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.  Here we go.

00:00:58 Casey: So this is the Fractional CMO’s guide to Q4 in a damn strong 2026. That’s what I’m looking forward to telling you about. So we’ll dive into the content in just a minute. We’re gonna talk about why Q4, what to do for 2026, how to build a solid foundation. This is super, super critical. The visions of being a Fractional CMO by following the holy book. I wanna tell you what makes for great clients, especially in the new year.  What you got to do to win your first client.

00:01:27 Casey: And then how do win your next bigger client? And then we’ll just do like an open Q & A. You guys have questions about clients, getting clients, closing deals, the accelerator, what we’re doing, um how I might be able to help any of kind of stuff. Happy to share it with you. I want to share one quick thing before we dive in, which I thought was pretty cool. So I had the team export a list of all of our members in the accelerator  and take a peek at this.

00:01:54 Casey: Here’s where we got folks all over the world. So these are folks that came into the CMOx accelerator  that  I’ve trained on the process of being a fractional CMO. We’re kind of everywhere in the US except we’re not in North Dakota. So if anyone here is from North Dakota, let me know. It would be really nice to get that one on the map. Oh, we’ve got folks as far south as Buenos Aires, as far north as Eagle River,  I think. Yeah, Eagle River. And then in Europe, we’ve got

30 some folks and in Canada, I think we have 25. So pretty cool to see the whole map of hundreds of folks who have come through. You know, we’ve got someone in Dubai.

00:01:54 Casey: We’ve got a newer member in the island of Reunion. If you don’t know Reunion, turns out that’s where the vanilla bean was first discovered. You all know the Madagascar vanilla bean, but it was because of Reunion. And this is crazy thing. This is actually France. Like people here are like actually French, even though. It is a literal world away from France. So we are everywhere.  And we’ve got a movement here with our CMOs. The vision here is that we’re getting into 10,000 companies and transforming them with our fractional CMOs.  That’s the mission that we’re on. So with that, I want to see in the chat real quick who here is currently a fractional CMO or who is thinking about becoming one. So it says like, I am a fractional CMO or I’m interested or I’m committed. That’s what I want to see in the chat.

00:03:18 Casey: Thinking about it, Dawn. Okay, cool. Aspiring Joanna, you are Diane. You are okay. Cool. Committed. Love it. Peter, you are one… Carlos. You’re committed. Aspiring. Great. Looking to shift into it. Yeah. It sense. Awesome. Great. Tough with the kind of, okay, great. Yeah. You’re thinking about it. I just want to share.  I was in a conversation with a guy who  was doing… was was a fractional CMO with us. And then he said, you know what I need to, I want to go work full time for this company.

00:03:48 Casey: So he goes in and works full time for the company. And then the company goes under. And he’s like, I just have this bad luck of like signing in with companies that like seem really good. And then I look at their actual balance sheet and they fold, you know, and I have to like quit before I get fired. Like that’s the relationship he found himself in. And he said, I figured it out, Casey. I’m finally listening to you. I’m taking on Fractional CMO work so I can do like 20 hours a week of work and make enough money to support my family. You know, his aims are pretty high too. He wants to make like 30 grand a month.

00:04:18 Casey: And then beyond that, he’s going to build his own startup and do other things. He wants to do like a tech startup. Awesome. But he’s de-risking himself by getting that consistent revenue. This is the thing I love about Fractional CMO. If you want to be a full-time Fractional CMO, like have three to five clients, that’s all you do. It is a completely great lifestyle. It’s like, it’s awesome. And if you want to do Fractional CMO work and then spend your time caring for a loved one who’s sick or spend your time building a startup or raising your kids and being really present as a parent. Like whatever you want to do, you can do that too.

00:04:52 Casey: It’s not like you have to choose one or the other because you’re picking clients that you’re going to be working with for four hours a month to 10 hours a week. It’s not a lot of capacity that’s being required of you. So I love that about being a fractional CMO, but I want to talk to you about why Q4? Why is Q4 like the thing right now? And here’s like kind of a weird thing that I’ve come to realize. I used to think that it was January. Like January was the time. But any of you e-commerce marketers know that if you’re planning right now,  your strategy for your November products,  like product sales for Black Friday, you’re behind. You should have had all of your Black Friday stuff thought through and committed by the end of the summer, at least by now, right?

