Dunbar’s number is. Some of you more, some of you less. But when you add more clients, and you have teams, and vendors, and the sales team, and the CEO, and the HR person, it just starts to overload the brain, and I think it becomes hard. You start missing things, you say the wrong thing to the wrong person, just doesn’t work out. So three clients is my ideal. I think you can move up to five if you need to. I’d rather just charge more to fewer clients than have more clients. 

00:15:45 Casey: Here’s an adoption life cycle of the fractional CMO. This is something I put together with the best data that I have, and if you look at it, I think this is reasonably accurate. You know, I started way back here, 2017, 2018, where no one heard of a fractional CMO. There really was no one around doing fractional CMO stuff. And then we have seen things shift. Right now, between 2022 and 2024, we saw a doubling of people who list themselves as fractionals on LinkedIn. They went from 60,000 to 120,000 over a two-year period. And I still think we’re early. I mean, if you talk to someone in the business space and you say, yeah, I’m doing this fractional CMO thing, they’re like, the fractional what? Like, what are you talking about? 

00:16:29 Casey: I think we’re still really, really early. And I don’t think we’re early for a lot of other stuff. You know, are we early for AI and marketing? Yeah, but I think for being a fractional CMO, this is probably the most poignant place to be is like in this early part of the adoption curve.

00:16:46 Casey: Also, agencies are losing their role. Man, I had some fun today playing with MoltBot. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. It was called Clawd Bot. Excuse me, Clawd Bot spelled funny. But I think they had a cease and desist. So now it’s a MoltBot. This is like an AI agent that runs locally and you have it do stuff and it ties in with MCPs and APIs and all that stuff. Very cool. We can nerd out about that if you wanted. But I wanna say like, that is fundamentally changing the utility of agencies. 

00:17:15 Casey: Claude Code, changing the usefulness of agencies. Young people in Africa getting online for the first time. They say like, there’s the rising billion. There’s a group of people in Africa who haven’t been on the internet and these Africans are getting cell phones and they’re getting on the internet and then they’re wanting to make money and they’re going on Upwork or they’re going on Fiverr and they’re starting to offer services and they’re willing to take a much lower rate because they have so much more buying power with that American dollar in their local currency. So you can hire someone that’s like smart and hardworking that might not be all that experienced but they’re connected to a $20 a month LLM and they can do incredible stuff. So I’m seeing agencies really start to go down in their usefulness. They can’t charge the same thing they charged before.

00:18:00 Casey: Back when I worked at an agency before I did the fractional CMO stuff, you know, we would charge $195 an hour at the agency. And we would write emails for folks and I was billing, you know, 45 minutes, 60 minutes to write an email. I think a client today, they’re not spending 200 bucks for an email, they want 20 emails for 200 bucks and they want them all to be perfect and it’s easy to do because of like Claude and Chat and that kind of stuff but I think we’re seeing agencies are losing their margins and they’re losing their relevance. 

00:18:33 Casey: Ultimately, the market is changing. This is a big thing. There’s AI slop and AI slop is everywhere. AI slop is, I’m in a private group, WhatsApp group and I asked a question and a guy replied to me with AI. It’s just like loss of trust, loss of respect for the guy. He gave me AI slop. It was a dumb answer, right? We see a lot of that stuff but then we see ads that are AI slop that kind of trick you because as a marketer, you’re like, this feels off but everything looks okay. Like the headline is reasonably persuasive and the body copy makes sense and the image relates and it goes to a landing page but something feels off about it and it’s not that the person in the image has six fingers on one hand. It’s not that there’s a em dash but there’s just like a feeling to it that’s just off.

00:19:23 Casey: We’re seeing a lot of AI slop which makes our life harder. When there’s a proliferation of noise, it’s hard to hear a signal and our job is to be the signal. So the market is shifting dramatically. We’re finding people in countries that otherwise weren’t competing in US markets now competing in US markets with AI and they kind of look good from the outside but once you get under the hood, you realize that it’s just a prompt in ChatGPT. 

00:19:51 Casey: Also, I’m seeing like a lot of businesses are measuring their results as being busy. Like it looks good to be busy in marketing and companies aren’t getting marketing to generate an actual outcome. Leads, MQLs, SQLs, Pipeline, closed one deals, cashflow, none of that stuff. ROAS, that stuff isn’t being measured and I don’t really understand why. It’s like it is a dopamine rush for the business owner to see so many things happen because they can because of AI, because of automation, because the barrier of entry is much lower but the result is that it’s just busy work and it doesn’t deliver a result.

00:20:29 Casey: Here’s an interesting data point. 25% of the 2025 Y Combinator startup batch wrote 95% of their code with AI. If you don’t know what that means, Y Combinator is like the biggest incubator for startups and it’s like where Uber went, it’s where Lyft went, it’s where DoorDash went, it’s where Stripe went. They all started off as these like little nascent companies. Y Combinator gave them a chunk of money, took a percentage of their company and then helped them accelerate and grow. So it really is like the bleeding edge of what’s new and useful for businesses. And these startups that got into this like next cohort in 2025, 95% of their code was written with AI, a quarter of them. What’s it gonna be in 2026? Is that number gonna be 50%, 75%? I think the answer is like, yes, why wouldn’t it be? It’s weird, it’s a weird time. 

00:21:28 Casey: So let’s talk about the ways that AI can hurt us. I think this is one that we can think of, right? AI is gonna take over the world, it’s gonna become sentient and it’s gonna control humans. I was just reading about Claude’s or Anthropic’s like governing principles for their AI. It’s interesting, right? Like that could definitely happen. Is it gonna happen? I don’t know, I don’t know if it will. 

00:21:52 Casey: Scenario two is that a single or multiple actors can leverage AI to make people do their bidding and take control of mass populations. I think this is like quite likely you think of like the Mark Zuckerberg’s, the Elon Musk’s, they have control of these massive AIs like Manus at Meta or Grok, that’s happening. But this one is the one that scares me the most. People like you outsourcing too much of your thinking to AI and then you become weak minded. You overly trust the LLM. And I’m like trying to figure out something locally. I’m playing with some hardware at home a couple days ago and I’m trying to connect a Wi-Fi device to a computer remotely that I have ethernet to and it’s a tricky thing for me to solve. 

00:22:39 Casey: And ChatGPT keeps telling me it’s not possible. I go take a break, put my son to bed and then I sit and think about it. And I was like, well, why don’t I do it this way? And it was like, you’re a genius. I can’t believe you thought of that. Like I never thought of that idea. That would totally work. It’s like I allowed myself to fall into this habit of just accepting what ChatGPT said and like being forceful and just being like, well, I guess we can’t do it. And it took me some time and clarity to actually solve the problem. I catch myself becoming weak minded. And I think you probably do too. It’s like overusing the calculator and then not knowing how to multiply something by seven. 

00:23:13 Casey: So I’m afraid of this happening with AI. And that’s why I’ve kind of been on the Luddite-ish level of AI. I love it. I play with it. I have a local model at home on a computer in my basement. I’m having fun with it, but I still think it’s better to do the basics of marketing myself as much as possible so that I can remain sharp. And ultimately the basics matter more. So UTMs and attribution matter so much. 

00:23:40 Casey: We have a member who just joined. She comes from a big .com CMOC. You would know the company. You likely have even spent money with the company that she worked with for, I think a decade. And she’s like looking at working with a new company. And she says, they have nothing. They have no email automation. They have lead capture, but no follow-up. They have no attribution, no nothing. It doesn’t matter if you’re a venture funded company or if you’re doing multiple millions a year. These companies still lack the basics. They don’t know what a UTM is. They can’t track origination of leads and traffic sources. And therefore they don’t know what’s working. 

00:24:18 Casey: Also these marketers, they don’t know the psychology of how and why customers buy. It’s like they’ve lost this. There’s a level of abstraction. It’s like, oh, we’re running an ad and we should run this kind of ad. Well, why? Because Alex Hormozi ran it or because that’s what Lululemon’s running or whatever. They don’t understand the psychology of how and why and they don’t get these basics. Therefore they’re producing campaigns that at best are just gonna be copies of others. They’re never able to actively innovate and be useful. 

00:24:49 Casey: And I’ll tell you this, if you can’t innovate and if you’re just asking ChatGPT for the answer, the difference between you and a $20 a month LLM is a salary. Like there’s no other difference between you. What we played with today, I had some of the members we were hanging out and we were playing with this Molt product. What that means for getting busy work done blows me away. It’s gonna be so efficient, so effective. I think it’s gonna really change things in my life personally and I think for the clients I work with and for our CMOs. It’s the most exciting thing I’ve seen in a long time.

00:25:28 Casey: And while I say that, other people are just like going to ChatGPT, getting the answer and then treating that as if it’s canon. And it just can’t be. You can’t live in that world anymore. Also, you have to understand the basics of like how does marketing and selling to large TAMs change versus small TAMs? What’s a TAM? It’s a total addressable market. If you’ve got like a million potential customers because you’re selling socks to women, you have a different advertising approach than if you’re selling a bespoke software solution to hospitals that have at least 200 beds. It’s like a very different way that you approach things. Do you fundamentally understand how to do those things differently? And can you focus on those and serve your clients? 

00:26:11 Casey: So let me tell you about things you can ignore for 2026. AI commenting on LinkedIn. If you do this, AI commenting, I think you’re risking your reputation. It’s gonna hurt you more than help you. This one made me laugh when I saw it. 9-11 was an inside job. Someone commented and [inaudible], a great marketer who I have a ton of respect for, but obviously using AI. Said, thanks, check your DMs. Like that’s not good, right? I’m sure you all have gone on LinkedIn before and seen AI comment on AI. And like have a conversation and it just is awful.

00:26:44 Casey: Also, you can ignore AI researching, writing, and posting content on your behalf. Like that amount of hops of like… be a tastemaker for me and do it all for me. Let me have that automation done for me. You can’t do that. You gotta ignore that stuff. The difference between you and AI is like, experience, taste. I think taste is a big one. These things are important to be able to broadcast when you’re communicating with folks. 

00:27:12 Casey: Also, should you care if there’s other fractional CMOs in the same niche as you? Again, we’re early. I think this is a really early time to be a fractional CMO. It’s not as early as 2017, but like I still think it’s quite early. It doesn’t matter if you’re like, Casey, I wanna be a fractional CMO and I wanna help trucking companies with getting routes and loads and stuff. Like, okay, cool. Like that’s a fine niche. And then you might find there’s other people in that industry too. That doesn’t preclude you from getting in there and winning and being the number one. 

