Transcript:

00:00:00 Casey: Marketers of the world, why do we work hard to solve small problems?  Why do we reinvent ourselves and our clients over and over? And why are we giving away marketing strategy for free? With advancements in AI, we’re all seeing the marketing department shrink from the bottom up, and companies need you to serve them as their fractional Chief Marketing Officer. It’s time to solve bigger problems and bring home a bigger paycheck. It’s time to create the lifestyle we deserve and to make a greater impact. This is the Fractional CMO Show, and I’m Casey Stanton. Join me as we explore this growing industry and learn to solve bigger problems as marketing leaders. The Fractional CMO Show is sponsored by CMOx, the number one company to teach you how to attract,  convert, and serve high paying fractional CMO clients on your terms.

00:00:58 Casey: Welcome. This is a Fractional CMO Q&A. This is just something I like to do, kinda like once a month or so, just to chat with y’all, and share the good news about being a fractional CMO, what it’s like, answer your questions around. I think oftentimes folks when they’re considering becoming a fractional CMO, I think their head isn’t really in the right place. They don’t really know what a fractional CMO is. And I think it’s like, you know, like working out, there’s a hundred different ways to work out, but Crossfit is very different than, you know, going to ballet or going to bar or something else, right? These are very distinct and different approaches to things. I think the CMOx approach to being a fractional CMO is novel, and it’s built with like a couple things in mind.

00:01:40 Casey: The first thing that it’s built in mind with is, I want you to be able to deliver maximum value to your clients. That’s like the single most important thing, but I want you to do it in such a way that gives you freedom. And I just like live by this idea that I wanna be free and then I wanna do with my life what I wanna do with it. But freedom is inherent to everything I’m doing. I’m creating structure to be free. And that’s like free to be me, free to show up authentically as myself and not have to like wear a suit and tie ’cause that’s just like not who I am. I’m free to, like, help causes and people and in companies that I really enjoy working with, free to make a lotta money and go and do the things in life that I wanna do. Freedom to work from anywhere. Freedom to call the shots on my time. Freedom to push out people that aren’t great to work with, and pulling better people to work with. So inherently, it’s like freedom. So we deliver value to our clients, but freedom is so important.

00:02:34 Casey: And then the third thing that I think is unique about the CMOx approach is that I created a vehicle for myself being a fractional CMO. I’ve trained hundreds of others on doing, to have a vehicle that can get you wherever you wanna go. So what is that vehicle… Like, what does it look like? Some people say, I just want one client. If I had one client, everything would be better. I certainly started off there. I remember years ago, man, 2010, I think I was in the Glazer-Kennedy Insiders Circle in Ann Arbor, Michigan. And I remember saying like, “Man, if I could make like four grand a month, that would be it. I’d be thrilled.” So I built a business that kinda got me towards that. But when you get to four grand a month, you realize that, man, if you just had eight grand, right? And then when you get to eight grand a month, you’re like, “Man, if I could just have like 10 or 12 or 15 or 20 or 30 or 40 or whatever,” It’s like a hydronic treadmill. It keeps moving.

00:03:22 Casey: Yet, so many people build businesses where they’re limited on their growth. They build a car that can only go a hundred mile. The CMOx approach to being a fractional CMO allows you to build a vehicle that can go really far. And then you just choose how far you want to drive it. I’ll tell you, we have some members in the CMOx accelerator who… There are different stages of life. So there’s kind of like three major stages, kind of, of life and career. There’s like the folks that are kind of earlier on… These folks… If I can just generalize, let’s call them single, living alone, got nothing to do but work. These people, like they can put the hours in, they can grind, they can work really hard. And you get people on the other end of the spectrum, which is, their kids are now grown and they’re off to college, or they’re going off to college this year or next year or whatever. We’ve got a bunch of graduations happening inside of boardroom that we get to celebrate for the last few weeks. So those folks now have more time because their kids are going to college.

00:04:20 Casey: And then you’ve got the folks in the middle. And I’m kind of that, right? My kids are young and I’m married. I’ve got other things to do in my life besides just work. Yet, the CMOx approach works for all of them. Those that are young, that have a lot of time and no commitments, but not a ton of experience, they can still go win clients, build deep experience quickly, deliver a lot of value and start making really great money. We’ve got some members that are in their twenties that are doing 20, $25,000 a month, plus variable upside. I would have killed for that kind of money in my twenties.

00:04:51 Casey: And we’ve got folks on the other end of the spectrum who’ve, you know, now got time, that are making $40,000 a month, $80,000 a month. Some pretty crazy numbers. But again, it comes at the cost of some of their other time in life. I’ll tell you, you cannot build an $80,000 a month fractional CMO practice, and maintain a lot of external things in your life. It’s just… You have to be in a phase of your life to be able to do that. I think the happy medium for a lot of folks is making 40, to $43,000 a month, 45 grand a month, like right there, working 30 hours a week.

00:05:25 Casey: So the CMOx vehicle can take you there. You can make more… The way that you make more is typically with variable upside. And we can talk about it… that if you want. But I think that structure is really important for you to understand. You want to deliver value to your clients. You want freedom to be able to work how you want, where you want. And then you want a vehicle that can take you where you wanna go. We’ve got a member who works with a company, totally outside of her niche, and gets to go to a safari adventure every quarter, and go spend time with tigers and giraffes, and you know, that kind of stuff, like big cats. Pretty cool. That’s… Some people like that kind of stuff. Another member just has a client and they’re taking ’em to Europe for a week or so. And he’s extending his trip and he’s gonna go explore and play. He was actually on a call like this maybe two months ago, three months ago. So that’s like a sense of freedom, having fun, doing the work that’s important, helping clients, but then also getting rewards besides just pay, which I think it’s freedom.

00:06:18 Casey: So, I’d love to answer your questions. We’ve got time to schedule here, just to chat. I see that there’s some questions coming in here, and happy to go through them kind of one by one. Just ask questions in the chat. Then we can run a queue, but in first, yeah, who here is currently a fractional CMO? Would you write like currently a fractional CMO? Maybe you write not a fractional CMO. So Mark, you’re working as a fractional seeking more clients and new territory with Legion. Yup. Dylan, you’re currently a fractional CMO. Vilda, you’re currently, currently great, currently a fractional CMO. Love to see it. Trying. Yuliana, dabbling, running an agency. Great. I think agencies are really great. I do like the agency model. I think that adding fractional CMO services alongside the agency model is a really deadly combination that can deliver lot of value for the client and get you paid really well. Sarah, you’re working as a marketing consultant. Great. Looking to be a fractional CMO. Looking to be. Aaron’s curious. Cool. Great. Awesome. Helps me kind of see where you all are at.

00:07:14 Casey: I’ll tell you how much things have changed over the last two years. Two years ago, people were just like, “I’ve never heard of a fractional CMO.” And now you all are saying like, “I am a fractional CMO.” That’s awesome. So big difference in just what’s happening in the market. You’re still early. This is still a very novel, nascent, new thing. And I was just talking with Michael before this call, we’re in a role that I think will remain reasonably unchanged for the next 10 or 15 years. This is a very strong position to be in. All of my friends that are in copywriting, content writing, funnel building, web dev, media buying, image creation, like ad creative stuff, analytics, people that just have funnels that they stamp out for clients. All those folks, they’re getting, they’re getting worried. You know, the copywriters, I think they kind of pretend like it’s not as bad as it is, but we all know that we can generate really good copy through AI tools and automation AI and overseas workers are coming for your jobs. Like that’s what’s happening. So to elevate to the role of the fractional CMO, I think is super critical, right?

00:08:10 Casey: All right, so with that, let’s just dive into questions- [crosstalk] here in the chat.

00:08:16 Michael: [inaudible] We have Shavat who is a working as a fractional and he wants to know what’s the better way to collaborate with a client and marketing vendors? One, refer vendors to the client and let them work directly or subcontract and charge the client at the vendor’s cost plus margin.

