Transcript:

00:00:00 Casey: In this episode, I’m gonna tell you about what it’s like to be a fractional CMO. What’s a day in the life of being a fractional CMO and what’s the solve bigger problems and what would it look like if you were a fractional CMO? Let’s dive in. 

00:00:13 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. 

00:01:09 Casey: All right, hey, it’s Casey. So here’s what it’s like to be a fractional CMO. And I’m gonna share with you how it’s like for me to be a fractional CMO because I’m a fractional CMO. I win clients and they pay me and I serve them and I deliver the same agreements that we have inside of the accelerator, all that stuff. Let me just say that real quick. So recently I signed a new client  and I needed to create an agreement for us, like a contract.  And I don’t have any special agreements. I don’t have something that like only I keep. I hired a lawyer, they built them for me  and we have them inside the accelerator. And when it’s time for me to sign a new client, which happens rarely, right? I like to keep my clients for years on end, but when I sign a new client, I need to get the contract. So I just went into the accelerator and got the file and made a copy and built it all out that way.

00:02:05 Casey: So, you know, I’m still in the game fighting alongside everyone else. Now, yeah, I’ve got more experience. Yeah, I charge more. But I’m still there. Like I’m still doing the fractional CMO thing because it is an awesome business to be in. It’s great to be a fractional CMO. So let me tell you what a day in the life is like as a Fractional CMO. And just basically, it starts heavy and it ends light. So my goal with everyone is to make sure your Mondays are kind of full. And I mean, like, I’m okay with seeing my CMOs work, I don’t know, at least eight hours on Monday, maybe nine, maybe 10 hours on Monday. Like Monday is supposed to be a hard day. Tuesday, pretty hard too. Wednesday, meh, it’s kind of a… I don’t know, like on a scale of one to 10, Monday and Tuesday are 10s on effort and energy.  Wednesday,  like a five.  Thursday, like a four. Friday, like a one or a zero. That’s what it looks like if you’re serving clients.

00:03:06 Casey: So you start the week off really, really strong serving clients. Let’s say you have two engaged clients. These are clients you’re working with 10-ish hours a week. They’re gonna meet with one Monday morning. You’re gonna meet with one Monday afternoon. Your Monday morning, just for client A, Monday afternoon, just for client B. It’s gonna nicely separate your day. You can bisect that with lunch if you’d like. But your whole job on Monday is just to kind of uh get everything  all back together, kind of rebuild it  into, like rebuild the business back into the structure that you want, like getting the people to do the right thing and making sure that they’re focused correctly, at least for the next five days, if not for the next two weeks and you want everyone to understand what the requirements are by the end of the week.

00:03:50 Casey: You want to pull together ad hoc meetings that are required, et cetera. But like that Monday first call sets the tone for the week. And then the other client also on Monday. Then you might have a third engaged client. Maybe you fit that in on Monday. I’ll tell you, that’s a lot. Maybe that happens Tuesday morning. You have your third engaged client, if you want to do that. Three engaged clients can be a heavy load. And it’s a great load for you if that makes sense at this time in your life. Also, if you have young kids, if you’re at a time of transition, if you’re taking care of your family, you’re just exploring hobbies, if you’re on a health kick, if you’re doing other stuff, it’s okay not to have three engaged clients. I’ve held three engaged clients for a long time.

00:04:34 Casey: And I’ll tell you, it’s easier to do  when, you’re like a newlywed and you don’t have kids and you don’t have a big responsibility and you can just stack cash. That’s cool. So I see  folks come into the accelerator, they’re usually like pre-kid  or like empty nester or soon to be empty nesters or they’re just like no kids, right? They made the no kid choice. And those folks can take on just more client load. They tend to. I gotta say one thing that I find really special. We have a member and he was just sharing in me that he was just grinding it out for so long in the corporate space, just like 60 hour weeks or longer with commute and just never had time for his family.

00:05:14 Casey: And it’s like, my kids are growing up and I’m gonna lose them. And that’s pretty tough, right? To like be a guy and like be the income earner and then like not get to see your kids and know like you got to work hard so you can make money so they can have a great life but then they never see you. It’s tough, right? That’s hard. And I know that single moms do that too, right? Like that’s hard. So  you got to choose where you’re at,  know, where you wanna be as a Fractional CMO. I like to engage clients.

00:05:41 Casey: I feel like it’s a pretty good vibe. Yeah, it’s kind of, it’s totally doable with travel and vacations and life and whatever. Two engaged clients is totally chill. So consider that you have two engaged clients, Monday, heavy day. Tuesday, what would you do with two engaged clients? Well, you’re have some ad hoc meetings. I worked with a client and sometimes, well,  every Tuesday I would meet with their sales team because their sales team would do like an EOS style L10 meeting  and… If I wasn’t there, they were just going to complain about the leads that marketing drove. So for about a year, I joined every sales L10. And then after a year, I got  my marketing director to step in  and he attended those calls on my behalf.