00:27:43 Casey: A lot of people who are there likely came from that field, left a full-time job, picked up a client, maybe two, they’re probably struggling and you can eat them for lunch. So I’m not worried about that. Also, you need two to five clients, three to five clients to hit your financial goals. Whatever they are, half million dollars a year or more, you can do that with three clients, four clients, five clients. So it doesn’t matter if the market has a thousand potential clients and there’s already 10 fractional CMOs there. You can still go win. You can still go clean up.

00:28:17 Casey: Also chasing nine to five jobs. You can ignore that. If you want the freedom of being a fractional CMO, ignore the nine to five job. Unsubscribe from the job board. One of our members, Lisa, talked about that. She had this moment where she said, I’m done. I’m done with that. I’m going all in on being a fractional CMO. I’m not gonna run two places at once. Whatever it’s called. It’s like chase two buddies, catch none. It’s like kind of what you’re doing if you’re running after a full-time job and you’re on job boards, but then you’re also doing this fractional CMO thing. So don’t half-ass it, whole-ass it. 

00:28:53 Casey: Also, I don’t think you’re missing one trick. You’re gonna be sold that you’re missing one trick. Like one AI hack. Oh, if you have this new AI tool, then everything’s great. Or you’re missing this SaaS that does all of these automations. One of the funny things in our boardroom at CMOx, so this is our most successful fractional CMOs. A guy was having a great conversation with someone, one of his target market kind of clients, like a perfect fit. And the guy decided, I got this ad for this AI. And it’s like this busty rendered image of a woman that’s like a fake person AI. And the guy’s like, I’m gonna give her the money and she’ll do all this work. It’s like, you can skip all that stuff. You don’t have to worry about that kind of garbage that’s in the market right now. 

00:29:37 Casey: And also like high pressure tactics from salespeople. That’s not the stuff that you need right now. It’s the basics serving very few clients that are solving big problems. Also, you can ignore seasonality. Like there’s no seasonality to your clients. Like yes, measurably Q4 is a great time to prospect and win clients, absolutely. But you know what else is a good time? Q1. Q1 is a great time. Q2, great time. Q3, great time. You know what’s a good time to sell? Today. It’s a good time to go prospect and win business today. You don’t have to live in this world of seasonality where you’re gonna have to wait for a specific time for something to happen. 

00:30:14 Casey: So like the job reports from the government, let’s not get political, but like who cares what the job report says? Are we hiring? Are we not hiring? Is the level of immigration low and therefore the number of the growth of the population increasing, decreasing? How many new businesses are up? Who cares? We’re talking about two, three, four, five clients that you need at any given time to make all the money that you need to make. That’s what’s available here while having all the freedom to travel and do whatever you want.

00:30:39 Casey: So after all, being a fractional CMO is straightforward. If you have a proven process to follow, and I’m not here to tell you like it’s a complex thing. It’s hard. Sometimes you have hard days. If you’re juggling a lot of clients, it can take up time, but it’s straightforward. It’s identify the biggest problems the client has, delegate everything except leadership, and then spend your time predicting the future. What do you think is gonna happen as a result of this? That’s your job. 

00:31:07 Casey: You can use AI to deliver results faster. That’s fine with me. I think that’s a good thing to do. You can take all your notes. You could ask AI to maybe summarize some stuff and then you edit it. That’s okay. As long as you’re using your intellect to really navigate things. But you gotta be able to sell yourself. And this is one of the things I think a lot of folks struggle with the most. They think, okay, so if you just gave me a client, I got it, I can serve them. And I’ll tell you, I think that that’s false. When people say that, they think that their past experience is simply enough to maintain the client. And it probably is for 30 days or 60 days or 90 days, but they’re not keeping that client for three years and getting paid out on exit, right? On top of their monthly fees. 

00:31:49 Casey: They are instead in a place where… like they’re not good at selling themselves at clarifying their message and therefore they struggle to clarify their client’s message and really deliver something of value. People who say, just give me a client and I’ll be good are the same people that roll into working with a client and spend the first 90 days working on a rebrand. And the client says after those 90 days, where’s the money? Like we didn’t make any more money with this. I can’t justify this expense. So yes, you need to be able to sell yourself. And maybe you can sell yourself… You can sell for your clients. Like you can maybe help them sell their stuff, but many of you probably haven’t sold yourself before. You haven’t sold yourself in like a package that makes sense, that gives you a boundary so you’re not feeling stretched on nights and weekends. 

00:32:37 Casey: Maybe you get nervous and you tell them you’ll do too much. This is a big one I see. We even have a thing that we say, like people will say at CMOx, they’ll say, oh, I’m serving a client. And I closed them before I joined CMOx, before I followed the process. So I have two types of clients. I’ve got the clients I got after CMOx and before CMOx. And the ones I got before CMOx are noisy and they underpay me. And the ones that I got after CMOx, I’m having a lot of fun. I’m making a great impact and I’m making a lot of money. They’re very different. And I think nervousness and anxiety and not knowing what you’re selling comes up for folks. So having a process to be able to sell effectively means, I mean, at a minimum, it means less stress, but I think more likely it means making a lot more money and having more fun. 

00:33:22 Casey: Also, a thing that I see people do is they press themselves based on bad data or no data at all. It’s like, what should I charge as a fractional CMO? They’re like, I don’t know, I’m just gonna make it up. How’s $2,000 a month sound? I don’t know about you, but like two grand a month, I can’t do much with. I can’t pay my mortgage. I need a little bit more money than that. So I think you have to walk your way backwards into how you price by saying, how much money do I need to have the lifestyle and freedom that I want? And then you walk into that and say, how many clients do I want? And therefore, how much per month does a client need to pay me? And therefore, what types of clients can’t afford to work with me? And now how do I go get those clients, win them and service them? 

00:34:01 Casey: We’re going backwards from what you need to what the market can bear, instead of saying, I’m gonna close the person in front of me. That’s the biggest noisemaker for folks is they’re closing the person that’s talking to them, which is a girlfriend from years ago who’s coming back with a new business and doesn’t have any money. And you’re thinking maybe I can charge her three grand for a month. Don’t do that stuff. You gotta be simple. You gotta be straightforward. You gotta be direct and clear with yourself and what you want. And that’s how you’re gonna have the level of success that you need. 

00:34:33 Casey: You gotta be relentless at taking care of yourself by winning and competently serving high-paying clients. We don’t win high-paying clients for the greed of it. I’ll tell you, sometimes it’s for the game of it. Okay, sometimes it’s fun. We’ve got a member, she’s in boardroom and we have a joke about her. She’s like, oops, I went to the beach and closed a client for 10 grand a month. Oops, I fell down and made an extra five grand on a client. Like she’s doing that kind of stuff. It’s kind of silly, right? But generally speaking, it’s about being relentless. It’s saying like, this is what I want. I’m very clear on what I want and I’m going after it. And the folks that do that and they kind of roll off the poor fit clients, the clients without the budget, that kind of stuff and they focus on the clients that have the money and they can actually serve them, those are the ones that are gonna win. 

00:35:21 Casey: Those are the CMOs that are gonna make the money. They’re gonna take care of themselves. And they’re not gonna find themselves in like this crisis of identity saying like, I thought I was a fractional CMO, but I can’t close anything and I’m only making $3,500 a month and I can’t survive on that. You wanna be able to say like, I’m gonna set out to close a client at 10,000 a month or 7,500 or 15,000 or whatever the number is for you based on your experience and what the market can bear. And also maybe a little bit of like how much fun you wanna have. That’s what’s gonna set you apart. That’s what’s gonna make you kind of hungry for the growth of it all.

00:35:54 Casey: So I wanna say one last thing about this. The CMOs that are successful that I see are incredible at making impact in the lives of the people around them. And this can’t be understated. If you start a nonprofit, my mom’s got a nonprofit, she’s the executive director of it. She didn’t start it, she’s the executive director. And they do incredible stuff. They fill up backpacks for kids on the weekends because those kids go home and they don’t have food. So there’s food in the backpacks. There’s like a neighborhood or neighbor assistance ministry where they have some money available that people donate and they give it out to folks. It’s incredible. She helped build like six homes in the last year that are for low income folks. It’s really important stuff.

00:36:41 Casey: How many lives is she impacting? A lot. I look at one of my CMOs who is serving three clients and those clients have a team, let’s say each marketing department has three people on it. So it’s nine people plus the CEOs. So we’ve got 12 people right there. They’re making a direct impact on those 12 people’s lives. They’re making the CEO give them more freedom, get them out of the marketing seat so they can be more free to be a CEO and think big picture. They’re helping the marketers do things that actually matter and get results. They feel good and they feel proud of their work. And then they help all of the customers who buy the product or service. 

00:37:16 Casey: And I think selling a product or service that is morally neutral or positive, you have the ability to impact like an untold number of people. So if you wanna work, we’ve got a newer member and she really wants to be in women’s health. She just feels really called to women’s health and she wants to work in women’s health in products or service, like helping docs, like OBs or helping with like TTC products. Really cool space to be in and meaningful. And what if she’s able to get an excellent product in a woman’s hand so that she can conceive a child for the first time or help them through IVF or something? Very high impact. 

00:37:56 Casey: So I talk about the money because I think it’s interesting, but also the impact is not to be understated. It is… I think you’d struggle to find another role that exists that has this level of impact and leverage to really fundamentally change people’s lives. And you know you’ve done it maybe previously in life when you’ve had a previous direct report and they call you up and they’re like, hey, Doug, I just wanna let you know, I got that job. Thank you so much for coaching me. And you hadn’t worked with them for five years, but you answered a text from them or something like that. You feel good about that stuff. 

00:38:25 Casey: When you’re a fractional CMO and you build these teams, they come back to you, they wanna work with you again. You might bring them on a project in a couple of years. You have like a sense of community and respect and you’re really changing people’s lives. So to do this, you gotta differentiate yourself. That’s critical. There are twice as many fractional CMOs today as there were in 2022, probably more than twice. And anyone can call themselves a fractional whatever officer. And I see people do like… the thing that grinds me is when people say, I’m a fractional marketing leader. I don’t even know what that is. No one woke up and said, I want a marketing leader. They said, I want a CMO.

00:39:06 Casey: So anyone can do this. But at the end of the day, business owners want the best. Business owners come to us, they come to me, they come to my team and they say, hey, Casey, we’re looking to hire a fractional CMO. Do you know anyone? And we’re like, yeah, tell me about what you’re looking for. And then we grab some of our members as candidates and we say, hey, here’s some of the folks that we have. Every single time they say, I want the best. Who’s the best? Who’s the best one? And we might be able to say, well, we think that these three people are pretty equal. Like based on our experience, we think they’re pretty great. They’re like, okay, that’s great.