00:08:34 Casey: Yeah. Great question. So by and large, I think that your income stream should be exclusively in your contract value with your client that you’re getting paid and not from any kind of arbitrage of bringing in an agency or a worker or anything like that. I don’t think… I think it rides an ethical line. So the way around the ethical line is to actually choose the best company. And if the best company throws you a kickback, that’s completely fine. But to choose a company, a vendor, an agency, a consultant or whatever, because of your financial relationship with them, I think doesn’t take into account what’s best for the client. And oftentimes when we do that, we do that at the cost of interviewing other potential candidates and getting a better result for the client. So generally I don’t like it. However, if you’ve got a really great relationship with someone, and you’re Batman and they’re Robin, and you swoop in and then they come in and support you and they’ve got a great team that helps. And there’s a relationship that you have with them that just says, “If I assess that you’re the best for this opportunity and it gets closed, I wanna take a margin on that. I want you to pay me your marketing fee because I effectively did the marketing for you,” You know, whatever that would be, a couple points on every dollar made or something. Then I think that, that’s okay, but I don’t want that to be your business.

00:09:52 Casey: And a big reason for that is because it’s easy then to step into the danger zone. And the danger zone is when you, let’s just use a round number, you’re 10 grand a month and you say, “and I’ll get all the marketing done.” So then you go and subcontract all the work out, and you take your 10 grand and you start chopping thousands of dollars off of it to give to people say, “Okay, this person is gonna do the media buying so they’re 1200 a month. And this person is gonna do this, and they’re 500 a month. And this person is gonna do this and they’re 3000 just for one time.” And as you play with that, my biggest fear is that you’re left with nothing, or you’re left with something so small at the end of the month that it just wasn’t worth all the work. You know, it’s not, it’s not a very good deal for you. So I prefer the pass-through approach.

00:10:33 Casey: It would be weird for me if I hired a CFO. And my CFO was like, and we’re bringing in these people that will subcontract through me, that will do all the bookkeeping. Like that feels kinda weird to me. I hired a CFO, not a, not like an agency to do it where that’s kind of inherent in the relationship. So I think you should stay as a full fractional CMO, which again is CMO. You should just be the Chief Marketing Officer and you should find the right vendors. And if there’s a kickback, there’s a kickback, but don’t do it as a matter of like structure. You don’t want that to be the reason that you hire someone. Happy to answer any follow up questions on that. If anyone has any. No?

00:11:09 Michael: Alright. Let’s see if any come in-

00:11:11 Casey: I just want to share real quick, like how we play this game here is you guys just chat. You jump on video. Let me see your face. It’s helpful to see. We’ve got 39 people on, maybe a couple robots. Just come on video and like, let’s just have a conversation around this stuff. I really wanna help you win clients and make a lot of money. Go ahead, Michael.

00:11:26 Michael: I see someone started to ask you something.

00:11:29 Juliana: [inaudible] I was going to jump in and say hello and I [inaudible] question, but I don’t know if you were going to call on somebody.

00:11:36 Casey: That’s cool, yeah. Got any questions? Go ahead. What you got Juliana? 

00:11:39 Juliana: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I know you’ve seen me before. I want to say hello again. So I did listen to your previous podcast about finding the unicorn. It seems like a lot of folks that I’ve been talking to are really looking for the unicorn. The one that does the strategy, that does the marketing, that does everything… that does everything. So just wanted to get your take on that. And-

00:12:00 Casey: Yeah, what is the revenue of those folks?

00:12:01 Juliana: At least, at least $500,000 a year minimal, then they do jump all the way up to like $5 million-

00:12:08 Casey: And what’s the industry?

00:12:09 Juliana: Lawyers. 

00:12:10 Casey: Okay. I remember the lawyer’s conversation. Yeah. So anyone can want whatever they want. You know what I mean? And that’s fine. Like, they can want what they want. It’s your… It’s not your job to convince. We don’t come into the world to convince it’s fractional CMOs. We come to be like partnered. I did an episode a couple of ups back on like, kind of turning around and not being… Not selling, but instead buying, ’cause they’re selling, fractional CMO’s [inaudible] you’re buying a client. Like that’s the way you look at it. Like I’m looking for the right relationship for me. And I’ll tell you, someone doing a half million dollars a year is wrong. That is the wrong relationship ’cause any decent lawyer wants to make a half million dollars a year. So every dollar in that half million dollars a year that isn’t a hard cost, they wanna put in their pocket so they can get their BMWs so they can, you know, ride around in there, with their Rolex, whatever. So I  think that’s just way too small. And that’s just like the… That’s who they are. Nothing wrong with those types of people. That’s who they are, and their lifestyle requirement. No one went to law school to make 200 grand a year. 

00:13:13 Juliana: That’s true. 

00:13:14 Casey: Right. So they wanna make big money. So you might have to find the one who like just hit a big on a big case and made a couple of million bucks. And now they’re like, “What do I do with all this money?” I don’t know what is a fact, but in Philly, we got this guy, a top dog, top dog law. 

00:13:28 Juliana: Oh, top dog. Yeah.

00:13:29 Casey: Yeah, I think he’s in Philly. I don’t know. But, you know, that like he must have landed some big client that he won and he made a couple million on and he’s like, “Well, what do I do with all this money?” I go ham on marketing.

00:13:44 Juliana: And he did, and he’s done that for him for years now. 

00:13:47 Casey: Yeah. And it’s killing it. And you know that the marketing brings in more for him what it’s like, like personal injury stuff. 

00:13:53 Juliana: Yes. He’s [inaudible]

00:13:55 Casey: Yeah. So he’s just like getting a bunch of personal injury stuff coming in from that. So like that’s someone that I’d rather work with. I’d rather work with the person who’s like, “Alright, I just made a couple of million. I’m ready to go big league. Let’s go.” Not the person who’s like 500,000, just kind of scraping by, trying to figure it out. So I think you’ve got to drop that low end. And I think you got to go to those that are making enough money where your costs don’t hurt that much. Like, I mean, also just consider, what it costs to get into a country club? 30 grand, 50 grand. [crosstalk] So they’re like buying in as they’re early on in their career as a lawyer. They’re kind of… The cost to get to the level of status that they want is multiple years of a high salary. And then they get to a place of comfort. So you want someone who’s reasonably successful already, not the person who’s just starting. 

00:14:41 Juliana: Right. 

00:14:42 Casey: And then you wanna work with those people and you wanna like know them so that when they are ready, they call you. I would be like asking ChatGPT to do a scheduled task. Yeah, Pay the 20 bucks a month for ChatGPT. Absolutely. [crosstalk] Scheduled tasks and have it look every single morning for any big PI cases that any law firm has a press release about. 

00:15:04 Juliana: I didn’t know I can do that. That’s pretty cool. 

00:15:05 Casey: Yeah. You’ve been able to do that since March, late February, something like that. 

00:15:09 Juliana: So I just thought, is there GPT for that? I just asked for it. 

00:15:12 Casey: So it used to be ChatGPT for Omni Scheduled Tasks. And now that’s rolled into just ChatGPT, I think, for Omni. ChatGPT Scheduled Tasks. Yeah. You can take a peek. I’ll just drop the link in the chat. Killer though. Killer, killer, killer. Have it do all that research for you on a daily basis. And then you wanna reach out to those folks and congratulate them. Like these are your people. Just congratulate them and say like, “I’m the fractional CMO. I’m the CMO that comes in and helps when it comes to scaling marketing campaigns after you guys have big paydays. So you guys can get more of those.” Now you’re buying a high quality customer and you’re not like, you know, doing hand to hand combat with a bunch of like low income, like lower-income-than-they-wanna-be-lawyers. 

00:16:00 Juliana: Yeah, for sure, for sure. Yeah. I recently, since I lost spoke to you, I recently put in three proposals, and they all thought it was very expensive. 

00:16:10 Casey: Did you deliver the proposal before you shared price? 

00:16:12 Juliana: I delivered the proposal via Zoom and we went through it together. 

00:16:19 Casey: Okay. Okay. Was it the first time that they heard price for-

00:16:21 Juliana: Fractional CMO services, yes. 

00:16:23 Casey: Okay. Yeah. Just a quick thought. Quick thought on this. You’ve seen these videos online of like guys like proposing in public, and then they get turned down and everyone just kind of like feels really awkward, right? And you said to yourself like, I would never do that. If I was a guy, I would never do that. Like I would never propose with the red carpet and the roses in public for the girl to say no. Yet you ran a proposal. You did all this work, all this prep, but you didn’t have a yes already. 