00:06:25 Casey: So it was great. He felt like he kind of got pushed up to the next level. And then I got just more freedom in my day. But that happened on Tuesdays.  We’d also have other kind of ad hoc calls, maybe with vendors working with a marketing agency, or you’re working on a project and you want to do like a same page meeting  and you just want to book a call with everyone to get together because you’re launching a website or launching a product or launching a book or doing whatever, and you need to spend that time together. So you’re to have some of those ad hoc calls. And again, my preference is Tuesday for those, Wednesday for those. That’s really where I want to pack those in.

00:06:57 Casey: And then your week just kind of peters off. On top of all that, you’re going to be doing daily standups. think that that’s, I’m not going to say it’s a requirement because sometimes you can get away with not doing it. Like you work with really uh independent folks. I’ve joined really mature teams and some folks are just like, I don’t wanna talk to you every day, Casey. I wanna talk to you once a week. And like nothing I can do will change that. And it’s just not worth it to reach out to them because they’re really self-directed and they’re quite good at their job. So I don’t do that daily standup, but I personally enjoy the daily standup 10, 15 minutes every single day, same time, like nine to 9:15.

00:07:31 Casey: And then you have another one 9:15 to 9:30. You pack it together in 30 minutes. 

You’re identifying the biggest problems for the day, making sure everyone’s on them and they’re off to the races. And you’re kind of good. Like you touched everything in the morning, in the first 15 minutes of the workday. And then you’re kind of, you’re good. People can just slack you or whatever. So much of your work becomes asynchronous communication. And that means that you can operate from your phone. So we’ve got different levels of folks in the CMOx Accelerator, right? Folks that are just winning their first client and then other folks who have established businesses, maybe they’ve been in the accelerator for a while and they’ve like built with multiple clients or they came in with a client or two and I’ve helped them gain additional.

00:08:11 Casey: And I’ll tell you,  this strategy, let me tell you what it looks like when you’re fully kind of ascended into this very successful fractional CMO role where you’re charging, you’re bringing in, let’s say 30,000 a month or more. What does that start to look like? It starts to look like utter freedom. Generally speaking, I would want to be at my desk on Monday every other day of the week, I can be mobile. I’d like to be at the desk. I’d like to kind of  see all the reports and everything and just kind of internalize it and find the big problems to solve on stuff  on Monday. 

00:08:44 Casey: But beyond that,  I need to work. I need to do work. It’s not like I can just disappear, but I don’t have to be at my desk because the work isn’t keyboard work. It’s not mouse moving work. It’s not PDF review work. It’s talking to the marketing techs, ensuring they’re on track and saying like, you’re doing a good job, keep it up. I mean, so much of the work is just that. It’s just checking in with people, vibe checking them, making sure they’re doing okay, making sure their life’s okay, and then making sure that they’re focusing on the right thing, and then just encouraging them. That’s so important.

00:09:20 Casey: So that encouragement is like literally saying, good job, you’re doing a good job, I’m proud of the work you’re doing. That stuff is so meaningful for folks. And I find that I can encourage the good work, and then people self-identify when they do bad work, like, cause they don’t get the encouragement. Like I don’t have to say like, yo, that sucks. Sometimes I do, if I’m like being a little spicy, but  by and large, I just compliment the good work and people revert to just doing good work. It’s really a positive work environment. I’m also really, uh don’t know, you could say lax or laissez faire, or just kind of… I don’t care about vacation time and stuff like that. I don’t care if people need to leave early for an event or a birthday party or, you know, go seeing someone at a funeral or any of that stuff.

00:10:13 Casey: Like, I don’t mind. I just go to take care of yourself.  My expectation is that you’re an adult and you take care of yourself and you deliver an exceedingly high quality product to me based on our agreement. That’s it. If you deliver a high quality product to me based on our agreement, we’re gonna keep working together for a long time. And if I don’t have to manage you tightly, I’m going to want to work with you because I can get more work for every hour I work. I get even more work done because I don’t really have to talk to you, you just do a good job. So that’s the environment I want to create.

00:10:42 Casey: It’s almost hands off except Monday, it’s very hands on and every standup it’s very hands on. If I do those things, people just do a good job. You know, I don’t care the hours that people work. Someone’s like, yeah, like I’m going to work today like from nine to five, or sorry, from like nine to noon, I’m gonna take two hours off to go do X, Y, I’m like,  don’t even tell me. Like, I don’t care. I’m just gonna slack you if I have questions, just get back to me when you can. They’re like, cool, got it. So that’s where you wanna be. So that creates this culture of just kind of like a relaxed, simple, outcome-focused, kind of result-focused team.