00:39:36 Casey: But no one says, I want the cheaper one or I want the person that will take longer but cost less money. They say, I want the person who’s the best and I’m willing to pay more for it. We recently had one of our members close a deal. The highest rate he’s ever charged. Plus he had an upside of taking a percentage of revenue attributed to marketing. He was higher priced than everyone else in straight cash compensation every month. Plus he had the upside and he won that deal because he’s the best. So a business owner knows like, if it takes me an extra month or two with someone cheaper, it’s the same cost as paying the higher priced person instead. So they move with the higher priced person. So you wanna be the best. You wanna elevate yourself to the number one position. 

00:40:20 Casey: So where do you find your first or next client? You might be thinking you wanna get one. Start with referrals. I know you’re like looking for like some genius insight but you gotta start with referrals. But the problem is that referrals can’t scale. So when you start with a referral, you just tell people what you’re up to and say, who do you know that I should talk to? It’s that simple. But you can’t scale that, right? You can’t have those conversations with the same person every week for the next two years. You can ask them once or twice, then you gotta cool off for a bit.

00:40:48 Casey: So there’s the people that you know and the people that you don’t know. When my business tanked at kind of the start of my fractional CMO journey, when I went up to 23,000 a month and I kind of lost most of it down to about 3000 a month, I didn’t have people I could call and say, hey, dude, remember when we used to work together? You wanna hire me again? That didn’t exist. I had to go out to strangers. The magic is being able to convert strangers. If you can convert strangers into paying customers, you’re going to win at life. It is magic. It is like literal magic. I can talk to someone who I’ve never spoken to before. I can build trust. I can showcase my expertise. I can get them to desire to work with me. I can have them ask me what it looks like for us to work together. I can share my fee.

00:41:34 Casey: They turn back to me and say, that makes sense. And then it’s up to them to be able to afford it or if now’s the right time. But like, if you can get there, and I’m not saying like, you’re gonna trick clients into paying you, none of that stuff. You give them clarity on what you’re doing, how you might be able to help them. You share your price. They say the magic words, that makes sense or I can understand that. It doesn’t matter if they can afford it or not, as long as they understand it. If they can’t afford it, then it’s just the wrong prospect. You’re never gonna sell them. They’re unsellable. 

00:42:06 Casey: So being able to convert people you don’t know is magic. And you can’t live in a world where you’re going to say, you know, Casey, I really just wanna be in a relationship where someone else finds business for me. Because you’re gonna have skinny kids. You’re gonna be stuck being anemic on business. You’re gonna have roller coasters where you make a lot of money one month and the next month you’re scraping by hardly able to, you know, pay for your base necessities like your rent or mortgage and your car payment and you know, your Netflix and all that stuff. Like it gets tight. 

00:42:37 Casey: You have to commit to being the person that builds a pipeline. You have to, like this is a requirement for you. And I guess it would be a different business model if all I did was like give people business. But obviously I wouldn’t be able to help you because I don’t know if I can find a gig for you. You gotta go understand your market and be the person and create an attraction so that people wanna work with you. That is the secret. That’s where you wanna be. My best CMOs, people are coming to them wanting to work with them. That’s where you wanna be. You don’t want them to come to me and then me pass them to you, right? You want them to come to you directly.

00:43:13 Casey: So the secret is not selling implementation. You wanna sell them marketing strategy and marketing leadership. So we can think of three things that we do in marketing. Strategy, leadership, implementation. Strategy, leadership, implementation. I do marketing strategy. I do marketing leadership. If I had to do just one of them, I would do marketing leadership. I can get strategy from other places. I can get strategy from a YouTube video. I can get strategy from a consultant. I can get strategy anywhere. But when it comes to building and leading the team, that’s on me. That’s what I sell. I don’t sell implementation.

00:43:48 Casey: I’m not rolling up my sleeves and building the website up for you. No way. The implementation work for me kind of stops at, I’ll write the job description. I’ll write the delegation filter, but I won’t do the labor. If you find yourself in this position, you don’t have to work the 40 hours a week. You can work 10 hours a week or less serving those clients at a high level because you’re providing strategy and leadership. And then you have a full department that the client pays for that does the implementation. 

00:44:15 Casey: This is an important note. I’ve seen a bastardization of the term fractional CMO. And what it looks like is folks that are like, they say, I’m a fractional CMO and I’m gonna charge the client 10 grand a month. And then I’m gonna go hire a copywriter and a website builder and a video editor. And I’m gonna pay them out of that 10 grand and whatever’s leftover I keep. It’s a terrible model for this. It’s just… it’s terrible. I see those people go upside down. Some months they owe money, despite having worked and orchestrated all this stuff. Like that is the wrong model. You can’t live that life.

00:44:51 Casey: If you’re a fractional CMO, you’re gonna charge a flat fee. Five grand, 7,500, 10 grand, 15 grand, 22,500. Whatever you wanna charge, whatever the market will bear, you’re gonna charge that as a fee. It comes to you every single month like clockwork. It just keeps coming and you show up and you provide strategy, leadership, strategy, leadership. And then the team does all the implementation. Very important you get that one right. You get that one wrong and like… I mean, that’s gonna constitute all the problems in your life. If you’re like subcontracting folks because you wanna make a [inaudible] of a thousand bucks here or 500 bucks there, don’t play that game. Go make big money. Don’t make small money. 

00:45:29 Casey: So above all, you gotta stop talking and you just gotta commit, you gotta focus and you gotta do so many reps, have so many conversations, stay in the game long enough that it becomes unreasonable to not be successful. If there’s something I see, it’s that people give up. It’s that comic of a guy with a pickaxe digging and he’s like an inch away from all the rubies and gold and he gives up. I see that time and time again. 

00:45:57 Casey: We just had a member just kind of like, I don’t know, make it. Had a client a year ago, was kind of struggling, had another client that was like getting paid a percentage of revenue, but they had no revenue, but it felt good because she had equity, right? It was just noise to now making big money every single month like clockwork, closing new clients, onboarding them like a champ. 

00:46:21 Casey: So let’s talk about how to build momentum in 2026. You gotta commit to a niche. Number one, commit to a niche. If you don’t commit to a niche, you’re not notable. You’re not known for anything. I’ll give you an example while I drink this pineapple juice. I live in an old house, 100 year old house. I’m in Philadelphia and we have radiators. Or as they call them out here, radiators. And I needed a new boiler. I had a tech come over a couple of years ago when we bought the house and they were like, eh, it looks kind of old. And then a tech came back and was like, you should probably get it done. And then not long ago, a tech came over. He was like, if it was my family, I wouldn’t feel safe. So I go, okay, fine, I’ll replace it.

00:47:07 Casey: So I look and who is going to do the replacement work for my boiler? Oh, I have like two major options. One option is any of the HVAC companies. I got vans driving all around my neighbor’s houses. I’ve seen these guys before. There’s so many different brands, franchises, whatever. I could go with those. Or I could go with a specific group who actually installed it. And it was the father who installed it. His brother built the manifold. The son came out because his father is now out of the business. And the son checked everything out and was like, I know my uncle’s work. He did it this way and this reason, all this stuff. And they laid out a quote. And their quote was more expensive than if I went with someone else.

00:47:52 Casey: But these guys knew it. They were the right people. They are 100% the right person because they are niched down into the type of steam boilers, the Dan Holahan style of steam boilers. Some nerdy stuff. But I could go with like the cheaper approach or I could get it done right. I’m really proud of us for getting it done right. We’ve got a beautiful setup. This has been a great winter. It’s been freezing cold. And the boiler’s like clockwork. That’s committing to a niche. I paid a premium to get what I believe to be a better product. Could another team have done the same thing? Yeah. Would they have been $10,000 cheaper? Yeah. But I still think I was right to make the decision I made. You have to commit to a niche.

00:48:37 Casey: If you’re not like that, then you’re just an anybody guy, anybody gal. Like you can solve any problems. How boring is that? I don’t know when to bring you in. I don’t know when you’re the right fit. When a company says, Casey, you got a CMO that’s really good at this? I’m like, I don’t know. I mean, I got this Becky, but she just does a lot of stuff. If you said I’m focused in this industry and I’m the master of this niche, you go to the conferences, you network with the people there, you really know the niche inside and out, you know tricks, that’s gonna make you more powerful.

00:49:08 Casey: I like the franchise space. Here’s something that a lot of people don’t know about franchise. The franchise disclosure document is not typically available. They kind of hide that. But the state of Wisconsin publicizes it. They actually publish all the FDDs on the Wisconsin Franchise Disclosure Document search site. So if a franchise exists in Wisconsin, I can get the FDD. If you didn’t follow what I said there, I have intel that I know because I’m in the space long enough to like know some of these tricks. You probably have tricks like that too. You know that if you work in healthcare, you can’t use Google Analytics because that’s not HIPAA compliant and you know to use Matomo or PIWEC or something. Like you have these tricks that make you more valuable. 

00:49:53 Casey: The second thing is you have to have this deep understanding of the niche. It’s critical. The deep understanding of the niche is like knowing how it works, knowing who the movers and shakers are, really becoming an expert here. Not treating this as like some flash in the pan weekend idea, but really something that you’re committed to. And then you gotta talk to strangers and there’s a way to do it. There’s a process to do it to make them wanna talk to you. But talking to strangers, building real relationships is critical. And then just making more offers. You gotta go out there and make offers. And the offers, you will get yeses at some point.

00:50:24 Casey: Sometimes the yeses will surprise you, sometimes the noes will surprise you. But your ability to make offers, share what you’re doing, give people the good news, give them the opportunity to ask more, ask about cost is how you get there. So if you’re not making offers because you’re hiding, you’re not gonna close anything. If you’re just dreaming about this, you’re not gonna win. If you haven’t commit to a niche and you’re saying, man, it’s just too hard for me to commit. You gotta commit. Commit for 90 days. That’s what we do for our CMOs. They come in, I work with them, I help them clarify a niche and really like the sub part of the niche that’s probably most valuable for them. And then they commit to it for a minimum of 90 days. 

00:51:00 Casey: And by and large, I just got a message from a member. He committed to a weird niche. iGaming? Like gambling, like online gambling. Totally new world for me. I knew nothing about it. He totally kind of educated me on that. It’s very, very interesting. And he put his head down and he just told me he’s got two clients paying him $12,000 a month. It’s killer. It took him a minute to get there, but it’s there, it’s sustainable, it’s real. And he’s built a moat around himself that makes it harder for other people to come and kind of close in on his business. He’s the guy. He’s got more reps than other people. And because he’s staying in the game, he’ll be more valuable. 