00:05:37 Casey: Everything passed now, you’re just late. So a business owner who’s like, I wanna focus on marketing in… Like marketing is really important for us, right? Like we need to do marketing. We need to have a great marketing strategy.  Those people that are proactive are saying that conversation in September and they’re hiring in October and November. That’s the people you want to be with. It is not the people that hire in January. The people who hire in January are late. Like what have they been doing? You know, to think that like that’s a good time to hire. If you get hired in January, when do you onboard?

00:06:13 Casey: January  6th, 10th, 15th, something like that. And then you’ve already lost half the month of January. And that’s gonna take you 30 days to really build a comprehensive marketing strategy. So you’re gonna talk about like mid February, maybe end of February, kind of the first quarter  is lost. So then you’ve got nine months in 2026 to make a great year. It’s hard. It’s way better to be prospecting and reaching out to the CEOs that can hire you in Q4 so that you can onboard with them in Q4.

00:06:44 Casey: Additionally, I would much, much rather work with a client in Q4, early Q4, like in October, get started. That pays me upfront because remember rich people get paid first. have to get paid first, like before the services are rendered. And then if something happens, we can refund the client if we want, you know, if something doesn’t, if they want out or whatever. But generally speaking, we just want to get paid first. That’s huge. Paid at the start of the work and we do the work.  I want to work with a new client in October because in

Mid-November, I want to kind of chill out a little bit. You we kind of go a little nuts for Thanksgiving.

00:07:18 Casey: And then in December, you’ve got all those December holidays that you might celebrate. So I want to get started in October and I hope you do too. Like this next 30 days is a good time to be working. Also, when we think of our work as Fractional CMOs, we work really hard at the end of the quarter and the start of the quarter. Chatting with one of my CMOs earlier this week on our boardroom call. That’s our most successful folks get on a boardroom call with me once a month and we talk about all the stuff in business that is tricky, know, like working from home, having a spouse that maybe believes in it, maybe doesn’t, working with clients that are sticky, losing clients, winning clients, all that kind of stuff.

00:07:56 Casey: And the CMO said, I’m working pretty hard this week. I’ll probably put in 40 hours this week and next week, probably the same too. And I was like, well, then what do think it will kind of go down to? He’s like, probably by like, I don’t know, mid October, I’ll be down to 20, 25 hours a week. This guy’s bringing in 50, I forget what he said. It was 51,500. And then he forgot some numbers on that. So it might’ve been like 54,000. Maybe it was up to 55,000 a month. He’s bringing in as a fractional CMO and his costs on that are $2,000 a month. So he’s netting at least 50 grand a month as a fractional CMO working 25 hours a week. Q4 is the time. You want to build a business right now. This is the time. Also a little bit of cashflow before holiday you know, gifts is nice. I didn’t know that that money’s here. It’s like kind of waiting for that money in January to drop. I think that everyone benefits from that.

00:08:52 Casey: So Q4, now is the time to be winning your first or your next client. But in order to that, you have to have a solid foundation. So what is a solid foundation? Well, most people who I’ve talked to who like think of doing this fractional CMO thing kind of on their own, they make some massive mistakes. Here are some of the mistakes they make. One is they offer implementation services. That’s a felony in  my world. Like you can’t do that. You can’t offer implementation services because if you offer implementation services, you become a marketing department of one. 

00:09:27 Casey: And I want you to be the marketing leader and strategist. So exclusively doing the marketing strategy and leadership. Implementation, do I do implementation? I do my best not to. I’ll be honest with you, I do it occasionally, but it’s because I want to.  And it just like feels like the right thing to do kind of in the moment, but it is certainly not what I do with a gross majority of my time. I would say 95% of my time, it is exclusively strategy and leadership. And then yeah, maybe sure. I’ll write a headline or you know what? Let me write that email to announce this product. That sounds like fun.

00:09:58 Casey: Not that I have to, but I just kind of want to. I like, I like that stuff. And I, I’m sure some of you here love marketing, so it’s fun to do it, but you don’t want to be in the role where you’re forced to do it. Yeah, Barbara, it is the dream, right? It feels like a really great place to be. So a solid foundation is you do no implementation. You only do strategy and leadership. So where does implementation come in? Other people do it. If you’re not familiar with uh Upwork, it is a killer website. I use it all the time. And on Upwork, we can find anyone to do anything. And I’ve never done this before, but let’s just run into Upwork real quick and let’s just come up with an idea.