00:11:22 Casey: And you add to that, if you can, a bonus structure where the person gets a bonus. And here’s a simple calculation. 10% of their salary as a bonus for the year paid out in April. So the company has like three months and also so that people don’t quit in January, February or March.  It’s kind of nice. That 10% bonus  is paid out either annually, which is like kind of a traditional method. I think that’s a tough one for the business to plan for. It’s like financially difficult for like everyone to get a 10% bonus on the same month.

00:11:53 Casey: So instead, I’d rather do a quarterly payout. So they effectively get 2.5% of their salary as a potential bonus every three months. And that’s calculated as 35% they get of that bonus if they complete all of their personal things, like their rocks, right? All of their quarterly outcomes. If they did it, boom, they get 35% of their bonus. If the team, the marketing team did a good job and like they support each other and like we all worked well together, they get the other 35%. That’s 70% of their bonus if they do a good job and the department does a good job. And then 30% of their bonus comes from if the company at large hits its targets.

00:12:35 Casey: Now this is only going to work if you have a company that has clear targets and you’re addressing the team in a quarterly fashion and like everyone has quarterly outcomes and then they’re driving towards them, which is a requirement in my book. So if you have that, then that can be a really nice incentive structure too, so that people can make some more money  and be financially incentivized to help one another out. And that structure, if created well, reduces the reliability on you to be there to gatekeep and answer every question. And a common thing I see that happens with CMO is they start to get weird, they get squirrely, they get frightened, like someone’s gonna replace me because they’re good at their job.

00:13:14 Casey: Like they don’t need my oversight and I’m not like telling them to rewrite this thing or something. Because you give them the freedom to like write something and then test it and realize the market doesn’t like it. So then they rewrite it and they keep testing it until they find a winning variation. Instead of you just telling them what to do, they get to solve the problem themselves. So they see most get squirrely, they get worried. They’re like, oh, these people are going to get better than me. They’re going to fire me. Like maybe that will happen. But it’s like that whole like if you love them, then let them go kind of thing, right?

00:13:45 Casey: If I want them to do well, like I want them to do well, I want to like give them the space to do well. What do I do with my time? We go back to the three, the big three of CMOx. We solve bigger problems. First big problem.  What should the team focus on? What should the individual focus on?  And then like, how do I get them to do that with the least amount of management for me possible so that we can have the highest leverage? That’s the first big problem, right? So if we solve those problems, then I’m just going to delegate everything except leadership.

00:14:13 Casey: My job is just to delegate to all these people, all the things that have to happen. And I tell them what has to happen. I always think of this as a car uh with a window going up and down. If my job was to lead a car development team, I’d say, hey, your job is to get a window that goes up and down when someone flips a switch. Like, that’s it. Do I know how servos work and the motor works and how it’s gonna plug into uh all the cabling for the computer and what the glass is going to be made of and are the gears 3D printed or they cast iron or you know, like, I don’t care.  I just need to find the person who can do the thing. And I just am like, your job is to get the window to go up and down when the button’s pressed.

00:14:52 Casey: They design the button, they design the window, they design the glass, they design the mechanism, all that stuff.  That’s delegating everything except leadership. Leadership says a window that goes up and down should go here. And then that person’s job is to just figure out how to do it. It’s beautiful. And then the final step here, right, solve your problems, delegate everything except leadership, and then you practice predicting the future. If you’re not spending at least an hour a week with your engaged clients, thinking about the future, thinking about the upcoming quarter, the upcoming year, what’s going to change in the market, what’s going to change with Trump’s tariffs, what’s going to change with, geez, AI, how are things changing with all of these AI platforms? What’s this nano bananas thing? 

00:15:36 Casey: If you’re not thinking about, you know, rapid content creation for ad creatives, if you’re not thinking about novel ways to get in front of clients, in customers, like if you’re not spending that time for your client thinking, you’re not doing your job. You’re just being reactive to the day to day. And I want you to be really good at your job. So the only way to do that is to spend concentrated effort predicting the future, just guessing what you think is gonna happen. Reading, learning, asking smart questions, meeting with smart people being in a community of other CMOs who are solving big problems and share some of the solutions that they’ve had that you could then probably just like put a little lipstick on and take to your client and boom, it’s like this big novel idea.

00:16:20 Casey: That’s incredibly valuable and that’s gonna increase your longevity with a client because you’re useful. We keep people around in business because of utility. So if you’re useful, you get kept around. So that’s the big idea. So your day in the life is a heavy Monday. They have you Tuesday, lighter Wednesday, light Thursday, potentially off on Friday, maybe outside of a stand up. So it’s just kind of your energy is hard on Monday and it’s nothing on Friday. Well, what do you do with the rest of that time? You got choices. One choice is to focus on building your business. So at CMOx, we try to minimize the calls that we do on Monday and Tuesday because our CMOs are pretty busy. So we do a lot of our calls Wednesday and Thursday because we know that they have more time for that.