00:51:42 Casey: And remember, you’re still early. This is the best time to build your practice. Yeah, Q4 was great. Don’t get me wrong. We saw a lot of sales happen in Q4. Q1, also great. I love making sales all year long. I mean, you saw that first sale I made with Jason happened in July. It’s the middle of the summer. I was at my parents’ house in the basement on my laptop. And I was like, yeah, 7,500 sound good? And he’s like, cool, can you start on Monday? So people still hire you all year long, but right now is a great time. We’re seeing the 2026 budgets are defined and they’re getting rolled out. And they have money to spend. They wanna hire you. 

00:52:22 Casey: So if you wanna win, you gotta surround yourself with winners. This is the truism in life. If you wanna get better at chess, study with the greats. If you wanna get better at copywriting, study with the greats. If you wanna get great at being a freshman CMO, be there with people in the game. Here’s Mandy. Mandy’s stacked with deals right now. She’s based in Toronto. She’s working hard. I don’t wanna say that she’s not working hard. She’s working her butt off. She just said that her husband’s taking over all the finances in the family and she’s just working. And she’s gonna clear $40,000 this month, maybe 50,000. We’ll have to see. She’s got a deal or two that could close in the next couple of days that would push over 50,000. A month in collections. It’s a beautiful thing. 

00:53:01 Casey: We got Sean. Sean’s great. Sean’s got a number of kids. Sean’s been in the accelerator for about a year. And he made more money as a fractional CMO working half the time in 2025 than he did as a full-time employee in 2024. And he’s making a great income. Definitely a solid income. He’s making more money as a fractional CMO in half the time. He’s got all these kids too. So he gets to spend more time with them. He gets to be like a present dad, not someone who’s just like always on calls. That’s a big deal. 

00:53:35 Casey: If you’re at that inflection point in life where you want to spend more time with your family, it’s kind of like being a fractional CMO is probably it. You got Lisa. I love Lisa’s commitment. She’s really inspiring. She struggled to get her first client and then she landed it. And she and I had a one-on-one. And she goes, you know what, Casey? I’m never going back. I’m never going back to corporate. I’m just never going back. One deal was more than 50% of her top earning year. She closes two clients. She succeeded her top earnings and she’s not driving to the office and getting dressed up. She doesn’t have to spend time flying around and doing stuff. She works from home and she has this great lifestyle. And that’s possible for you. That’s what I’m excited about.

00:54:22 Casey: But you got to start early. I think it’s going to be hard when that market really starts maturing. If you’re late and you’re not an early adopter, like right now where we are. The longer you wait, the more competition there’s going to be and the harder it is going to be to be able to break in. But right now, it’s just like, it’s the moon in the 40s. Someone was like, we should put a flag on that moon. You can go do that. You can go declare that an industry or a niche is yours and then you go prove it by being the best, working the hardest, really understanding the market. And you can build something lasting. 

00:54:53 Casey: What I mean by lasting is you can build something that pays you well or if you want, you can bring another Fractional CMO to work underneath you and you can just go win the business then the Fractional CMO serve underneath you. That’s fun. We’ve got a member right now. She just left her full-time job. I actually talked to her and her husband and we had like just a real honest conversation. She’s like, I’m thinking about leaving my job. I got to talk to the two of them and kind of have the conversation around what would it look like if she left her full-time job? You know, who’s paying for health insurance? She shares that she’s pregnant and we talk about this whole process and she’s building herself to a place where she can be present with her kid at home instead of being strapped to her desk for 40, 50 hours hours on the client. So I think that that’s a pretty big deal to be able to have that level of freedom.

00:55:42 Casey: Also for the members inside the Accelerator, I keep fighting for them. I fight for you. So I’ve been closing larger and larger clients with longer term commitments and I get a cut of the upside at exit. That’s the game I’m playing. I’m like, pay me every month, but really pay me at exit. And that’s where I wanna make just really big outcomes for me and my family. As a result, I think I continue to win the biggest rates of anyone else in the market. I’m just at the top and you get to see what that’s like. 

00:56:16 Casey: It’s funny, a year – sorry, two years ago – no, a year ago, a year ago, I wrote my second book, Find Your CMO. And when I wrote that, I launched it in like November of 2024. I had spent that year kind of thinking like, what do I do with the AI stuff? Do I leave fractional CMO? Is this thing for me? Is it not? And I kind of backed off of client work. And after I finished that book, I was like, damn, I’m so like excited about this. I went and won a client. That client I’m sticking with for two years with a contractual exit at the end of this year with a big payday, awesome. Won another client, long-term commitment, high rates. And then won a third client just recently, a couple months ago. And we’re gonna stick around together for three years with a big exit there.

00:57:01 Casey: I share what I’m doing. I share the results that I have. We’re all very like open and honest about everything inside of the Accelerator and specifically Boardroom. These are for the folks doing $10,000 a month or more. They’re in a WhatsApp chat and the WhatsApp’s on fire. We’ve got jokes, we’re having fun. We’ve got people going through different things in their life. Divorces, cancer, like all sorts of stuff. It’s like, it’s a real group of people, but we’re all in the same game. We’re all fighting for the same thing and we’re sharing what’s working. 

00:57:33 Casey: Someone’s like, oh, I just shot out this message on LinkedIn that worked. They share it, everyone else can try it. We’re always sharing new techniques and things like that. I think it’s awesome. There’s no place quite like the CMOx Boardroom. I mean, to the point where like it’s 11:30 at night and people are chatting or it’s Sunday morning and people are chatting. You know, everyone’s just staying active. 

00:57:52 Casey: So I want you to see that I’m not a guru on a mountain. I’m just a guy in the trenches, breaching past the walls and giving you the map to get to my level faster without the scars. It took me a long time to get here. I think I started in 2017, that’s nine years ago. It’s like eight years ago. It’s taken me a while to get here. I’m seeing our members speed run here in a lot faster time and get to $40,000 a month. The number for me that I want them to hit is like $42,000 a month. That gets them right at a half million dollars a year. I think that’s an awesome place to be.

00:58:25 Casey: So do you want my help in building and scaling your fractional CMO practice? If you do, I’d love to tell you how. Here’s some folks, you know, here’s a member. She got a $16,000 a month engaged client. Another one got a $10,000 a month client in real estate SaaS. Here’s another member, she bought… she’s like, I want a badass truck and I want a badass Airstream and I wanna drive around the country. And she did it. And she like bought it and she took off and worked remote from the road. I mean, it’s awesome. That’s a level of freedom. 

00:58:59 Casey: Daphne says you have the potential to get your return on investment just with one or two clients. Sam’s an accomplished business owner. He had Grooveshark and he found that after that business kind of went under, this was… it was a big music business. It was gonna be Spotify. Spotify kind of took over. You could look up Grooveshark, but Sam’s a killer entrepreneur. And he said like, he kind of lost his why. And by joining the Accelerator, he kind of learned who he was again, found problems he’d love to solve and he stuck with it and he’s doing great.

00:59:29 Casey: Becky, Becky started off at low monthly rates. Her rates were incredibly low. I think her first rate that she charged a client was below 2000. It took her a little while, but she got that to 2000, 4000, 6000 and above and made more money as a fractional CMO than she ever did in her corporate role. So she started at a different place, right? And she worked her way up.

00:59:53 Casey: So the question to you is what’s one client worth to you? If you’ve got a client that you’re working with, what we call the advisor role, where you’re working with them every other week, you meet for 90 minutes, maybe you charge four grand for that. That one client is worth $48,000 per year for you. It’s a lot of money. Or you could spend more time with the client, like 10 hours a week, and maybe you’re charging 15 grand a month for that. And that’s gonna be $180,000 a year. And these are real numbers. These are real numbers that people are doing. I don’t know if you’ll do them, but they are real numbers that members are closing at. 15,000 is less common. I would say like 12,000 is more common, 10,000 certainly. But the 4,000 for advisor, absolutely all day long.

01:00:39 Casey: So if you think about the money that you could make, we’ve got five seats left to join us inside the CMOx Accelerator in February. We’re limiting the seats. We’ve got some really great folks in. We just onboarded some real killers, people who have deep experience, like Fortune 500 experience, but we also have like ragtag marketers who have just been in the game for years. I can think of one of our members who’s in the community banking space. And he held some titles in the community banking space, but like was never like the VP of the big bank.

01:01:13 Casey: Yet he got it. He understands what to do and he’s had a lot of wins and he’s able to go serve clients and deliver really good outcomes to them. And instead of them paying full-time for him, they pay for him fractionally and he has a great lifestyle. It makes a lot of the money. The math with it is like, if you’re full-time, let’s say a hundred grand a year, my fractional rate would be a quarter of the hours for half the money. So if I was a hundred grand a year, I’m gonna charge you 50 grand for 10 hours. That’s like basic math, I think. That way you can make the same amount of money in half the time, or you can make twice the amount of money and then push it up from there. 

01:01:50 Casey: So I wanna invite you, if you think you have what it takes to be a CMOx member, if you wanna be in, if you wanna be the kind of person who like… works hard, don’t get me wrong, is courageous and goes out and talks to strangers, but follows a process and wins clients and serves the clients and has fun and like delivers great outcomes for their clients and then makes a great lifestyle and gets to interact with other great people that are doing the same stuff. If you wanna be in that group, we’d love to talk to you and see if we can help you. You can go to cmox.com/call and book in with Justin on my team. Justin will ask you a couple of questions. 

01:02:23 Casey: I also have John here. John on my team. John’s been with me for a while. How long have we been hanging out, John? It’s been a minute. Can you come off mute? 

01:02:32 J: It’s been since January, 2020.

01:02:35 Casey: Yeah. The reason I brought John in is because he makes me sound smarter because he’s British. And John would be happy to answer any questions anyone has. If anyone wants to chat with John, he can go to a one-on-one with you right now and just hop over to a breakout room. We can do breakout rooms in Zoom. So if anyone wants to break out with John and just say, like, I’ve got some questions, John. Like, what is this thing with Casey? Is it for me? I don’t know. Just say, hey, John, in the chat and he’ll yank you into a breakout room. We can sit a couple of people in at a time and you guys can chat with him directly. This is great if someone’s like kind of on the fence, like, oh, should I schedule a call or not? Do that. But really, there’s no pressure for the call. It’s like 15 minutes. We just ask you some questions. And if things sound good, then you can book a call with John afterwards. 