00:10:36 Casey: So let’s say we need to hire something like a HubSpot person. So HubSpot Technician. I’m going to share my screen here. So here I am in my Upwork account, and I just searched for the term HubSpot technician. Yeah, did I spell it wrong? Yep. Here we go, HubSpot technician. On the left-hand side, I’m just going to click a couple of things, like job success. I want people who’ve done a good job.

00:11:07 Casey: How much money have they earned? I like people who’ve earned like a thousand bucks. I feel like if you’re a thousand bucks on Upwork, like you’re legitimate, you’re kind of there, you’re doing stuff.  And then I want their English level to be fluent. And here we go. We’ve got this guy for 30 bucks an hour who’s available now. I can message and possibly get him to start work by the end of the hour. This guy can start work for us. It’s crazy the implementation talent that we can find.

00:11:37 Casey: Melody here in Philippines, 40 bucks an hour. I think these prices are kind of high too. If we just keep going down, Nigeria HubSpot CMS website developer, certified HubSpot CMS specialist, available now, $10 an hour. You can pull these people in immediately to do work. This new flag available now allows us as CMOs to identify a problem, identify a vendor, get them started on the work all within an hour. So we’re never forced to do the work.

00:12:05 Casey: You say, but Casey, I’m special. I’m really good at copywriting and I want to do copywriting.  Cool. Let’s see what copywriters are available. Available now. Like, and we can reach out to these folks that are available now and get them moving on stuff like immediately. And there’s ways to do this where you just kind of like have a couple of folks that you hire for an outreach and you have them do a bake off. If you want to hire someone long-term and find the best person who communicates the best, has the best work product. There’s nuances to it, but just this general idea of like, I have to do the work because there’s no one else that can do it. 

00:12:42 Casey: No, there are so many people that can do it. And they’re like eager for the work. I mean, a $14 an hour Pakistani who has a hundred percent job success rate. He’s already earned $3,000. He’s worked almost 300 hours on 13 jobs or what is that? 19 jobs. Like that’s a guy that maybe you give a shot to. So as a Fractional CMO, your job is not to be the implementation team. It is to be the strategist and leader. And then implementation happens through implementers. I would always rather hire the right person, the best person, the technical person to do the work.

00:13:19 Casey: Instead of finding someone like me who’s like a good generalist, but not the right person to like write JavaScript. Like, yeah, I can ask Chad GPT, but I kind of want to get an expert to do it. Especially if that expert’s going to cost me a hundred bucks to do it start to finish. Who pays that a hundred bucks? Who pays for these vendors exclusively your client? This is another major fail point that I see when people become fractional CMOs. They say  they act like pirates. So here’s what pirates do. Pirates say, all right, I’m going to go get $10,000 from my client. All right, and I have 10 grand.

00:13:52 Casey: All right, now we need a website done. So I have to get a website developer. All right, I’m gonna give that person $1,000 a month. And then I’m gonna get a copyright. I’m gonna get them for $750 a month. And I’m gonna get this QA person and they’re only like $250 a month. And then I’m gonna get an ads like a media buyer and then a creative builder. And then I gotta get someone for landing pages. And like they’re doing all of this stuff and orchestrating it. And they’re just taking this bag of gold and they’re giving it out to all their compatriots. And then they’re left with what they’re left with.

00:14:16 Casey: The problem is it’s oftentimes those people are left with nothing. They have like no money left over at the end of that project. It was 10 grand for the work, the strategy, the leadership and the implementation. They paid out six, seven, $8,000 for the implementation. And now they find themselves stuck with two grand. And they’re like, damn, I worked really hard. I’m only making two grand on this project. From the outside, they’re like, I just closed a $10,000 deal. That feels cool.

00:14:44 Casey: But the reality is they’re only netting $2,000 or 3,000 or 5,000. In the vision that I have for you, and I said the holy book, I wrote a book on it, the Fractional CMO Method. If you haven’t read it, it’s great. Wall Street Journal bestseller. That book lays out this strategy in large, which is you’re paid for strategy and leadership exclusively. Implementation is someone else. Who pays for the implementation? Your client. Think about how weird it would be.