00:16:48 Juliana: Got it. Right.

00:16:49 Casey: So you wasted your time and you got into a land of like hope, ultimately for them to be surprised. No surprises is appropriate here. So-

00:16:57 Juliana: We’ve got the few dates already. 

00:17:00 Casey: Yeah, sure. But I’m not writing any proposal for someone unless I say, literally these lines, “Alright, so everything we talked about today, including the price and everything, if it’s all in a contract and there’s no funny business in there, I get that… got that to you like in an hour, would you sign it?” And I say, “Yeah, okay, cool. I’ll send it over.” Then I’m gonna work my butt off to get the perfect proposal out in the next hour, but I’m not spending any more time on proposals. Your proposal delivered to acceptance rate needs to be like a hundred percent, except for like maybe the one guy who, know, something bad happened in his life. So you needed to walk through all along the sales process to talk through pain, opportunity, bridging that gap with your services, the cost for you full-time, the cost for you as the fractional CMO, them agreeing to that. You know, the language that you want to say is like… look, let me just ask, what would you charge as a fractional CMO? 10 hours a week.

00:17:51 Juliana: I’m starting off at like $3,000. 

00:17:53 Casey: Okay, cool. Fine. What’s your full time rate? If you did full time work in marketing, what would be your rate?

00:18:00 Juliana: Minimally $140. 

00:18:01 Casey: Great. Yeah. I mean, that’s crazy. Okay. So here’s the language. When you have the sales call with them, the sales call is like, you’re kind of just interrogating and asking them questions to understand, “Can I help you? Do you have a problem that I wanna solve? Do I like you? Do you have the budget?” right? This isn’t like, please buy from me. 

00:18:18 Juliana: No, no, never begging. [inaudible]

00:18:20 Casey: We’re flipping it around. Do I even wanna work? Can I even help you? Are you the kind of person that I could just like rock this with? And if the answer is all yes, then you say, “Great, do you mind if I share how I can help?” And they say, “Yeah, like that’s why we’re on the call.” Cool, great. So my full time rate to come into a company like yours and do this work is $140,000 a year. And that looks like me doing these things. And that comes with benefits and you know, just kind of the typical package, but that doesn’t make sense for your company, right? Like thinking through you and like where you’re at and what you wanna do. If you paid me $140,000, you guys wouldn’t have a lot of money left over for actual marketing expenses, like media buying, buying billboards, like that kind of stuff, like the photo shoots that we need to do, whatever. So that’s why I did this fractional CMO thing would make a lot more sense. So instead of me working 40 hours a week, I think 10 hours a week, I could get a lot done. I could build that marketing department out for you. We could use AI tools, but also we can leverage local workers if we need to, interns, but you know, overseas folks too, and really build something that’s dynamic where you’re owning it, where you’re not like renting an agency’s labor. So we’re paying hard costs for everything. There’s no markup. Does that sound like what you kind of want here? Like you want something that you guys kind of own, is that right? And they’re gonna be like, “Yeah, that sounds awesome.” You’re like, cool. Yeah, so like I said, I’m like 140 full-time, but I think I could do it for like $3,500 a month. How does that sound? Does that feel like it’s in budget? Does that feel like what you need? And I’m just talking it out. Hear you on it. Like I’m not pushing anything. 

00:19:49 Juliana: Well, my sense with lawyers is, you know, whenever we tell them… We, meaning I… I tell them anything that has to do with financials, like it’s gonna cost, you know, hiring me $140,000, or it’s going to cost them $3,000 to work with me directly. They’re always like, “Yeah, of course, that sounds great.” And then all of a sudden, they just, for the most part, they just don’t get back to me or I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. To be honest, I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. But I am taking them through the cycle. I am talking to them. I am telling them where they are right now, where they can be. What does it cost for them to stay in the status quo? They all tell me- 

00:20:28 Casey: If you’re being really honest with yourself, where is this falling off? 

00:20:31 Juliana: I think I over… I overshare. I overshare strategy-

00:20:37 Casey: Like the how? 

00:20:38 Juliana: Yeah. And then I think they get scared on the implementation part in some senses because they are stuck in being comfortable where they are, even though they tell me that they want to now scale and grow the company. 

00:20:52 Casey: So there’s a line that I learned. I don’t remember who said it, but it says,  “Share the what and the why, not the how and the now.” 

00:20:59 Juliana: Yeah, yeah, that’s true. Yeah. 

00:21:02 Casey: So the what, what’s wrong and why it’s wrong and why that needs to change. We can talk about that. The only thing that I’m going to tell you on how is just hire me. And like, what we tend to do is we say, “Okay, so the first thing I’m gonna do when I come in is I’m gonna do a Google ad campaign and I’m going to like, remove all of your broad keywords and I’m gonna add only an exact match keywords. And then we’re going do these other things with creative and look at these creatives and we’re gonna copy those, you know, from this law firm, we’re to do it just for you, but with your face.” And if you give that level of strategy, they’re like, “I don’t need you anymore.” So we do have to withhold some of that. 

00:21:31 Juliana: I’ll wait. I don’t get it all-

00:21:33 Casey: You don’t give it all away. The biggest fear that I have for you around this though, is that you’re giving away possibly too much. They think they get it. They go and implement it. They implement it poorly because they’re lawyers and not marketers. And they turn them on and they blame you. They don’t blame their lack of understanding of marketing. They said, “I understood what you said. I Googled and ChatGPT-ed and I didn’t get the result that you promised me. You’re wrong, Yuliana.” They never paid you any money. They took your ideas and ran with them. So that’s why I don’t share that information. Not because I’m trying to withhold and hurt them or be secretive, but because I don’t want them to have the opportunity to improperly execute the campaigns that I share and then blame me. So maybe there’s not enough intrigue with you and you give too much away. 

00:22:15 Juliana: Okay. I love that. Love that. Thank you for sharing that. I love that feedback. Okay. 

00:22:21 Casey: And are you like bulldogging them afterwards? Like you have calls in the calendar, you never leave a call without the next call booked. 

00:22:27 Juliana: Yes. 

00:22:28 Casey: Yeah. Okay. Cool. And you, like, are you going back to any of these folks right now?

00:22:32 Juliana: I was only able to call one of them, family lawyer in Texas and… it does include agency services.

00:22:40 Casey: Okay, cool. Great.

00:22:42 Juliana: I was close. Close to that one.

00:22:44 Casey: Yeah, I mean, keep going. I, you know, the last thing for you to interrogate, obviously, like all of your actions, you know, like that’s important. Just like how can you improve because obviously, most of the things that we can do is improve ourselves. But the other thing is consider the intent of them. Did they actually have a problem? Were they actually hungry? Gary Halbert says, if I had one advantage over you, you and I were selling hamburgers. Right? You and I were selling hamburgers and you wanted to sell more hamburgers than me. What’s the one thing, what’s the one advantage you want over me? Better meat, cheaper prices, bigger buns, Kobe beef. What is it?

00:23:14 Juliana: Go to where people are hungry.

00:23:15 Casey: Yeah. You want a starving crowd. So if these people aren’t starving, then you’re trying to convince. I don’t live in the world of convincing. I live in the world of talking to someone. Can I help you? Yes. Do you want help? No. Cool. Good luck. See you next. Next. Next. I don’t try to try to get people to want to work with me. Great marketer, Eben Pagan, pen name when he was doing dating work, David DeAngelo. I don’t know if anyone knows that. Kind of a throwback to original like direct response online. But under the name David DeAngelo, he wrote this headline, which just killed me. He says, “Attraction is not a choice.” We look at guys who try to convince women to like them. It’s laughable, right? Like it just like looks desperate. Yet we find ourselves professionally trying to convince clients that they need to work with us. It’s the same energy. The attraction is not a choice.

00:24:03 Casey: So when you show up, I help these kinds of people. Do you have the intent? Do you have the budget? Do you have a problem I want to solve? Do I like you?  They’re attracted to you. You’re attracted to them. It works. 

00:24:13 Juliana: Right.