01:03:19 Casey: My whole vibe here is like, I don’t wanna pressure anyone into doing something that they don’t want, but I wanna say that now is the right time. And I can’t think of a way that I can make more money, have more fun and have a bigger impact than being a fractional CMO. I mean, I make more money as a fractional CMO than I do running CMOx. I run CMOx because I love it. My dad would teach at the community college. I love teaching at Tulane. I do it for the love of sharing what’s working and having fun, but really I’m in it with my clients too. And that’s where I make my money. So cool, Chris, yeah. Michael will send Chris in with John. And anyone else just book that call in right now. Just go ahead and go to cmox.co/call or cmox.com slash call. You can just book in a time. Whoa, okay. I see how that’s working. All right, cool. So I’d love to answer any questions that y’all have. I’m here to hang out too. I got some time on my calendar for dinner with the kids. 

01:04:15 Michael: All right, well, Casey, we got a few lined up in the queue. And again, if you wanna meet with John, just drop in the chat, John and I’ll move you into that breakout. All right, so let me start. I see, David, you have your hand raised. Let me get a few that we have. Alicia asks, the team for implementation, internal or is it a client’s team? 

01:04:40 Casey: It’s a client’s team that you build. That’s it. It’s a client’s team that you build. Are you on video, Alicia? Can I see your face? I don’t know. 

01:04:51 Michael: I know she is. 

01:04:52 Casey: Okay, great. Okay, sweet. Yeah, so it’s the client’s team. That’s one of the things, like you start working with a client and, I’ll give you an example. So I started working with a client in November, like October, October, November. And I pulled in some Upworkers. So I went on upwork.com and I found some people to do some immediate work. And they did a fine job, but they’re not my long-term talent. We’re gonna hire a marketing technician. The marketing technician is preferably a full-time role. So that person’s gonna work 40 hours a week. I don’t care where they live. If the client needs, sometimes you want them in office.

01:05:28 Casey: So here’s an example. I worked with a dental service organization. We bought dental practices in the Northeast from like Vermont, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey. So we wanted someone that could actually drive around and kind of do… to yell at the ladies at the front desk. It’s like really what they… I would need someone to show up and be like, hey, Alicia, I need you to answer the phone. I’m gonna spend all day here with you to make sure you answer the phone right. So we needed a marketing tech for that. That was a little different. 

01:05:55 Casey: I work in the franchise space and our franchises are across the country. I can’t have a marketing technician that can get to every franchise. So my marketing techs are location independent. I’ve worked with one woman for a year and she lives an hour away from me. I don’t know if I’ll ever meet her because we’ll sell the company before I’d ever meet her face-to-face. But we talk every other week. So it doesn’t matter to me where they live, but the client pays for them exclusively.

01:06:18 Casey: And my preference is not to hire people through headhunters, especially if they’re offshore. So there’s great places that you can like onlinejobs.ph if you wanna find a Filipino, there’s great Filipinos for hire there. But if you start going through headhunters, they might charge you two grand a month and pay the headhunter $300 a month. Sorry, pay the laborer $300 a month. And when a laborer is making 300 bucks a month to work full time, life’s tough for them. So I like to go direct to the source. A lot of people are available. Upwork remains my favorite place. I can find talent on Upwork in a minute. Good talent. I just hired a guy for a project. He’s in Pakistan.

01:07:07 Casey: And also there’s something maybe a little political too. If you’re the kind of person who wants to support certain countries because the US is in a conflict with them or whatever, you can hire those people. Like what a cool thing to be able to do. I hired a guy in Ukraine who was just great. And when I went to go hire, I said I’d hire anywhere, but if you’re a Ukrainian, I’ll look at you first. And he’s awesome. And it just feels different, right? To be able to help those kinds of people. Does that answer the question? Great, okay, awesome.

01:07:37 Michael: Casey, let me ask another because I think it’s a common one and then you can do the raised hands and then come back to me. These are from two, Heather Dawson and Kristin Howland about niche. So any tips for finding like large, growing, underserved niches? And what do you mean by niche? Are you talking industry or like marketing role, like product marketers, market researchers, et cetera?

01:08:01 Casey: Okay, great. Kristen, do you wanna just come off mute? What’s your experience? Like where do you wanna be? 

01:08:06 Kristin: Yeah, sure. So I have been a product marketer for a really long time. I have a little bit of imposter syndrome that I’m not certain that I am CMO material. I have a director title. I have three people that work for me. So I’m getting there in terms of P&L and revenue and managing the entire business unit. But I have a history of being a product marketer. So that could be my niche. I’ve been in ed tech for a long time, but I have a real, like to your point about, one of your people already is like in the health and wellness for women. I would love to be there, but I’m not sure that I’m ready. So again, back to my question. Thank you, Michael, for verbalizing it. But is it the industry or is it the specialty of what we are good at? 

01:08:52 Casey: I don’t want you to change it once you choose it. And I want you to choose something that you wanna be in. I struggle to be honest with you to find an industry that I wanna be in. Let me clear my throat. I like a lot of stuff. There’s not an industry that I don’t find interesting. I’m just like one of those people that’s just like curious and that’s fun and like, yeah, whatever. You wanna talk about data lakes or women’s health or whatever. Sure, I find all of that stuff interesting. What I found is that I wanna be in a place… I found franchise, I think it’s interesting and I could tell you why, but there’s just some things about it that make it cool for me.

01:09:30 Casey: The big one is like, they need me before they can pay for me and therefore I can defer some of my costs and I can make more money at the exit and PE wants to buy franchises. It’s a cool place for that reason. So for that, and I have some early successes with that, easy for me to get in. I know people in the space. I like a sales team, franchise development has like a human to human sales team. I like these components of it. So that’s why I like it. But I could like other stuff too. 

01:09:59 Casey: The thing that you have to choose is something that you just wanna do. And if you don’t care, you still have to choose. So you could find these things that you slice and dice and say like, well, you know what I really wanna do is like, I want women’s health, but I also want this other thing. But like women’s health is growing because like, but all medical experiments have been… all medical experiments have been traditionally performed on men. And now as we like perform them on women, we can like understand how the women’s body works. Maybe that’s interesting for you and you wanna be there and that’s a good enough reason for you. I would say by and large, every industry would work. The only industry that I would- 

01:10:31 Kristin: The industry but not role, per se?

01:10:33 Casey: Yeah, the only industry that I would say don’t get into, I would tell you right now, don’t get into cybersecurity. We’ve never had anyone successful in cybersecurity. I don’t know why. I think that cybersecurity folks, if I had to guess, think that their product matters and that’s it. If we have a good product that everyone wants it. Because CIOs are maybe a more informed buyer and they don’t get swayed by marketing. I don’t know, I don’t know. But that’s a hard one. That’s probably the only one that I would say consistently has been a poor performer. But everyone else is like one clients in their weird niches. I had a woman in trucking. I used to say, don’t get into trucking because trucking is going away.

01:11:10 Casey: She married a guy who runs a trucking logistics company and took over the marketing and then took over marketing for other kind of competitors out of state and does very well for herself. So three to five clients is all you need. Just choose something that you can get depth in.

01:11:27 Kristin: Thank you so much, Casey. I appreciate it.

01:11:28 Casey: Yeah, where would you go? 

01:11:32 Kristin: It’s women’s health, or just health tech, actually. Let me be more specific.

01:11:38 Casey: Yeah, go to women’s health, it’s way better. Health tech is like whoop bands. 

01:11:42 Kristin: It is whoop bands.

01:11:44 Casey: Yeah. I think, I mean, I think it’s interesting. There’s a cool repo on GitHub called wearipedia. Check it out, super cool. Look at the companies that are using that because that’s like the open source platforms for aggregating all the data for scientific experiments from like whoop bands, Apple stuff, all that. It’s called wearipedia. I mean, I find that stuff super interesting, right? You like get into it, kind of absorb yourself in it. If it’s general health, that’s cool. If it’s women’s health, I think that’s cool too. I think a woman, like a female CEO who’s running a women’s health, let’s say like trying to conceive product, talks to you and me, who do you think has the upper hand? 

01:12:27 Kristin: Ooh, ooh, pick me, pick me.

01:12:29 Casey: Right, so you could use that. We have a woman in the accelerator who’s Jewish and she is like Israeli and like, I mean, very culturally Israeli. She’s like, I want to work with Israeli founders. Cool, I can’t. Like, I’m just another guy, but she’s like one of them, you know? So it works for her. Yeah, I would try to choose things based on where you want to be. And then also if you’re stuck, choose the one that maybe you kind of naturally fit into.

01:12:59 Kristin: Excellent, thank you very much, Casey. I appreciate you.

01:13:02 Casey: Yeah, I hope you get into women’s health and help them with something. That’d be great. I just like think like how many more people you could help. It’s so cool. All right. So I think of niches, what do I think of as a niche? I think of a niche as can I find a total addressable market? Can I pull a list of business owners? Can I find a database of businesses in that market that are spending on marketing? If I can, then that’s a niche. If you told me your niche is that, like, I help busy parents, like, I don’t know about that one. Like, that’s kind of too wide. But like, I help HVAC companies that have at least three trucks. That’s clear. That’s a good one. All right, David, you got anything you want to talk about? Let’s see, Michael.

01:13:48 David: Thank you very much. And actually, I read your book, Casey. It’s exciting. I loved it. The question I have is probably about agencies. Do you see agencies working in your community and how you find that working within your infrastructure?

01:14:07 Casey: Yeah, I would tell you about that one.

01:14:08 David: Do you think financial sector is a good sector for that?

01:14:11 Casey: Financial? Okay, yeah. Great. Financial, how? Like what?

01:14:15 David: Like fintechs or community banks.

01:14:19 Casey: Yep. Great. Yeah. Okay. So start at the bottom. Work my way to the top. Community banks? Yeah, great. I think that’s great. I’ve got members that have definitely had success there. I was surprised, to be honest with you. I thought they would be more cashed up, but they’re not. They definitely are capitalized, but they don’t want a full-time CMO on staff. So for them, project… like a three-month start, and then seeing like how well you can work, and then locking them in for the next two years. I think that’s a very realistic thing to do.

01:14:49 Casey: It’s not project-based work. It’s more like it’s just a three-month term to get started with a renewal in it, and it gives them a sense of like an out if they need it. So yeah, I think those are great markets. I think financial advisors is an okay market too. I think it’s a different market than it used to be. Financial advisors used to be a lot bigger. I think there’s more like self-management of money today. So if I chose between the two, I’d say fintech is cool. And community banks are cool. 