00:15:13 Casey: If you were working at a company and they hired a CFO, a chief financial officer, and then that CFO was like, great, you got to use all these vendors of mine and you have to pay me and then I’ll pay them. I would feel weird, wouldn’t it? Like, don’t you want, no, I want a bookkeeper. So let me just go hire a bookkeeper. Can I hire this person who’s a bookkeeper? They’re like, no, you got to hire it through me so that I can take my cut on it. Like, that’s silly. That’s not aligned with the best outcome for the client.

00:15:42 Casey: There’s a way to do this if you are an agency owner. And I think agency owners are in a really strong position to add fractional CMO services, but it’s a little different. So if anyone wants to talk about that, when we get to the Q and A, tell me that you’re an agency owner and I’ll help you kind of think through how to be a fractional CMO  as an agency owner. You can do it and make a lot of money and be very ethical.  But there are just some tricks to it that I think you have to follow in order to ride that ethical line and to really support your client the best. All right, so if you build this foundation right, you’re not doing the implementation. You’re doing the strategy and leadership. 

00:16:16 Casey: When you get paid, let’s say 10 grand, you keep the 10 grand. And if you’re paid through like E-Check or direct deposit, like you keep that 10 grand. If you’re paid through Stripe or something like that, you might lose 2.9% on processing. But by and large, you keep it all. That is a requirement for this model. Anything else to me is just a non-starter. It’s way too risky for you.

00:16:37 Casey: However, CMOs that come in to the CMOs Accelerate, they’re oftentimes at some kind of ceiling. Either they don’t have a client because they kind of don’t know what to do and they need the support on that. Or they have some clients but they’re stuck sub $10,000 a month. And the greatest differentiator between CMOs,  fractional CMOs are those who do  less than 10K a month and those that do more than 10K. It’s such a significant difference.

00:17:03 Casey: It’s like, if you can get to 10K a month in recurring revenues, a fractional CMO and keep it, like keep, just say $9,500 of it, right? So you might have some processing fees. You might have like a website,  you’re paying for hosting, maybe some email tools, whatever. But if you’re keeping like 95% of what you’re billing, you then kind of graduate to this next level. Inside the accelerator, we call it boardroom. And why is it so important? It’s because you see the world completely differently. It’s like, once it’s happened to you, you’re a changed person.

00:17:33 Casey: When you’re before it, you’re selling things for maybe two or three or $4,000 a piece a month. And you just don’t get it. You don’t understand the clients that you need to work with to be able to afford that single client that pays you 10,000, 12,000, $15,000 a month, $20,000 a month or more for your work as a fractional CMO. So it’s a really big differentiator. So the ceiling is you don’t have a client or you have less than 10K a month in clients. After you have 10K a month in client work and you’re keeping 95% of it.

00:18:03 Casey: So let’s say you do like 20K, but you only keep 40 % of it. That doesn’t qualify. Cause that’s the wrong model. If you’re doing 10K a month and you’re keeping 95% of it, then you can scale. Then that 10 can go to 20 and that 20 can go to 40. And that 40 can go to 60 or 80. All right. We’ve got a member in the accelerator who’s doing north of $80,000 a month as a fractional CMO. When I talked to him, which is rare because he’s so busy. He’s like, it’s crazy for me right now.

00:18:32 Casey: Klein’s in too many niches and it’s kind of  nuts. However, he’s making the money.  How many hours a week is he working? Probably a little more than 40, but probably no more than 50. But he’s making a million dollars a year as a fractional CMO. So if that makes sense where you are in life, consider that. I’ve got two young kids. I don’t have the time to work 50 hours a week as a fractional CMO. No way, no how. 20 hours a week, 15 hours a week, that’s a much better place for me. That works for me.

00:19:00 Casey: All right, so having that solid foundation is a requirement. Cause if you want to get to that $40,000 a month, that’s what I did when I was living in the RV years ago. I grew my business to like $42,000 a month as a fractional CMO. If you want to do that, you have to follow a model that allows you to win clients and scale the service that you provide to them. So let’s talk about getting ready for 2026.

00:19:26 Casey: This is gonna be a huge year for us. Like a huge year. Why? Because the whole fractional thing is just compounding. It’s just growing. We’re seeing fractional everything. I saw someone like saw an ad, fractional consulting. I don’t know what that is. I call that consulting. I don’t know about you guys. Like what’s fractional consulting? I don’t know. Other people have like fractional  marketing department. That doesn’t make sense to me.