00:24:14 Casey: If it’s any kind of push, it doesn’t work. Yeah. And the last thing I’ll say, then we’ll move on is, I want the client, the prospective client to hear you say, my going rate is 140 a year. And I want them to be like.. Okay. It’s like, yeah, that makes sense. And then you say, so the cost for me to do this work is three grand a month, 3,500 a month, whatever. They’re like, okay, that makes sense. Like it needs to make sense for them. They might not be able to afford it. It might be the wrong time. They might not have the intent, but they have to agree that, that is correct. And if you’re not getting them to agree that you’re worth 140,000 full-time and that in the fractional capacity, you’re worth 3,500, which I think is dramatically underpriced.

00:24:53 Juliana: It is, it is. I’m just trying to get my foot in the door.

00:24:56 Casey: But maybe you’re trying to get your foot in the door saying like I’m the dollar store version of what you need and then they don’t think that they need it. No one needs to spend $10,000 on a watch, but these guys think that they do.

00:25:08 Juliana: Right. And I started at like five grand and they told me that my price point was too high, that I’m scaling down.

00:25:17 Casey: What was their revenue? I mean, how many people did you talk to? I just don’t, listen to me and don’t listen to them. Your price point is not too high at five grand. Certainly isn’t. They’re too small or they have too little intent  or they don’t have enough pain  or it’s a bad time or they don’t like you, which is fine. Some people just won’t like you.

00:25:36 Juliana: Totally okay with me.

00:25:37 Casey: Yeah, right. Fine. I probably don’t like them either.

00:25:40 Juliana: Yeah. Like right now, for example, I’m going to meet up by the people I want to work with. then one particular person who has said yes to me and… but they just haven’t pulled, they just haven’t pulled the trigger. So I’m kind of curious to see where they’re standing at. 

00:25:55 Casey: So just, you need pressure around that? Just consideration of pressure. July 1 is the start of  Q3.

00:26:01 Juliana: It is.

00:26:02 Casey: So I manufacture that pressure. “Hey guys, can we like the year’s halfway over. Do you guys want to write the ship for Q3 and Q4? If you do, let’s get rolling on the first. We can get rolling before that. Can you guys start getting me access to these tools?”. That’s what I’m pushing on. Cause I’m vying for their success. I want them to win. I want to deliver value.  And most companies, Juliana, no one cares about quarterly planning. I find it unacceptable to do quarterly planning after the quarter starts. It’s an indication of dysfunction. Most companies don’t do quarterly planning.

00:26:28 Casey: They don’t even do annual planning. They just like work every day. Right? I want quarters. I want it tight. I want rigor. I want focus. So when you bring that energy, people tend to like, and I sit up and be like.. Oh shit, we got a real one here. Like someone who’s actually going to drive us forward. Someone who’s got some strength behind us.

00:26:44 Juliana: Cool. Well, thank you so much. I don’t want to take too much time out of, out of everybody’s, but, but I’m going to come in today. And if there’s one thing I will tell them, but it’s going to be a buck, you know, the quarter starting now on July 1st.

00:26:56 Casey: Yeah. The quarter starting July 1st. Do you guys want to get in for a really great second half of the year now?

00:27:01 Juliana: Great. Love it.

00:27:02 Casey: Yeah. If they say no,  cool. I got to move on to someone who’s actually hungry. I want to work with people who are hungry to grow. That’s like the number one thing I want less than revenue. It’s I want the person hungry to grow. I can work with a company that’s losing money today, but if they’re hungry to grow and fix it,  I love it.  Awesome. Thanks Juliana. Michael. What’s up next?

00:27:22 Michael: Okay, so I’m going to give you two sort of really high level questions. One is, I’m hearing the market is flooded with fractionals right now from multiple people. So your take and how you would solve that. And the second is prospects need to be making enough to afford a CMO and they don’t have one yet. So how do you sort of bridge that gap?

00:27:45 Casey: Okay, cool. The market is flooded with fractionals. First of all, who cares? Like I disagree with that, but like who cares? I don’t know why I just love the dating analogies on the stuff. Just flip it. You’re single, you’re a guy and you’re looking for a woman. And you say the market, like my area is flooded with other single guys. There’s no chance for me.  Like really? There’s no chance for you. Like you just have to be different. You have to have the conversation in a way that’s different. No one goes through systematically and says, “Okay, let’s go to LinkedIn and find all of the fractional CMOs in my industry.” And then let’s start like, breaking it down to who’s available now, who’s got capacity, who has direct experience, whatever. 

00:28:24 Casey: Most business owners work with the person that’s in front of them, not with the person who’s best. Currently coaching someone on winning a gig. And they said like, they’ve never had this level of, they’ve never been a CMO before. They’ve been levels below that. And they’ve always thought that they had to like apply and work their way up to the CMO title before they could ever be a fractional CMO. Yet they’re a really strong marketer.

00:28:47 Casey: And they went from three outreach calls. They had three calls with strangers.  One of them is in the final stages and they’re doing a final discussion on fees and they’re going to be charging 16,000 a month plus upside. Nuts on the first one. Are there other fractional CMOs? Yes. Are there cheaper fractional CMOs? Absolutely. Think of another one of our members. Lead came to us at CMOX. We qualified them. We found some of our members who might be a good fit. We introduced them. We keep in contact with that client.

00:29:15 Casey: And we’re like.. Hey, these are the CMOs for you. You know, we don’t do this all the time. It’s just like one those kinds of extra things that we do when we have good leads that come in, we pass them over to our members and we had members pitch. And we had members pitch at like 7,500, 10,000 and 12, 500 plus two and a half percent upside. 12,500 with two and a half percent upside is just nutty. It’s a huge number. The client went with the most expensive person. Is the most expensive person the best? I don’t know. Like they’re pretty good. Like I really think that they’re a solid marketer.

00:29:45 Casey: But are they the best? I mean, it’s kind of hard to define, but they want it. They want it on price. They want it with the biggest price. They want it with, I mean, some experience in the space, certainly they’re not a bad bit, but they’re not 10 years in the industry and like the greatest. They just did a really good job of talking through the client’s veins and showing how they can help. So it doesn’t matter how many other fractional CMOs there are. It doesn’t matter how many other people they’re talking to, right? What matters is like you’re there, you’re talking to them and you create a little bit of pressure to get a yes or a no reasonably quickly. If you just like protract the discussion for it to be three or six months long, then there’s an opportunity for other people to come in. But if you keep it tight and it’s like a two week first meeting to a yes or a no in two weeks, who cares how many other people there are? That’s how I feel.

00:30:35 Casey: Most business owners want to hire reasonably quickly and they’re going to hire without considering all of the potential opportunities that are available. I mean, if you as a marketer have ever hired an agency for one of your clients or your employer, you know how much of a pain it is to go through and interview a bunch of agencies. So you can like get a short list of five and you talk to them and you find the one that you like the most. And that’s the one that you hire. And then maybe you fire them if they don’t work out, but like, that’s how you get the job. So I don’t care that the market’s flooded in some ways, that’s a good sign. But I think at the same time, the market is always flooded with kind of like the new hot thing.

00:31:10 Casey: The market was flooded how long ago with marketing AI implementers or whatever the AI title was that they wanted to use. That stuff’s all gone now. So there’s a lot of folks that are going to don the hat of the fractional CMO and they’re not going to have time in the space to actually do any significant work. But it’s like, it’s like with everything you want to be a realtor, just go be a realtor. It sucks maybe for the first year as you sell a couple of properties and kind of get your feet under you. But then over time you build a sense of dominance and understanding of the market and then people want to work with you. Or I guess we can just take the opposite approach, the inversion, which is then don’t be a fractional CMO and go be an agency owner whose margins are getting pushed down because everyone’s using AI tools already and they don’t need you. Or go be a funnel builder and know that I can go on Upwork and find a funnel builder in Bangladesh who can do similar work to you for much cheaper. I mean, don’t you want to be in strategy and leadership? Just go there. Who cares what other people are doing?

00:32:08 Michael: Let me give you a follow up, I think will be really good for this. So like when you have, you know, people pitching themselves as fractionals, $50 to $75 an hour, like you’re saying, “Hey, who cares? They’re out there. Just keep going.” But then how do you, how do you respond when the potential clients trying to low ball or ask for pay based on results?