01:15:21 Casey: Your other question is around agencies. So we’ve got a member, Dawn. She had a client in her agency, and she did agency work, like PPC. And then she joined the accelerator, and I was like, can you sell them fractional CMO work? She’s like, yeah. So she did. So she got paid two ways. One was just for her brain, and the other one was for her team’s labor, where she makes her arbitrage. Great. And then I was just having fun with her one day, and we were just like proposing some ideas. I was like, why don’t you offer to take over more responsibility for the guy? Don’t charge anything, and then get him to sell the business in like two years. 

01:15:58 Casey: So it took her a while. Six months. She was on my podcast and shared this, so I don’t feel like I’m sharing out a turn. She locked in with a client to make a major percentage of the revenue on exit. And it’s going to be a big exit. She was able to do that because she was the trusted agency owner, and now the fractional CMO, and now she opens herself up to take on more risk. The difference here, David, is that she took on this additional risk without compensation. She’s like, I will do this work for free for two years, contractually we must sell the company at this point, and then I get this percentage of all proceeds.

01:16:40 Casey: So do I think it works for an agency owner? Yes. And I really think, David, that the smart agency owner is looking for ways to bring an additional revenue right now. And one of the ways you do that is depth. An agency owner right now, or an agency, isn’t incentivized to get the company to comply. So let’s say, what kind of agency do you have? Do you have like a PPC agency or what?

01:17:03 David: I don’t have any.

01:17:04 Casey: Oh, you don’t have one. Okay. So like a PPC agency is like, their job is to get the leads. And if those leads aren’t called, the PPC agency gets blamed. But really, it’s the sales team. But the PPC agency doesn’t have someone inside the company to actually generate change. They just bitch to the CEO. And then the CEO, like, what do they do? So the flip of that is, become the fractional CMO, be embedded in the company, and then say, I’m going to join the sales meetings, they’re going to know, like, and trust me, and then I’m going to spot check them on calling the leads. You’re getting paid for that work. It’s very important work. But then finally, the agency can get what they’re kind of owed, which is, you know, generating sales.

01:17:45 David: Thank you. That’s great.

01:17:47 Casey: Yeah. Yeah, I think it’s, I think being an agency is great. I’ll tell you, I… there’s a type of person that wants to have an agency. The agencies of old, like back when I worked at the agency, that agency owner, he would go on like month-long motorcycle trips through the country of Georgia, just like lived a great lifestyle. We all worked diligently. It was great for him. It’s just gone now. I don’t think that the lifestyle is quite the same, unless… I mean, even media buyers, they’re losing their, I don’t know, their edge, you know, what is media buying today? It’s good creative. So I think the agency model is hurting. I think there’s still good ways to be profitable, but it’s not the same. 

01:18:27 Casey: All right. I’ve got Brooks up next. Brooks, you available? 

01:18:31 Brooks: Hey. Hey, Casey. How are you? First of all, I really love the presentation. They added a lot of healthy perspective because there’s a lot of things that I’ve seen change in the past year because of AI. And so it’s good to see where the fractional piece fits in nowadays. My background, I’ve been self-employed for eight years running a business. It’s basically been a freelance business. So I come in, I do the strategy, I do the implementation, but I’ve always been involved in the execution. It’s strategy plus execution. And I would love to go more towards just the strategy side. That being said, I’ve worked almost exclusively with smaller businesses.

01:19:14 Brooks: So anywhere from like 50 to 200,000 a month, sometimes even starting from scratch. So they typically don’t have a marketing department. If I were to exclusively focus on being a fractional CMO and just do strategy, even though I have some fantastic case studies, how would that be relevant to a, I guess, going up market where they would already have the marketing team?

01:19:45 Casey: I don’t understand the last part of the question. 

01:19:48 Brooks: Yeah. So those clients that I’ve worked with in the past don’t have a marketing team. So I wouldn’t be able to come in and not do the execution. So I’d have to go up market to a bigger business that already has a marketing team. 

01:20:01 Casey: Or kind of, not true. So yes, but also a company that is ready to build out a marketing function. So example, I’m talking to a guy. This guy’s kind of a juggernaut in my space and in the franchise space. And I want to work with him. I want to understand how they work, right? So I want this gig for the insights more than anything. And he said to me, we’ve never done marketing before. We don’t know if we’re going to do it yet. So in December we were talking, he’s like, I’ll let you know in January if we’re going to go on marketing or if we’re going to delay and maybe do that in Q3.

01:20:38 Casey: So I heard from him, he’s like, we’re going to focus on some of this other stuff. And like, maybe it’s right. He’s got to work on his product and stuff like that. Like that’s where he’s focusing. But then come Q3, he’s saying, all right, if we go hard on marketing, we’re going to go hard on marketing. I want Casey and I want you to staff the team out and I want you to build something real. So they started nothing with a commitment. That is a big difference that you have to look out for. 

01:21:01 Casey: I talked to a company that was in ambulatory helicopter transportation. Your mom’s in Costa Rica, she breaks her leg and you’re like, you’re not going to a Costa Rican doctor. I’m getting you to Miami. You fly in a helicopter, picks her up, takes her to the hospital. That’s what these guys do. They’ve always been kind of like B2B, like direct sales, the hospital groups, and they never had marketing. So they want to open up a whole marketing front and it’s like, are they going to go hard and put a million dollars out for me to go spend on marketing in the next year or not? So that is a difference. 

01:21:39 Casey: And sometimes they do have a marketing department. I worked at a company that had 12… when I started, maybe six people in the marketing department and there’s a marketing director and they hired me over him despite him being super smart. But they hired me because they wanted a CMO level. So you can kind of join at different angles and different levels. They either have to be serious about building a marketing team or have a marketing team. It’s one or the other, or they’re spending money on agencies and they’re like, agencies are taking a 30 to 40% profit. What if we just kept that to us and hired Brooks and then we’d get better outcomes from Brooks instead of giving it to the agencies?

01:22:15 Brooks: Yeah, I guess that’s where my conflict is because I really resonate with what you’re saying about you being the go-to person in a niche, right? If I’m going to go to a market that has a marketing team, which isn’t really business that I’ve worked with before, how do I be that go-to person? I mean, obviously I’ve been in the trenches and done the work, so that helps. But to position myself as the CMO level… 

01:22:44 Casey: So you’re going to work, let’s just be honest, you’re not the right guy yet. So that means that you’re likely going to get signed by someone who is less perceptive. It’s going to be an entrepreneur that doesn’t really understand marketing. They’re going to trust you on a vibe that you’re going to figure it out. They like you, you hold yourself well, they think you’re confident, cool, they’re going to hire that guy, not the guy who has the pedigree. That’s fine though.

01:23:13 Casey: When you have more pedigree, it builds up your natural confidence, but you come across strong. So it’s rare… that I give someone a full breakdown of all of my wins in the past. It’s more that I review the wins that I have to bolster my self-confidence so I present myself well. Does that make sense? 

01:23:36 David: Yeah, totally. 

01:23:37 Casey: So you’re not precluded from winning a big client. So I’m thinking about this client that I won. I worked with them, they’re called First National Realty Partners, Red Bank, New Jersey. Great, great guys, real company, dude. We like bought grocery anchored commercial real estate. So we would identify Wegmans or a Publix or a Piggly Wiggly and all the out parcels and we’d buy the dirt and we’d go raise funds for it. I never knew any of this stuff, dude. They came to me as a guy who has never once before ever heard of a K2. I never heard of an accredited investor. I didn’t know any of this stuff and I didn’t have ChatGPT. This was, I like… when I left the company, I wrote my goodbye letter with this brand new tool called ChatGPT. Like, that’s how, you know, it was a couple years ago, this was like 2020.

01:24:23 Casey: And I was the wrong guy, but they trusted me and I kept showing up and kept working and they kept working with me. We were together for two years until the money dried up because it was COVID money. We were using that low interest rate money to buy a bunch of stuff. So deal flow slowed down and I moved on. But I was the wrong guy. It’s just that like I positioned myself and I was hungry and I showed up and I learned and you know, I got their books and I read it and all that stuff. So you can do it, dude. Like there’s nothing precluding you from being the guy. There’s no magic like finish line that you have to cross for you to be awarded the medal for you to be able to charge $10,000 a month to be a fractional CMO.

01:25:04 Casey: All you have to do is be the guy who’s going to be worth it. If you can’t lead because you’ve never led before and you’re not learning and you don’t have a community of people supporting you and figuring it out and you make missteps, you’ll lose the client. And over time you’ll lose enough clients to be good. Like that’s a way to do it too. You know, I was just at a training for our members yesterday on like, why you’re the best person. The training was called articulating why you’re the best. And one of the most, I think salient points is you’re in front of them right now. 

01:25:37 Casey: Like I’m in front of you right now. Like what’s your other option? You know, like are you in or not? Like it’s fine if it’s a no, but if it’s a yes, it’s easy for everyone and I can start tomorrow. So yeah, I just would close that gap, have the conversations with people, have a sense of like confidence, price yourself accordingly. Just for fun, dude, you should go to a luxury jewelry store and try something on that you like, like a nice watch and then ask them for a discount and just watch how they handle you. They’re like, we don’t give discounts, dude. You know, if you want a discount, go to the Timex store. It’s like… and then you take that and like you embody that kind of vibe. People appreciate that. This is my fee. Do you want to work with me? This is what I cost. That’s it. It’s cool if you don’t want to work with me. If you want to work with me and can’t afford it, that’s cool too. If you want to work with me and you can’t afford it, I can start on Monday.

01:26:27 Brooks: Yeah. Yeah. No, I think makes total sense. I’ve charged 30K a month with plenty of my engagements because it’s based on performance. But yeah, it’s just a new pivot going towards charging that out of the gate and them trusting me. Yeah, that’s a good point. I appreciate it.

01:26:43 Casey: Yeah. I mean, if you’re performance like that, I think you would want some kind of upside if you can deliver those kinds of results, if you work with those kinds of companies. A lot of companies can’t do that because they have long sales cycles or they’re doing product launches or whatever. It’s just different. But if you’re working with something more transactional where you can get a cut, I would do it. Do a base fee. It’s a fractional CMO. You build and lead the team. They do all the execution. To your level. Yeah.

01:27:14 Brooks: That’s really good. Appreciate it. 

01:27:15 Casey: Yeah, man. Absolutely. Yeah. I’m excited. It feels like you got it. It feels like you could do well. 

01:27:22 Brooks: Yep. Yeah.

01:27:23 Casey: Emily, what’s up? 