00:19:53 Casey: It’s called freelancers or like an agency, you know? But like the word fractional is getting into the lexicon. People know what fractional means. And the people who are probably leading the way the best are fractional CFOs.  And we’re seeing fractional CFOs just take off. They’re doing very well.

00:20:12 Casey: I think we’re going to struggle to see something like fractional COOs take off. I don’t think that’s going to be a thing. That’s just my vision. I think it’s hard to be the  operations officer of multiple companies, but when it comes to CMO, we are just in the perfect position. We’re seeing  so many tools come online for us, like all the AI writing tools. Obviously those are easy. Image generation. ah If anyone here plays has played with Nano Bananas, the new video stuff from Google. Super exciting for us to be able to create great creative for ads.

00:20:41 Casey: If anyone who’s created a Facebook ad recently, you’ll write a couple of headlines that you put in and then they’re like, hey, we generated some AI headlines, they want us to use those. The barrier of entry to become a good marketer, I think  it’s difficult because it’s lower, but also it’s higher because we have to know what these AI-ers are doing and make sure that they’re doing the right thing. So 2026, we’re in a great position to dominate its fractional CMOs. Companies know about us and things have never been more complex in marketing than they are right now.

00:21:11 Casey: It is hard in marketing. There’s just so many things to do. People are like, should I be on TikTok shops?  Should I just do like a direct to sale ad on Google? What about Google LSA ads? Should I be doing something with uh ad role? Like they’re confused. Should I be doing something on TV? You know, what about us using like AI models? Is that better? Should we do human models? Should we do UGC? They’re just confused with all of this stuff that’s possible. They want you to come in, simplify and drive growth on the things that matter.  So 2026 is big. And if you do it right, let me tell you what it looks like to be a successful fractional CMO.  

00:21:54 Casey: You spend more time walking  and talking than you do sitting and typing. That’s the big differentiation. You spend more time walking and talking  than you do sitting and typing. Sitting and typing is what? Like, what are you doing when you sit and type? You’re creating  stuff like deliverables.  You’re doing like edits, you know, that kind of stuff. Not to say that you don’t do reviews. There is still some sitting, typing, mouse movement stuff. But by and large, your days are walking and talking if you choose to walk.

00:22:26 Casey: You spend more of your time saying  good job instead of do this. I don’t want to be in a relationship where I have direct reports at a, like with a client where the people come to me and say, Casey, what should I do today? And I’m like, Oh, I do this. What I want to say is, Hey, here’s the quarterly plan. We’re inking it right now. Next quarter. is what we’re doing. You got to get this stuff done over the next two weeks. Are you clear? Yes. Great.

00:22:53 Casey: Like ask me questions along the way, but in two weeks I want this done. They’re like, you got it boss. And then they deliver, they have a wedding, they get sick. They need to go see a family member, whatever the thing is. Like they can figure that out within those two weeks and still deliver. I don’t care if they’re working nights and weekends. That level of uh letting adults work gives you the benefit of not having to myopically focus on everyone’s day to day and feel stressed and micromanage but instead you just macro manage just big picture stuff  and people deliver. And if they don’t deliver, you just find someone else. It is not hard to find good talent right now. We are in an incredible position to find great talent.  

00:23:34 Casey: I think AI is doing a lot to lay off a lot of talented people and people are just like eager for good meaningful jobs. So if we as Fractional CMOs can develop a great  role for someone and then post it online, like we can get a thousand applicants in two days on LinkedIn jobs, no problem. Go to Indeed, you can probably get a thousand applicants in one day. So we’re in a position right now where we can, once hired and once the strategy is laid out, just lead adults to do adult stuff, like to kick ass, to win, to play hard, play to win. It’s a lot of fun. The idea that you say good job more than do this is really critical. When we say good job, we’re like encouraging the positive result that someone generated.

00:24:20 Casey: And then we don’t even have to talk about the bad thing they do. You know, it’s like when you train a dog, you say like, good job, you sat when I said sit, you you like retrieve the ball when I said to you like, good job. It’s not like bad job. You didn’t do it. You didn’t do it. It’s just a better work environment for everybody. uh Your direct reports are gonna find that they feel like a sense of accomplishment, a sense of meaning. They’re part of  the bigger thing that you’re all working on together. They feel like a cohesive team. It’s very exciting. All right, so let’s talk about what makes for a good client.