00:32:30 Casey: So I want everyone here who has that question to go to a high end car dealership or a high end luxury place, whatever it is and just go see what happens when you ask for a deal. How do they treat you when you go to the Porsche dealership and you say, “Yeah, I want to get a 911.” Can you guys cut me a deal on it? They’d be like, “No, Toyota’s across the street. You might get a deal over there.” Like people are welcome to drive Toyotas. They don’t need to drive the Porsche, but Porsche has the price that Porsche has. I think it’s important to really go do that. Some of the team members at CMOX were in New York. So I went on and met them.

00:33:06 Casey: And one of things that we did was we stopped at luxury stores downtown in Manhattan, just to see how we were treated. And we played this game a little bit and try to push around a little bit and ask some questions. And it was just great to see how we were treated. So you need to know that if you’re selling a luxury solution, you need to treat it like everyone has always sold luxury solutions before. If you want to sell a commodity, feel free to sell a commodity. Just, you know, it’s really hard to make a living on a commodity.

00:33:31 Michael: How do you transition from giving away the strategy to sell the practical to  selling the strategy? 

00:33:40 Casey: Okay. Yeah. There are so many marketers that I know, and you probably know too, that are… that reinvent themselves seemingly every 12, 18 months. It’s like the new next thing. I don’t want to disparage anyone, but I can think of a number of them who’ve been in the game for a long time. They make a lot of money then they spend it all. And then they reinvent themselves with the latest thing they’re doing now, webinar stuff, they’re doing now paid media stuff, or they’re doing hire someone overseas stuff, or they’re doing AI stuff or whatever. And those people have tactics. They come in high price tactic and they just kind of stamp out what they have and give it to you and say, do this thing, you’ll make money. And if you don’t, you won’t ask for a refund probably. That’s their role is to deliver that tactic. And it’s not wrong. It’s not bad. 

00:34:25 Casey: Certainly the people that were teaching how to do stuff with ChatGPT and make.com and all that stuff like 12 months ago, were probably giving a lot of intel and an alpha to companies to build really neat stuff that saved them a lot of money and their consulting fees were probably worth it. I can think of those things as like there’s value in that, but the role of having the tactic and executing it is exhausting and you quickly find yourself out of customers because the paradigm shifts, technology grows.

00:34:55 Casey:We’re moving into agentic AI. So ,what do you want to do? You want to be there for the long haul. So I’m not selling just the strategy. I’m selling the leadership. So again, three things in a marketing department: marketing strategy, marketing leadership, marketing implementation. Implementation, I can get anyone to do it. I can get AI to do it in time. I can get someone in the U.S to do it. I can get someone local to the company who goes into the office to do it. I can get someone overseas to do it at a lower price and I can get computer use, agentic AI to do it.

00:35:23 Casey: You know, some of it now, but maybe in a year it’ll be kind of everywhere and we’ll be able to get stuff done like that. So then that leaves two things left that are valuable. Strategy and leadership. Strategy, I come with a lot of strategy, but other people have great strategy too. I personally am not on the cutting edge of what works today on TikTok shops. I don’t follow the TikTok marketplace. I tend to be in the B2B space. That’s like where I like to focus with also B2C stuff but just like not on a social channel, specifically TikTok. Yeah. So if I needed to do TikTok, I could identify our customers are on TikTok. I need to find out the TikTok solution and I could go find the expert, bring them in for a couple hundred, a couple thousand bucks. They gave me the best TikTok strategy right now. I get a team to implement it. We’re off to the races. So I’m not alone building strategy. I’m leading strategy, but I’m getting strategy from other people. Sometimes I ask my CEO, “Hey, what are your ideas?” And they’re like, they’ve got some banger ideas. I just had a quarterly planning two days ago with a client of mine and he had this super, super smart idea, just using big data to pull stuff in, to do some measurements of stuff, to be able to send direct mail out. I was just kind of floored with it. I was like, that is an awesome idea. I didn’t have that idea. It’s his idea, but I will get it executed. So I’m not doing strategy. I’m not doing implementation. I’m the leader. This is what we sell. So I don’t want you to sell the tactic. I don’t want you to tell, sell the campaign.

00:36:50 Casey: I want you to sell the long-term ownership of all things marketing. And there’s a relief to that. A lot of business owners are the CEO and the CMO and also like the lead salesperson. And if you’re able to get all of the marketing related activities off their shoulders, you’re more valuable. So you sell that. I’ll take care of all the marketing stuff. You’ll go from however many hours you spend right now or wish you spent to me having a full department executing it. And I’ll report to you in 30 or 60 minutes every single week.  And you’ll have full confidence that we’re doing everything right.

00:37:19 Casey: For so many, that is the most important thing. The tactic, it’s like the tactic du jour. It’s like it changes maybe every day, every month, every quarter. So you can’t sell the tactic. Inherently, you don’t sell the tactic. You sell the ownership of the department, the building of the department, saying, “I’m gonna come and I’m gonna assess the agencies and then we’ll probably sunset a couple of them, maybe keep one or two, you know, folks out from the agency. But then we’re gonna build up our marketing techs. We’re gonna pay lower costs. We’re gonna build internal structure and I’m gonna build and lead that team. I’m gonna create a sense of structure in the business so marketing finally works well with sales.” I’m gonna create a sense of structure in the business so marketing finally works well with sales. So we finally work well with products so that we can straddle both of those departments and support the growth of the business.

00:38:01 Casey: When business owners hear this stuff, they’re like, that’s what I’ve been missing. The business owner you don’t want is the one saying, I just want the tactic. Cause the tactic isn’t the problem. Sometimes the tactic can do good things for them, but you know every tactic is short-lived. The person saying cold email, it’s short-lived. The person who’s saying run meta ads, run video ads. You know, I love Frank Kern. I think he’s great. He just ran at the same thing. It’s like run this ad with this number of videos and only let the frequency be like two for each video view. Have seven videos, give people seven videos of content over the course of a week. And he had this whole fancy complicated funnel. Does it work? Yeah, maybe. Is that the actual solution for the business? Absolutely not. The solution for the business is structure. It’s reporting.

00:38:46 Casey: It’s a team, it’s a department, it’s fighting with the CEO and not doing stupid stuff they ask you to do. It’s coming up with new ideas, finding partnerships, it’s all that stuff. So it is inherently different than tactic. And the strategy that you have, all that you probably have in your brain is strategy for 30 or 90 days. But you want to be with the client for years. So the strategy is not beyond that. Just one quick aside, I worked with a company, I came in, good marketing department.

00:39:15 Casey: I think there’s like four people full time in the marketing department. Right when I joined, someone quit. He was like, uh-oh, someone who knows what they’re talking about. I’m out. Found out he wasn’t working very hard. So boom, like I created right their  structure just because I knew what I was doing. This guy who was just lying on his time logs, got found out, knew he was going to get found out and decided to quit. I had underneath me a really smart marketing director. Love the guy. Still stay in touch with him.  And we built out this department and we brought people in.

00:39:43 Casey: And I just solved the same problems. But as we built it out and we were spending 10 or 20 or $30,000 a day on ads, the level of complexity increased and the risk increased. So it doesn’t really matter what my monthly fee is. If I can stop the company from having one bad day of ad spend, I’m worth it now. Right? If we’re spending 20 grand a day and my fee is less than 20 grand a month, that’s a huge savings for them. And it’s a sense of protection that they have. It’s reasonable to think that they would want someone like that in the role.

00:40:13 Casey: So just being there, like… What do we do? Oh, we’ve got a guy, had someone whose partner was pregnant and then had to be hospitalized early for a pregnancy complication. So we’re losing one of our key players. So I have to go solve that problem. Like that is a managerial problem. That’s like the ownership of the department’s problem. How do I support a guy that we’re losing? How do we support him so that after his pat leaves over, he comes back, he wants to come back. And moreover, like how do we keep the department moving forward? Those are the decisions that you make. So they’re not just, you know, a one-off marketing campaign. You’re thinking long-term, how do you build rigor and structure to support the company long-term.

00:40:54 Michael: Okay. Next is, can you describe more about what the variable upside is? Give an example of that. And when you’re contracting, is it purely just hours per week? Are you building in flexibility with outcomes?