01:27:24 Emily: Hello. Hello. Hi. So I am kind of getting my feet wet with fractional CMO work. I have up until now owned a web design agency, thrown in some other marketing pieces into that for the last six years. And the thing that people say about me is that the genius happens when I’m sitting across from the person and kind of excavating from them their goals and creating a framework almost. So I’ve been, in a sense, operating in some levels of advisory for years. And I’ve just kind of thrown it into all the packages that I’ve done when myself or my team is building a website. To future proof… 

01:28:04 Casey: So you kind of gave away the marketing strategies. You did all the stuff. 

01:28:06 Emily: Yes, sir. Yeah.

01:28:09 Casey: Which makes sense. Because you had to prove yourself. You had to invent the universe first in order for there to be a website. 

01:28:15 Emily: Exactly. And I’ve always just like, I’ll just kind of get my feet wet with all these different things. I’ll just kind of test this out. Do I like it? All right, I’m going to go harder on that. Oh, I didn’t like that. I’m going to not go anywhere near paid ads. I don’t want to deal with that myself. I’ll hire people to do that. But with fractional CMO, now that I’m more… Like I formalized it a little bit, but I’m kind of… It’s a mess. The client that I have right now, it’s a mess. But I know even without this being a mess, I know this is the direction I want to go long term. 

01:28:51 Emily: The mess that I’m in right now is that I came in as a consultant at first. I fixed their Shopify site. Then they were like, oh, we like you a lot. Stick around. Can you help with all this? And I’m like, yeah, I can. And so I did. And then I kind of got closer to how they worked operationally. And I said, there’s a lot more that needs to be done here, kind of under the hood. We need to fix a lot of things. And there’s a lot of opportunity that is untapped that you’re not doing because they built their whole company. 

01:29:23 Emily: It’s a cafe franchisor. And they’re also doing retail nationally. And so they built it, kind of bootstrapped it, and just like with available people. Well, those available people are now people that I’m working with. And that’s the team that you’re talking about. So what do you do when you get into your fractional CMO role, and the team that they have under their wing is a whole cluster? [inaudible] And then I think it’s potentially on the table, but I don’t even know. I might not be the right fit for this company. They might just not be ready to work with somebody like at this level yet. 

01:30:11 Emily: Right now, I quoted them like six grand a month. And then he pushed back. And he’s like, well, let’s start at four. So we started at four. And now I’m spending way too many hours on it. So the getting your feet wet and kind of messy start is kind of how I’ve done this. And so now I want to either pull out of it. But really, I want to just kind of create some structures so that I can move forward healthily. And I don’t know, like the team, it’s their team. So I don’t want to go in there as the odd one. I’m not even in their circle. And I’m going in there. I’m like, you need to fire the people that you’ve been working with for 10 years.

01:30:55 Emily: So it’s capacity for these folks. And it’s just kind of like… their value systems. And they’re just not good enough to do the job that needs to be done to get them where they need to go.

01:31:10 Casey: Here’s what I would do, I would build a skunk works. Do you know that term from Boeing?

01:31:15 Emily: I don’t. 

01:31:16 Casey: Okay. Have you ever heard of the SR-71 Blackbird? It’s like this wild looking stealth fighter that we have in the US. It’s like one of it’s like our first stealth. It’s goofy. It’s the kind of thing like, if you look at every airplane, David, you know this, right? If you look at like every airplane built before, they look like a normal airplane, and they look at the SR-71 Blackbird, and you’re like, what, like, this is like a hallucination of a bird, right? It’s just wild looking.

01:31:42 Casey: So Boeing set their engineers and they said, Hey, couple of you, you guys are going to this building. Not telling anyone what you’re doing. We’re gonna give you a limited budget, we’re gonna give you an unbelievably tight timeline. And you guys are going to create the first generation of stealthy aircraft. And these people were like, okay, and they did it. And it’s called the skunk works. And it’s this idea that like a ragtag group of people work together to make an unbelievable outcome happen. And it’s a mental model for you. 

01:32:16 Casey: It’s like, it’s a skunk works, you’re going to assemble a skunk works, and you’re gonna take a project, and you’re going to go assemble your little dream team from Upwork or wherever. And it’s going to be a project based thing. And you’re going to go show that you can bring a team that cooks better than the chefs that have been there. And you’re gonna do it for one project. And you say, Hey, we don’t have capacity for this. Give me the budget. Let me do this. Here’s my thought. Two things happen. One, it’s done faster. [crosstalk]

01:32:46 Casey: Yeah, that’s what I would do. I would just skunk works it. And then when you bring that level of like, action, these business owners are like, hell yeah, Emily. Like you’re the one. If you’re noticing these people are slow, they probably notice these people are slow. 

01:33:05 Emily: Yeah. I mean, it’s ultimately when I came into them, came into the work with them. I said… I sat there. I didn’t even know they had invited the entire executive team to come meet with me. I didn’t know that. And so I get in there and I’m listening to them talk as well. I’m listening to them talk, I’m drawing an org chart on a napkin and I turn around and I’m like, this is where you are right now. Like totally flat organization. One guy in charge, direct line to every single person. I’m like, this is all flat. You’re never going to scale to the next level unless you make it vertical. And I flipped it to the other side. And I was like, here, you need mid level management. He needs to be out of interaction with all these people. And then he kind of won’t do it. So it’s also a… The target is always changing with the guy in charge. He’s like, we should work on this. I want you to work on retail right now. It’s all about the retail side. And it’s like, oh, wait, no. Now it’s all about just getting [crosstalk]. 

01:34:04 Casey: So you lock into quarters. This quarter, this is what we’re doing. And if I do this by the end of the quarter, are you satisfied? And they say yes. And you say, cool, let me cook. And then they say, hey, Emily, it’s Feb 1. Let’s change your whole process. You say, okay, we formally declared this as the quarter. I can do it, but it comes at these costs. You call the shots because you’re the CEO. What are we doing? And they’re like, all right, when can I bring this up? You’re like, mid-March, but I’ll note it and I’ll bring it up to you. They’re like, okay, cool. 

01:34:30 Casey: That’s the process you got to go through that helps these entrepreneurs that are ADHD, that are just kind of crazy. Just settle down. They need to know that they’re being handled well. And you can do that by creating some partners. So I think the opportunity is in front of you. I never take off the table firing everyone. I don’t want to fire everyone. But if there’s a level of like, can’t teach an old dog new tricks, the person is just so stuck in their ways. You got to let them go. There’s also, you know, does it hurt or scare people? Does it scare the team? You know, is that bad? But I just fired someone recently on a project. Just didn’t do well. And we had to walk her out. And it sucks.

01:35:11 Casey: And I wish her well, but she was the wrong person for what we needed. And we’re going to keep going. And we’re going to hire someone who has more capacity and they’re going to do it. And Emily, one thing that I think no one talks about is sometimes we have people that work for us that aren’t smart. And it sounds really mean, right? But if you think that- 

01:35:29 Emily: No, it’s very true.

01:35:30 Casey: Intelligence is a bell curve. Some people are below the 50% margin. And you know who they are. And it takes a minute sometimes to figure it out. I want to work with smart, capable, hungry people. And sometimes I work with hungry, dumb, incapable people, and I got to shuffle them out. 

01:35:35 Emily: This is music to my soul, everyone. 

01:35:49 Casey: Yeah. Good. 

01:35:51 Emily: Hungry, dumb, incapable people. I appreciate that very much. Thank you. 

01:35:54 Casey: Yeah. You’re welcome. Yeah. Good luck with it. 

01:35:56 Emily: Thank you.

01:35:57 Casey: Yeah. Lisa, before I get to you, if anyone wants to go after Lisa, let me know. And then just book a call in with Justin too. Just go to cmorks.co/call. What’s up, Lisa? You’re muted.

01:36:13 Lisa: Hi. So great call. I’ve always wanted to get into the fractional world, so I wanted to understand what exactly it was. Actually wrote an article about it, but I want to reverse engineer. I think I love what you said about strategy. I love strategy. That’s my jam for marketing strategy. I do that all the time when I meet with my clients. But I want to be that conduit for fractionals that need that implementation work that you talk about. 

01:36:51 Casey: Why?

01:36:54 Lisa: Why? Because that’s been my background, and I have a relevance of different things that I can do in my digital marketing.

01:37:02 Casey: But why are you sitting in the kid’s table? Why don’t you come to the adult’s table? You say you like doing the strategy work. Why are you doing the implementation?

01:37:07 Lisa: I can do both, like your friend did. So I could be at the adult and the kid’s table, to be honest. 

01:37:16 Casey: You got to choose your seat. You got to choose what you want. Implementation’s fine. Implementation is busy work, and it’s relevant. You’re not going to get economies of scale. You’re not going to be able to solve big problems with it unless you’re like a performance marketer like Brooks was talking about. That’s a good way to do implementation. But you lose out on getting a seat at the big table. You lose out on all the big outcomes that are available there. 

01:37:51 Casey: And I’ll tell you, life is just different. When I was working at that private equity real estate company, we acquired $1.1 billion of real estate in 26 months. I had a marketing budget. I was spending $20,000 a day, $30,000 some days. Anything I wanted, I could have. I had a $1,000 a month slush fund for my team where I could just do goofy shit, like send them DoorDash of pretzels if I wanted. Every time we ran a webinar, we did a guess of how many people were on there. And if you won, you either got like a $50 gift card to Amazon or a $200 gift card to Applebee’s. It was just like, it was funny. No one ever took the Applebee’s gift card. It was just like, it was just a fun thing to do.

01:38:34 Casey: And that’s where I’m passionate. I’m not passionate in like the nuanced implementation thing. And I think users are just getting eaten alive with AI. I mentioned this thing, Clawd Bot or MoltBot. It’s crazy what’s available right now that you can just piece together to do all of your bidding. I can’t say enough about that. If I was… I have a good buddy, Kevin, who ran copychief.com and taught copywriters how to write copy persuasively. And he fought like hell to keep it. And he sunsetted that product, that whole program. He left everything behind because AI is eating him alive. It’s just hard to make a living in that world. 

01:39:14 Casey: So if you want to constantly reinvent and learn new stuff, stay in implementation. If you want to be steady and calm and let AIs or people or offshore workers or whatever do all the labor for you, do the fractional CMO thing. I mean, I’ve got a buddy of mine who runs a SEO firm. He’s calm, he’s measured, he makes good money, he’s niched down, smart. He’s got a good life. So it does exist, but his staff is rapidly changing. He went from all American workforce to probably 50-50 offshore. And now he’s heavy into AI. He’s forced to deliver more outcomes for people in less time for less money. He’s getting a pinch. He’s doing well, I think. But man, I think you’ve got to be innovative and at the top of your game to do that. It’s just different. I mean, I remember you used to saying like, oh, I’ll set up a Google ads campaign for you for a thousand bucks, and it would take me an hour. Like those days are gone. 