00:24:50 Casey: What makes for a good client? Here’s an easy one. Their ability to pay is a big one. If they can’t pay you, if they’re offering you something like sight unseen, they’re like, I’ll give you equity. You might feel, I don’t know, tickled, flattered. Like how nice someone wants to offer you part of their company. The reason they’re offering you that is because they can’t afford your fees. If you’re talking to people that want to give you equity early on, always my anticipation is that they’re not gonna let you be a fractional anything. They’re gonna say, well, I’m paying you in equity. My expectation is that you sleep under your desk and you work 24/7 on this, which is a reasonable expectation. That’s what they’re doing too. 

00:25:31 Casey: So equity only bad people who  fight you over price bad. There’s two things that business can solve for. They can solve for cost or they can solve for speed. Cost versus speed. I would rather work with a client that’s solving for speed over cost. I’d rather work for the client that says, Casey, we’re doing this thing and now is the time. And if we do it right, we’re gonna rock.  Like we’re gonna pull in the best people. We’re gonna do it. We’re gonna invest a bunch of money. We’re gonna make it happen. But I need you to make it happen. First is the ones that are like, hey, let’s lower the cost. It’s okay if we go a little bit slower. I’d rather move fast. I think it’s more exciting. I would say that it’s almost like a… I don’t know. I think this is generally bad advice. 

00:26:16 Casey: You hear this in like consulting, which is get rich clients that are dumb and move slow. Those rich clients continue to pay you. They don’t get it. They continue to pay. They pay you high rates. Everything’s fine. And maybe that’s okay. But to me, I just want to work with like fast moving, fun, exciting companies who are solving big problems where I can pull in like a dream team and we can just sprint together. And it’s a lot of fun. I was talking on boardroom on Tuesday  and ah one of my CMOs said like, did you have like a daily standup? Did you meet with the team, your marketing department every single day at that client? I said, yeah. 

00:26:53 Casey: And come to think of it, it was some of the most fun I had. Everyone was like rallying together. We were like, what are we doing today? We’re gonna go spend like $20,000 a day on ads. Like it was fun. We were doing cool stuff together. It was exciting. I wanna be a part of something like that. So if you’re working with clients that… It’s like pulling teeth to get paid $2,000, $3,000. They’re the wrong client. They’re just like in the wrong, they’re at the wrong country club, right? They’re at the country club anyone can join. You want to go to the next level. You want to work with the folks that are, this is difficult because what makes them unique? It’s like, maybe it’s their niche. 

00:27:30 Casey: Maybe it’s their revenue. Maybe it’s an investment that they recently received. Maybe there’s some pressures in the market or maybe it’s just their commitment. I worked with a guy and I was like, we were talking back and forth. He’s like, yeah, I want to go to the company by XYZ. And I was like, it doesn’t sound like you’re really committed to anything big here. Like, don’t you just want to be the biggest and the best? He’s like, I don’t know, let me think about it. And then the next time we got on the call, he was completely transformed. He was like, yes, I want to be the biggest and best. I want to be the most dominant in our market. That was the language he used, the most dominant. That’s exciting. I want to go work with that person. I don’t care if they’re the 10th position on the leaderboard of companies holding market share. 

00:28:12 Casey: I want to work with the one who’s the most committed and willing to do the work. So if you ask like Casey, what makes for a good client, it’s their ability to pay you that money not coming from their kids college fund, because that’s a weird relationship. And that’s definitely happened before. I’ve experienced that right. People just get real weird when they kind of like grab money out of the 529. And then the client that’s just like working on something where speed matters.

00:28:38 Casey: And you can find in different industries, different ways that speed is going to come up. So someone is like, they’re just ready. Like, Hey, we’ve done this stuff for the last 10 years and we’re ready to like adopt this model. And we’re going to sprint that model until exit. Great. That could be a cool, um, a cool client to work with. Like they’re just ready for you. And you don’t know any of that stuff until you talk to them. You can’t like go, you could go to crunch base and figure out like who’s received a series a or series B  investment round, but that doesn’t tell you the experience of the CEO or the commitment of the CEO. 

00:29:15 Casey: That CEO might be like, yeah, we’ve got some nice dry powder. We’re just gonna sit on it here for the next year as we kind of do some R &D. That’s what they might say. Or they might say like, hey, we’ve got the money. We’re gonna go spend it now. So there’s really very few external things that signify if someone is the perfect fit client. That’s why you just got to talk to folks. It’s got to go and talk to people.