00:17:04 Casey: And then not on Friday. We have some calls on Friday for folks that are getting started. That’s like our accountability calls and the road to 10K to help folks get to 10K a month in recurring business  as quickly as possible. We do those on Friday.  But like the true service calls, like that stuff, we want to that Wednesday, Thursday when folks are working. My vision is that the CMOs don’t work on Friday if they can help it, or don’t work 30 Fridays a year. And I mean, even like don’t work, not even just like do stand up, but like don’t even show up. Like Thursday they turn off.

00:17:35 Casey: They’re work stuff. They don’t turn it back on until Monday morning. So that’s what a day in the life looks like. And the only way that you can make a lot of money on that is if you niche down and you solve problems that are worth solving that have a big outcome for the client. You position yourself as an expert because you are an expert. You keep building your abilities. You learn about the industry. You spend more time in the industry.

00:18:01 Casey: Like the person who’s been there for 20 years is going to be more valuable than the person who just started. And also, you have to negotiate asymmetric upside. You want the opportunity to make more money of upside. If you can do that, man, life is really good. So upside comes in the form of uh getting a percentage of revenue. uh It comes in the form of maybe phantom stock units or part of the exit value or deferred cash that then gets multiplied at a certain time.

00:18:30 Casey: There’s all these different ways that you can do upside. Now I’ve been coaching our members. One of the cool things in the accelerator, one of the things I really love is all members get unlimited, unmetered time with me for deal making. So if they’re like working a deal and they need help with negotiation, I’m in their corner fighting for them, but I don’t fight for them exclusively. I also fight for their client. I find the middle ground that makes sense. When people make deals  through my coaching with this upside stuff, what they tend to find is that it’s the best thing for their client. Maybe they never realized their own worth, like I’m not worth that much, no one would believe that.

00:19:08 Casey: But the way that we’re able to kind of  slow step agreements so the client  sees the actual value of the CMO, and then we pitch at a higher rate, and then we do some kind of asymmetric upside, it’s just a really beautiful thing.  And like, I mean, those deals are worth.

$50,000 extra a year, $100,000 extra for one member, a couple million dollars. And these are true verifiable claims  that people have done. I don’t know if it’ll work for you or not,  if you’ll have that opportunity, but some folks are really working some pretty amazing deals right now, all with upside.  And uh that’s possible for you. And these folks weren’t doing that before.

00:19:53 Casey: So I really think that what we’ve got going on here is something special in the market, and I’m super proud of it. So if you want my help, live in this kind of lifestyle. If you’re willing to work your butt off on Monday and Tuesday, and then kind of slow it down the rest of the week and maybe dig into building your business so you can have consistent income, which I think you need to do for at least a year, like really lock in and build something of significance, and then you can kind of chill out a bit. It’s like life’s a little bit easier once you have all the foundation built.

00:20:20 Casey: You get it. You’ve had a couple reps, signed a few clients, you know how to do it all, you’re like building and learning and getting paid. And after you do that for like a year, man, you’re in a good place. That’s when you can start swinging maybe some of these more asymmetric upside opportunities and just like stacking some cash and really helping great companies and moving to the top of your game. So now’s the time to do it.  If there ever was a time, you know, this AI influx is gonna lead to mass layoffs and the market is going to get crowded. So it’s better to be in early in this novel place than it is to, you know, delay.

00:20:51 Casey: So if you want my help, if you wanna join me on calls every week and I’ll coach you directly personally, like today I was on with members, I think I had uh like seven members join and I helped them each one-on-one over the course of 90 minutes with their niche. Like finding the niche that was right for them  and just really squeezing down and finding the perfect audience for them to go attack. If you want my help on that kind of stuff, on what to say, on how to get over your maybe limiting beliefs on what to charge and  all that kind of stuff, that’s what I can help you with. That’s what I love doing. And you can have my playbook on everything I do to help clients.

00:21:30 Casey: Again, everything I do, I go into the accelerator and make copies myself and use with clients. I do not have a special version of anything.  I just use the one that we keep in the accelerator. So it’s literally everything I do for clients is what you have access to  if you join. So book a call with my team, cmox.com/call.  Book a call. And we’ll ask you some questions and see if you’ve got what it takes. If we think you have the experience, the commitment, the readiness, like if you’ve got the skills to be the kind of person that could be the next successful Fractional CMO. All right, hope you’re well. See ya, take care. 

00:22:02 Casey: Thank you for sticking around for the full episode.  As you know, learners are earners, but you’ve got to take action on what you heard today.  For more information and show notes,  visit fractionalcmoshow.com. If you’d like me to answer your questions on an upcoming episode, you can share your question at fractionalcmoshow.com.  And last, please hit the like and subscribe button so that I know that this content is helpful to you.  All right, go get them.