00:41:09 Casey: Yeah, good question. So I’ll say the second part first the contract templates that we have at CMOX, just say about 10 hours a week. Like about is kind of what you want. Some weeks you’re going to work less. There’s at the end of the quarter and the start of the quarter, you work more. At the middle of the quarter, you work less. So what does that look like? Right now, my CMOs, they’re pretty focused. They’re delivering quarterly plans this week. Maybe at the latest next week, we did a quarterly plan training last week. So they’re all clear. We did it all together. Big group thing. Ton of fun. Couple hours along with me. So they build a quarterly plan for their clients.

00:41:41 Casey: Then they schedule the meeting and deliver it this week. And then next week they get all the milestones and they’re off to the races. And the first two weeks of July, they’re really focused on their client, really getting everyone started. It’s all about getting started on time, good focus. And these folks have them the quarter to get their tasks and outcomes complete. So you say 10-ish hours a week. That’s kind of the range. If you’re in the engaged capacity. And I think a fair price to pay to charge for that is like 5,000 on the low end to like 15,000, generally speaking.

00:42:11 Casey: My first one was at 7,500. We’ve got, had folks that have come in and sold a little bit less, maybe like 3,000. But after they sell their first one, they realize that they should be selling it at like 5 or 6,000. So that’s kind of the range. Yeah. So Michael, what was the second question or the first question of that?

00:42:24 Michael: Yeah.

00:42:25 Casey: The variable upside.

00:42:26 Michael:Hold on.. Upside.

00:42:27 Casey: Variable upside… So variable upside. First of all, I would just like to check you. This is not a conversation that I want you to have. It’s kind of like an unacceptable conversation to even consider unless you have a base of revenue that covers you and it’s consistent. So the example of that is, I think just like a general number, if I had to throw it out, is, I want someone to make 20 grand a month as a fractional CMO before they even consider taking on any kind of upside. Why? Because I just want you to have consistent income. If you have consistent income, then like, life’s good and you can take risks. When you ask for upside, sometimes you lose the opportunity. Some people are just like, no.

00:43:09 Casey: And they like close the door on you. Other people try to use variable upside as a way to, I don’t know, win a client because they think that having equity in a company is cool or something. I don’t want equity in any company. I want revenue share, but I don’t want equity. I don’t want to own anyone’s company, but I do want to be  owed a percentage of revenue. So yeah, I think equity is just the wrong move. By and large for just about every single person. I can think of two people in the accelerator ever or equity made sense. For everyone else, it’s revenue share. So do not… try to go work with a client and they’re like, I can’t pay you, like, you’ll [INAUDIBLE] on it. They’re like, “I can’t pay you three grand, but I’ll give you equity in the company and we’ll pay you a thousand bucks a month.” The answer is no. Like you need to be making 20 grand a month consistently confidently before you get upside. And you are welcome to not listen to me. And it’s going to be really hard because equity rarely pays out. Got a good friend of mine, worked at a company that most of you would know by name.

00:44:09 Casey: He was the CMO. had a package, equity package worth a million dollars when he left. The company grew a little bit after he left. So maybe it was worth a million two, a million five. He lost all ability to influence that business. That business ultimately reached a liquidity event five or six years later. And that liquidity event only paid out on preferred stockholders, not on common stock. He held common stock. His million, million and a quarter of IOU, he never got a dollar for it.

00:44:39 Casey: It just vaporized. So I don’t want you to have equity. I’d rather you have quarterly payouts on revenue. That’s like an easier approach. Inside the accelerator, we have a few different vehicles for how to get upside. It’s really on a case by case basis. What makes sense for the company. It’s not a bad move and it is how you get your revenue  over 15,000 a month. Yeah. So some folks are doing it as a percentage of revenue, but those people have a base of business and like all their bills are covered before they do.

00:45:09 Casey: I just want to say like one more time, too many people take on equity for low paying companies where that equity will never reach liquidity event. It is such a YOLO for them, but they think that they’re in a good position because they own the equity. 

00:45:23 Casey: They don’t know about all the downsides. What if there’s a capital call? What if the cap table has to raise a million dollars and you holding 10% of the equity don’t have a hundred grand to throw in? Well, they’re going to have to go get capital elsewhere and how do they reward that capital with equity? So your equity value drops. So if you don’t have the cash to play the game, it’s probably not worth getting equity. Yeah, I would just be really cautious and careful and it’s way better to make money today than it is to maybe hopefully someday make more money later, by and large for just about everyone. Michael? 

00:45:56 Michael: A quick clarifying question was the five to 15,000 a month for 10 hours per week.

00:46:02 Casey: Yeah, Kelly. Yep, so we have engaged and advisor. Those are the two roles that I think that you should do as a fractional CMO and I think it’s like three-ish thousand to five-ish thousand for advisor, and then five to 15 for engaged. We’ve had some folks charge over 15, 16, 18, 18, five, 50, someone charged some numbers like that. Some people work a little bit over because of a unique circumstance with the client and they might be working 20 hours and they might be closer to 20,000 a month, but I think that that’s really dangerous and scary. We just had one of our members share with me yesterday that they had a client that paid them very well and that client wanted them to do more work. And this member had to consider, do I take on a larger scope and get paid more from one client, which would give them more revenue today, right? The CMO would have more money today in their pocket, but at the risk of having that revenue centralized in one location. They opted not to, and they prospected and got another client. Their big client that wanted this person to work more hours just put a notice of the end of the contract. They, like, ran out of money.

00:47:07 Casey: So the CMO went from a possibility of having devastating risk to just having like a bummer of a day. So just consider that you don’t want to put all of your eggs in one basket with these clients. If you know anyone, you included, who had a like a formal nine to five W-2 job and you lost it and you see just how brutal it is right now in today’s market. Yeah, I wouldn’t want to centralize all of my income to one source ever again. I want multiple ways to get paid. I think that’s what you should be going after too.

00:47:36 Michael: How are you on time? They say how are you on time? [crosstalk] Yeah. Do you hear me?

00:47:40 Casey: Can you speak again, Michael? My speakers just turned off.

00:47:42 Michael: Got it. I was asking, how are you on time? Just because we’re at the hour mark.

00:47:46 Casey: Yeah, good question. We can keep going for a few more minutes.

00:47:48 Michael: Okay, great. So going back to stuff you talked about at the beginning of the call, what’s the ideal way to use AI tools you mentioned?

00:47:56 Casey: So, yeah. This is great. Michael and I were just like on a conversation about this this morning. How should the CMO use AI tools? So there’s a spectrum here of concreteness and abstractness, and a lot of people exist in abstractness. They don’t know how things work – and you can’t exist in abstractness. That’s critical. Do you know how the things you’re doing work? So here’s just a basic one: Do you know what a UTM is? Do you know what it means to stuff a URL with a UTM from a traffic source and then have a web form, parse those UTMs into hidden fields and then submit when the lead submitted and add it to the CRM so that you can run reports and lead sources. Do you understand that from a big vision? Do you get how that works? If you don’t, just write this down, go to ChatGPT, ask about it, watch some videos, measure school, Julian over there is great. Learn this stuff, like learn how that works. Learn the concreteness of how marketing works, attribution works, that kind of stuff.

00:48:59 Casey: From there – like once you understand how these things work – “How does a CRM work?” Then you can start looking at AI solutions to increase and improve outcomes in less time. So absolutely there’s great ways to do it. Content writing, for sure. A lot of content you can arm a marketing technician with, “Hey, I need you to write this content for the website.” And you tell them, “Go and look on Google for ten other companies in a different city.” Like, listen, if I had a dental practice in Philadelphia and I wanted web content, I would just go to the marketing technician and be like, “Hey, go look in Chicago and Dallas and Los Angeles and Little Rock. Find me a couple of dentist websites, copy their content in, paste that into ChatGPT, have it rewrite it, write something really great kind of based on that.” Totally fine to do something like that. Copywriting. We can bite off a lot of persuasive copy with good ChatGPT prompts. So those are like the easy ones. Image stuff for sure with ChatGPT’s new image models. Those are great. Those are producing great images, so you can have your marketing technicians iterate design ideas as drafts and then hire the designer to finalize. This is going to greatly collapse the time window it takes to develop something useful for design. I was just thinking like for my book cover, I went with a designer and I was like, “Give me your ideas. Give me your ideas.” You know, it just took a while to get this woman’s ideas. Finally, we landed on the cover for my book Find Your CMO, and I mean, how long did that take? I don’t know, eight weeks or something.