01:40:10 Lisa: You don’t think that supporting other fractionals who are doing the strategy, but need that implementation, and they’re working with companies that don’t have a team, that wouldn’t be a good segue for them?

01:40:26 Casey: I don’t think that as an offer is all that compelling. Because if I need someone, I’m going to go find the person. I have a lot of people I’ve worked with in the past. I might send a text out to ask a question, like phone a friend. But if I’m hiring someone, I’m just going to the open market to find someone who’s available right now. I don’t have to have it. I literally go to Upwork. And I just reach out to someone who matches my search query that has the available now flag. And I message them and I get a video call and make sure that they’re human. And I ask them questions. And if they’re good, I give them a small project and pay them in milestones. I don’t… 

01:41:01 Lisa: No, I appreciate your point of view. I just wanted to see, you know, I appreciate your point of view. I’ve been leaning towards the fractional side. Actually, someone I talked to took your course and they spoke very highly of you. 

01:41:15 Casey: Can you say who it was? 

01:41:18 Lisa: Aisha.

01:41:20 Casey: Yeah, I know Aisha.

01:41:21 Lisa: Yeah, we connected on LinkedIn. We connected on LinkedIn. And she spoke so highly of you. And she was like, why aren’t you being a fractional? And I was like, huh? You know, so I thought about it. But I just, you know, I’m implementing right now because I have the digital marketing agency.

01:41:40 Casey: I think you got to set your sights to get out of that at some point. And, you know, you go do your implementation work. It’s fine. It pays the bills, whatever. But you go lend one client that pays you five grand a month. I swear to you, you will say to yourself in the mirror, I’m never going back. It will be a switch for you, just like it is for me.

01:41:58 Lisa: No, I understand. No, and I appreciate that because I’ve been straddling the fence. And so to hear that, you know, maybe I do need to make a change and think about the fractional… put the implementation side. But I could offer those services because I have that digital Rolodex if they don’t have a team. So that would be an upside for me anyway. I wouldn’t have to go to Upwork because I already have the Upwork in my background. 

01:42:25 Casey: Yeah, sure. Right. Yeah, I think a fractional CMO role is, I mean, it’s just where I think it’s best. I want to answer David’s call or question. David, you said, what’s my hack and finding quality employees? Dude, I got it. You want to know what it is? I’ll post a job post anywhere. I’ll post my doc anywhere. But the call to action on it is reply to, you know, david@cmo.com. Like send an email to david@cmo.com with the subject line. Hey, it’s me. First name, the marketing technician that you’re looking for.

01:42:58 Casey: In that email, include a loom video, no more than five minutes long. Whatever, like whatever you want them to say in it. You could say describing your favorite recipe that you like to make for dinner. Right. Just simply that. The number of hoops someone has to jump through to like read it. AI is not going to do that. AI is not going to record a video for them. It’s a human that went through the whole process.

01:43:23 Casey: We find that it’s fleetingly few people make it through that process. But you’re not stuck in the garbage candidate review field, things inside of like Indeed or Upwork or whatever. There’s people email you. I’m the person that you’re looking for. You’re like, sweet. Upwork, you can’t do it. They have to message you because you can’t give an email address. But that’s it. And then you review the candidates as they come in. And then you just keep reposting the same job post, maybe change the title a bit to make it fresh. But that is the secret. And I will watch a video no matter what I’m doing. I’ll like stop and I’ll watch a video of a candidate. And if it’s a good vibe, I tell them it’s a good vibe.

01:44:04 David: Amazing, that’s a great advice.

01:44:05 Casey: We reach out to them. Yeah, and we have a chat. Yeah. Yeah, awesome. Well, thank you all for being here. 

01:44:11 Michael: Casey, I’ve actually got two more questions.

01:44:13 Casey: Oh, sure. Okay.

01:44:16 Michael: So these are going to be from Christian. And then Andrew, you’ll be up last. Christian’s asking, after exhausting your referrals, how do you go about prospecting and cold calling? It’s not door to door. So a list, a script? 

01:44:29 Casey: Sure. Yeah. I mean, listen, like, I guess like I’m incentivized to tell you that there’s like a black box strategy here. What it is, is that you’re the expert. You got to be the expert. You got to know it. You got to like map it out. We do some really cool stuff in the accelerator. We call it the Industry Intelligence Playbook. And it’s a series of like research prompts and pulling together the big ideas of who these players are. And you go and you meet them. If there’s a conference happening, you go and meet people. You reach out to them. You go pay for the conferences and you attend them and you meet folks. 

01:45:00 Casey: Like, I’m not telling you a lie that you can be rich overnight. I’m saying, if you become the person people want, you will be full for the rest of your life. So this is about being the person that you want to be. Do you have to write a book? No, but you should like, what is the person who’s number one in the space do? That was my thought. Like when I wrote my first book, I was like, if I was the number one guy teaching people how to be fractional CMOs, what would I do? I’d probably have the book on it. So I wrote the book. And then I was like, I’d probably have the podcast on it. I probably have the biggest Facebook group on it. It’s like, it’s the actions of doing the things that the number one would do gets you to the point where you become the number one. 

01:45:40 Casey: And it’s curiosity. It’s never turning down a conversation. There’s a hunger to it. And I mean, there’s technique to it. It’s how you talk to people. It’s how you follow up. It’s how you’re you and unique. But I want to be 100% me and authentic with my clients. I don’t want to hide. Like I want jokes. I want fun. I want it to be kind of silly. I want us to work really hard together and everyone make a lot of money. So I’m really authentic and I don’t hide any of that stuff.

01:46:07 Casey: So I think in a world where everyone’s saying to leverage AI for your outreach and to build relationships, I’m the guy who’s saying don’t and build true, real relationships with fewer people. I got a buddy of mine who is arguably my most important connector in my life. He’s driven me some really good business. He’s in Minneapolis. I am not talking to him about business. I’m talking to him about his daughters and how they’re feeling about what’s happening. That’s a real relationship. I’m not manipulating him. I really care. I want to know what his life is like. So that’s the conversations that I’m having with him. Because I care about his family. You know, send Christmas cards or holiday cards to these people. You want real relationships. That’s how you become the person. 

01:46:50 Casey: You have that level of authority. You can kind of like, I don’t know, kind of like trick your way into your first client or two. But if you want to be sustainable in the industry, you got to be the person. And that’s what it’s about, coming in and becoming the person. That’s why people join the CMOx Accelerator. They’ve had wins. You know, we’ve got the former CMO of Ancestry.com. ButcherBox, Salesforce.com. We’ve got heavy hitters in there. We’ve also got people that are agency owners. And everyone’s coming in wanting to take the prestige of where they’ve been and re-leverage that to be the next level. And that’s like who they are. So I think it’s really about who you are and kind of building out that persona publicly to a small group. 

01:47:36 Casey: You know, you’ll see, I don’t post on Facebook. I don’t post on LinkedIn. I don’t post on Instagram. Because I just text message a lot of people. Like I have tighter relationships than that. Maybe someday I’ll get on that train. But I don’t need to do that for business. Maybe as you get started, it works for you. We have members that do very well with it. And we train around it too. So I hope that’s helpful, Christian.

01:48:00 Michael: All right. And we’ll wrap it up with Andrew. You may have spoken to this. Are there particular industries, niches with higher propensity of success? Conversely, not as strong opportunities for fractionals? 

01:48:12 Casey: It’s a tough one. Because, Andrew, two companies can look the same side by side. Can you say what industry you’re looking at, Andrew? Like broad industries?

01:48:26 Andrew: Broad industries. So being in the Detroit area, automotive. 

01:48:32 Casey: We’ve got a woman in automotive, dude, that is cleaning up right now. She’s in boardroom. She’s crushing it. She’s in auto repair. Like helping auto repair shops. So that’s a cool niche. But she knows it. Like, she’s one of the people, you know? 

01:48:47 Andrew: Yeah. My background’s all OEM. 

01:48:49 Casey: It’s all OEM? Okay. Yeah. But there’s interest in that. Like, you can pivot that in a way. You can tell a story about your OEM experience and how you can help aftermarket folks too. I know how the big guys do it. So therefore, I can help you. Yeah. I wouldn’t think that there’s… Nothing tells me that that would be a bad industry. Yeah. I think that maybe there’s some cyclical stuff with government funding. You know, you get like a blue president and maybe there’s more stuff for electric cars. And that could be something to be considerate of if you want to be like an electric space. 

01:49:25 Andrew: I just did an EV startup.

01:49:27 Casey: Okay. Yeah. Right. We’ve got some members that are in the green tech space. And definitely when Trump came in, it was tough. But it’s kind of loosening up a bit. We’re seeing more private funding in that space. So they’re able to do well and close good business. But it was different than like the middle of Biden.

01:49:47 Andrew: Sure. Absolutely. Yeah. Much friendlier environment to that. 

01:49:51 Casey: Yeah. I would say that my big thoughts on niche are… It’s kind of a case-by-case basis. Like outside of cybersecurity, it’s a case-by-case. I could talk to someone and they’re like, Dude, I’m going hard. I just got a divorce. And all I’m going to do is work and grind. And we’re going to build this thing out. And I want just a stud that’s working alongside me. Who cares what their revenue is? That person could afford you maybe even if it’s tight for them. And they’re just going to go hard and they’re going to win. Like that’s on paper a bad client. But in reality, probably a great client.

01:50:30 Casey: And then you’ve got someone else who’s like super well capitalized. But they want incredibly fast turnaround. That’s just unbearable for you. To them, you’re cheap, but you’re not moving fast enough. And it’s just beyond what you want. So it’s case-by-case. And I’ll meet with anybody and have conversations. And then you just get pickier over time on who you want. 

01:50:52 Andrew: Got it. Thank you.

01:50:53 Casey: Yeah, you’re welcome. Great. Well, thank you all for being here. Just about two hours. If you have questions, ask them in the Facebook group. We’ve got cmox.co/community. It’s the Fractional CMO community. We’ve got like 7,000 folks in there. So hop in there. Be an active member of that. I’ll put that in cmox.co/community. There. Thank you, Michael. With the HTTPS. That’ll redirect you to the Facebook group. You can join that. Ask questions there. Sometimes I go live on Facebook. And I’d love you to book a call in with Justin. If you guys want to see if you’ve got what it takes. We’ve only got five spots available for February. So we’re pretty choosy about who we let in. But if you think it’s you and you want to get in and you want to like, you know, win in Q1 and start building a client base, I’d love to help you. Thank you for being here. Take care. See you later.