00:50:27 Casey: I probably could have got there on my own with these image-prompting models in a couple of days and then I could have given it to a designer to finalize and actually do it right. But I could have gotten closer. So that’s a lot of it. I can also think I was recently on a call where we wanted to get a URL field for a phone number and we wanted it to display on the site. So like the click to call button, we wanted to change based on a field in the URL. And I knew it was like a JavaScript and I’m not a developer and I have no business writing it, but I also wanted it done and I didn’t want to deal with it. So I just got on with the marketing technician. I said, “Here’s my idea. I want to pass over this field so that we don’t have to have all these duplicate pages.” And like, I know that this is probably a JavaScript that we need for it.

00:51:09 Casey: So I just asked ChatGPT and it spit something out and it worked marginally. Like it’s all one of the fields, but not all the rest. I was like, “This is it.” We know what we’re doing. Went on Upwork, wrote a request out to a couple of JavaScript programmers who knew HubSpot and we said, “Here’s the script that we did. Here’s what we’re trying to do. Help us.” Got on a call, one hour from my start to finish inclusive of finding, hiring, onboarding and getting the work done and tested. Took us one hour and $30 to get that done. I couldn’t have done that without ChatGPT. I couldn’t have done that without ChatGPT writing the code for me, so that’s a really good use of AI. We just like speed ran an outcome. I think middleware is useful too. So you’ve got like the make.com, Zapier, N8n – those kinds of tools. You can use those to support,  you can ask those tools to come up with, you know, using AI to come up with better workflows. You can also put AI in those workflows to transform data. That’s useful too.

00:52:08 Casey: But by and large, most companies don’t have those problems. They have people problems and like, again, by and large, what I see most of our CMOs doing is just arming smart people with basic AI tools, big outcomes, limited times to do it, and the person gets a better outcome faster using AI tools. But they have to understand the concreteness. So your job is to teach the concreteness so that they can work in the abstraction. They can work with the AI tool that’s gonna come up with all this stuff and be able to check its work. You know, is there like one tool that I would recommend you to use for marketing strategy?  Absolutely not. I think that that is like a kind of a foolish way to look at AI. I get approached often by folks who say, “Hey, Casey, you know, I know you’ve got all these CMOs. I want to show you like my how to make a marketing strategy tool. It’s story brand mixed with Jeff Walker mixed with the copywriting angles of Ben Suarez.” Like whatever, like they have like all of these different modules in this AI tool and the CMO gets lazy and they stop thinking. It’s not that those tools are not useful. It’s just that oftentimes it comes at the cost of actually understanding things.

00:53:17 Casey: So I’m all in for shortcuts, but I think that our over-reliance, like what is the problem with AI? There’s this great guy, Parker Pentsy’s Parker Notes. You can find him on YouTube. He’s got like the three scariest outcomes on AI and like scariest outcome. Number one is AI takes over the world. And he’s like, “That’s probably not going to happen.” Number two is it’s like a bad actor leveraging AI and they take over the world, which has some semblance of like that could happen. But the third thing that’s already happening is people overly relying on AI to do something and therefore not learning themselves and just kind of becoming, you know, just kind of empty, just like ChatGPT monsters and they just trust whatever the output is. And that’s really scary. We see that a lot happening, and I think that when the teams that you have could do that and just like do the job and still get their paycheck, it becomes a really dangerous incentive structure for them. So, I love AI. I use it every single day. Our teams use it, but it comes with a huge caveat that, yeah, you just have to like watch it and make sure that people understand the concreteness of how things actually work and not just trust the output of AI.

00:54:27 Michael: Great, and Aaron just posted an MIT study that backs up what you’re saying.  Okay. Is it a bad idea to create a visual or flyer to go to prospects when I’m meeting with them and Kelly’s looking for advice on contract templates?

00:54:42 Casey: Okay. So I mean, contract templates… I mean, the contract templates, Kelly, just what are your boundaries is the biggest one, and what are you focused on? Scope creep absolutely happens. Just kind of be considerate of that. Yeah. I mean, what are the things that you want? You want to tie in any kind of travel that you are compensated for it. You want to get all normal fees reimbursed. Listen, I like the finer things in life and if a client’s paying for me to travel, I’m flying in the back of the plane. Right, I’m taking a cheap Uber. I am not putting undue expenses on the client. I’m not to be treated like I need a black car in first class or anything like that, right? It’s just very reasonable stuff. I just kind of want to show up and do my job, and I think you should do the same. I think it shows that you’re a bit more of a servant leader. So add those things to your contract and then make sure that you get paid upfront. You don’t get paid after the fact. It’s totally fine for them to pay everyone else at the company after work is provided. But for you as the fractional CMO, you just paid upfront. Those are one of your terms.

00:55:43 Casey: You get paid with Stripe kind of immediately so that you win the deal. But then after the first month, try to push them to something where you don’t have fees. So Stripe is going to charge you 3.4%. It’s the 2.9% transaction fee plus a 0.5% recurring charge if your client pays you month after month. So, you know, on 10,000 bucks, 3.4% is $340. I’d rather not give that away. Those are the some of things that I would have in there. And you know, the last thing about contracts is the contract needs to be clear so that you’re all on the same page, but you also don’t ever want to find yourself in a position where you have to execute clauses in the contract as some form of retribution or whatever. It’s nice for you to just turn around and say like, “Hey, I’m just executing the contract as it’s written.” So you want to have it for that reason, but I really encourage you not to ever find yourself in a position where you have to like sue someone for the contract. It’s better just to walk away from any of those opportunities and just not deal with that.

00:56:37 Kelly: Totally agree. Do you happen to know, Casey, is there any place where I would be able to grab like an initial template that to your point then I can make some edits to and start building from?

00:56:47 Casey: Yeah, I mean… Yeah, so like we have one inside the accelerator that I had a lawyer write for me that I think is really important to have the consideration of a lawyer around it. I don’t want you to generate a contract that isn’t approved by a lawyer because  who knows what can happen. That’s just dangerous, so it’s just one of those things like when it comes to incorporating a business, what should I do? Well, you should talk to your CPA, you know, when it comes to the contract, what should you do? But Kelly, the contract should be based on just like a plain language contract. It should just be like emails back and forth where you list, “Here’s what I’m going to do. Here are the terms. They agree to it.” Then there’s legalese that you’re going to slap onto it. Non-indemnification, you know, all that kind of stuff. But I would absolutely have a lawyer just for the – just to feel good.

00:57:28 Kelly: Appreciate it. Thanks, Casey.

00:57:29 Casey: Yeah. Yeah, you’re welcome. Yeah, and my lawyer, I mean it was, I don’t know what, $2,000 for my contract. It’s not inexpensive to get a really good contract written. It’s one of the things that we have to be accelerated though for all of our members to get that. Michael, there’s another question here.

00:57:41 Michael: Yeah, someone’s working with a CEO and they’re skeptical of some of the marketing campaigns, lead gen, digital campaigns and so the team is like doing a lot of stuff. So they’re just asking in your experience when it comes to B2B markets with a small TAM around a thousand companies, what’s the best marketing approach?

00:58:02 Casey: It’s long term relationship building. You got a thousand, you got to know these people – what kind of coffee they drink, where they go, what events they’re at, what’s important to them, what the sales cycle looks like. That kind of stuff. I mean, a thousand people is not much. We’ve got someone coming to speak at the Biddy Accelerator in July,  and they’re a partner at a private equity company and it’s a big private equity company. They have one of the largest collections of a certain fast food restaurant inside of their portfolio. Very interesting. It sounds kind of boring, right? But just a very interesting approach to how things work. And these folks in private equity, if you burned them, they close that door and they will never open it again for you, and I just think that’s an approach that we have when we have a small TAM.

00:58:44 Casey: When you have a larger TAM, maybe I’m a little sloppy in my outreach. I’m okay with sending a prospect, maybe an imperfect message. But when I have a small TAM? No way, everything is perfect. Like world-class perfect. If my TAM is 50,000, I’m a little more cowboy…but when it’s a thousand or less, I am very tight and I don’t let anything go out that isn’t absolutely perfect. And I think you just play the long-term game. If you have a higher lifetime value and therefore potentially a higher acceptable cost to acquire the customer, consider how you use that money. I would rather live in a world where I have a thousand dollars or five grand to acquire a customer than live in a world where I have 20 bucks to acquire a customer.

00:59:26 Casey: If I’ve got five grand to acquire a customer, I’m having fun. I’m doing stuff that’s interesting, that’s novel. I’m sending them direct mail, just like having fun. You know, and just look at lumpy mailers, look at shock and all boxes, look at Gary Halbert’s dollar mailer. Like that kind of stuff is novel and interesting for these folks and you just want to be good news. You want to be helpful and friendly, and the last thing I’ll give you here is the consideration that don’t just sell the thing that you’re selling. You can also provide something that’s useful. So here’s an example. I worked for a company in the telemedicine space a few years ago and the people that sold that we sold to…it’s kind of funky. So it’s B to B to B to C. We sold to companies who then had their agents sell to the HR at companies who then had employees leverage the telemedicine.

01:00:16 Casey: So it was like a long sales cycle, a lot of people in the way. And instead of just saying like, “Sell our telemedicine, we’ll pay you.” We started developing resources for them to do a better job generally at outreach or CRM management and we just gave a really great world-class guide to doing these things. And these people wrote back like, “Oh my God, this is so useful.” Like they’re sending these terrible emails out, so I wrote emails for these insurance agents to send out and I said, “Send it out right back. Tell us how it goes.” They got free marketing, like a free CMO in their back pocket. They’re like, “This is amazing.” We’re like, “Awesome. How can you sell our telemedicine better? Here’s some of our ideas.” They loved that, and they were able to leverage it more and sell more. So it’s not just selling your thing, it’s helping the people who buy your thing be successful and therefore you’re more top of mind.

01:01:00 Michael: Alright.

01:01:01 Casey: I got to wrap though, so I just want to share something here – a big picture about this. Fractional CMO, like fight me on this. Tell me a better role to be in in marketing. There isn’t one. There’s not a better role in marketing than being a fractional CMO. AI is coming. I am not an AI absolutist. As much as I like using AI to do stuff and make my life easier, I’m also like considering what’s happening in the future and how destabilizing it is.  My job is to provide for my family. Like number one, provide for my family. And how am I going to provide for my family? I’m gonna do it by being relevant and being a leader. And that means today stepping into a role that is harder. Like every new client I personally win, because I’m still in the game. I still prospect win clients and serve them as a fractional CMO. Everyone, bigger problems, bigger budgets, more fund outcomes and I get paid more.  That’s what I’m fighting for because I wanna build relevance and efficacy. The CMOs that we have in the CMOs accelerator, we’ve got some powerhouses that are in the later stage of their career. They’ve been in corporate space for years. Some of them decades. They’re very strong.

01:02:07 Casey: Others that are kind of just been in like an agency. They really get how things work, but they’ve never had the leadership role and then everything in between – literally all walks of life. We’ve got folks from all over the world: US, Malta, Italy, Netherlands, Singapore, Australia. I mean, we’ve got folks all over the world and they’re seeing, you know, we say like when the US gets a cold. When the US sneezes, England catches a cold. So fractional CMO, stronger here than it is over in Europe but it’s starting to grow in Europe. It’s starting to grow in Netherlands. It’s starting to grow in just like kind of just east of us in Canada. So it’s valuable – companies are hiring this. They’re hiring this role, and I can’t think of a better place to be. You win a client that pays you three to $15,000 a month. Then you win another one, probably increase your rate a little bit. Then you want another one. You start feeling good. Then you start winning those that give you upside. So you start getting  more bigger, better outcomes without flooding yourself with a bunch of clients that you’re working with. That’s what we do with the accelerator. That’s what I help you with.

01:03:09 Casey: Three stages. First, we have to get sales ready. So we give you the proposal template that I paid to get done. We coach you on getting your kind of business set up so that you can go and confidently sell something. Like, what are you selling? How do you sell it? How does it help the person? Who’s your ideal audience? Where do they live? How do you get in touch with them? All that stuff. We help you figure out. Then we try to graduate you out of that as quickly as possible. Some folks can do that in like two days, some folks two weeks. Then we get you on the road to 10K. This is where we focus you on getting to $10,000 a month in recurring business. That’s where I want you to be. It’s like the number one place I want you to be. You want to be past 10K a month because everything is different. It’s like every kind of hero story, the hero with a thousand faces. You go and do the thing, you come back, everyone kind of sees you, you look the same, but to you, you’re a little different. You see the world differently – you’ve sold the client, you’ve pitched it, you’ve serviced it, you’ve spent a month or two collecting 10 grand or more.

01:04:03 Casey: You see how things really work. You see that you don’t have to have this meritocracy of earning your way from junior marketer to mid-level marketer to marketing director to VP of marketing to CMO to now being a fractional CMO. You see that you can jump to the role of the fractional CMO. That is critical to your own confidence. And then you get into boardroom. That’s our third level. So sales ready, road to 10K, boardroom. Boardroom is where we have a ton of fun and we talk about this stuff. This is where people are out there. Some folks are just kind of getting fat on great paying clients and they’re just living a great life, you know, 30 hours a week, that kind of thing. Other folks are making a lot more money, but they’re working their butts off. They’re working, you know, 60 hours a week. And you’ve got other folks that are kind of figuring it out in there. They’re making 10, 15, $20,000 a month, that kind of stuff. We all chat in a WhatsApp group for boardroom, and that WhatsApp group was blown up before I woke up this morning. It was blown up after I went to bed last night. And it’s the people that are in the game actually playing and winning.

01:04:58 Casey: So I don’t, when I hear Yuliana say three grand a month is too much, this lawyer says. When you get around people that are pitching 12,000 a month plus upside, you realize that you were talking to the wrong prospect, not that your prices are wrong. And that’s so valuable to helping you increase your own confidence in your ability to sell. So I’d love for you to book in a call with my team. You would talk to Justin. Justin’s great, he’s been with me for a couple of years. He lives just north of New York city. You can book a call with them at cmox.com/call. It’s a 15 minute call. You just make sure like you’ve got the experience and you actually want to be a fractional CMO and it’s kind of like a mutually good fit. We think that we can help you – and if he thinks that it’s good, he’s going to pass you over to one of two people, John or Melissa on my team. John’s been with me for years and he’ll answer any of your questions about what it takes to be a fractional CMO, how we can help you, what’s possible for you. If your experience is even enough, you can also talk to Melissa.

01:05:53 Casey: Melissa is my sister-in-law, my wife’s sister. She’s been with the company for over two years and she’ll do the same thing. Both John and Melissa will chat with you and either one and they’ll help you see if we can help you. And if we can, we’ll just share what that looks like and you know, when we’re enrolling folks and what the timeline looks like and how we can support you. I really encourage you to book the call. It’s at cmox.com/call. I’ll put it in the chat here. Book the call in right now and just schedule the call and see, just like answer it for yourself: Is this a yes or a no? For some of you, it’s a no and that’s totally fine. But for some of you, I really think that this is the opportunity that trumps all other opportunities. If you’re like, “Casey, but I want to start my own company and do these other things.” Cool. Go be a fractional CMO. Go make 20, 30 grand a month, work 20, 30 hours a week and then do your other thing. Reduce your risk for yourself and your family. It’s just a better way to go. Like, don’t take on equity. Go get paid cash. Make a lot of good money. Serve your clients. Build a reputation – build a tangible, real, robust, durable business that maybe you can even exit in a couple of years and then if you want to take risks and do other things, fine. But I just think this is the route for you. Being a fractional CMO is just a killer, killer place to be.

01:07:03 Casey: Alright, thank you all for being here. We’ll do another one these next month but if you have any other questions, just ask them in the Facebook group and I’ll see you guys soon. Take care.

01:07:11 Casey: Thank you for sticking around for the full episode. As you know, learners are earners but you’ve got to take action on what you heard today. For more information and show notes, visit FractionalCMOShow.com. If you’d like me to answer your questions on an upcoming episode, you can share your question at FractionalCMOShow.com. And last, please hit the like and subscribe button so that I know that this content is helpful to you. Alright, go get them.