00:29:37 Casey: You gotta talk to strangers. It is the number one thing that you can do. If you’re walk away with like, what is the secret here? It’s talk to strangers and have a really smart offer that actually solves the problem. So to win your first client, you got to know who you wanna work with. No business owner has ever said, oh, you know what I’d like? I’d like the person who kind of works with a smattering of different companies and doesn’t have any real solid process and it’s just kind of kind of wing it.  But they’re smart. Like no one wants that person. 

00:30:13 Casey: You want the person who’s the specialist in it. The seasons are turning. I’ve got this hundred year old house. I’ve got a furnace in the basement. It’s a, uh I forget what it’s called, like a hive. I don’t know. It’s it’s a vaporizer. It’s like a steam boiler. And there’s  one  family that knows this stuff in the Philly area. They’re out on the main line.  And I’ve had other people come. I’ve had like kind of like your big box HVAC folks come and they’re like, yeah, we can help. We’ll just like rip it out and install like this new hyper new efficiency thing. That’s not what I want. I want someone who knows this thing that I’m doing. I don’t want someone to come and say like, yeah, I’ll figure it out. 

00:30:49 Casey: No way. I want the guy whose dad actually installed the unit in my house. That’s my number one guy, right? He’s the guy who gets it. He understands the kind of the value of having this steam boiler in the house, how it’s already piped, how everything works. I want that guy. I want the specialist. So for you, you must choose who you’re talking to and be a specialist for them. You need to be the best that’s out there for them. And you can be the best. You can be the best because you’re the only one talking to them.  You’re the only one in front of them right at that moment. That can make you the best. But you have to declare a niche that you want to be in. Like Daniel, Daniel joined the accelerator. 

00:31:30 Casey: I love Daniel. He’s down in Florida and he works with ophthalmologists and just like eye doctors kind of in general. And he was charging a fee that was like two, $3,000 a month for fractional CMO services, but then also ate a bunch of that  fee by providing additional services on top of just strategy and leadership. Him joining the accelerator allowed him to  shed some of those lower performing or lower paying clients that demanded a lot of labor from him and his team.

00:31:59 Casey: And now he’s offering fractional CMO services where he’s doing a whole lot less work and making a lot more money. The difference is that he punched up to the next level. If you go to an eye doctor, that’s got two docs and one business, you kind of expensive. If you go to a group that has 25 docs, your marketing strategy can easily work for all 25 and 25 paying you is a lot easier than two paying you that same rate. So that’s an example. Then you’ve got like Ben and Stacey, they’re both in home services.

00:32:28 Casey: So what’s home services like? Home security, electrical, plumbing, roofing, decks, pressure washing, whatever. So two different people,  not related. One in Texas, one in Colorado, I think. And they’re working with home service companies. And what do you want to look for in a home service company? Well, enough trucks. Does it have to be a franchise or going to be corporate owned? Doesn’t matter to me. I feel like that’s not really the  the differentiator. It’s just like how many trucks are on the road. Maybe it’s sexist, but like how many guys  are out doing the work, right? How many electric  electricians are out there actually working every day? How many sparkies are there?

00:33:10 Casey: So that’s what you’re looking for, like trucks. Once you get that level of trucks in your mind, that’s right. It doesn’t matter if you work with one company that has 30 trucks in Houston or a company that is tri-state and has 10 trucks in three states, right? But like that’s gonna give you a basis of them being able to pay you. I think of Brandy, she’s up in Toronto and her experience is in e-commerce with a specialization in health and wellness.

00:33:37 Casey: She’s awesome. She just closed a client. We actually passed the lead over to her and she closed it. That doesn’t always happen, but sometimes leads come to us and we find the right CMO and we introduce them. And Brandi was able to close a $10,000 a month US client based on a lead that we passed her.  And she rocks this e-commerce  space with a specialization in health and wellness. And just think like, if Stacy’s in home service, Brandi’s in e-comm… And someone comes in and they say, hey, we sell nail polish online. Do you have any CMOs? I wouldn’t introduce Stacey. That would make no sense. Stacey might be able to do it. I mean, she’s a smart person, but her specialization is in home services, not in e-commerce, certainly not in health and wellness or health and beauty. 

00:34:23 Casey: So focusing on a niche is critical  because people will pay more for the right thing.  I will pay more for the  solution that’s bespoke to my needs than I will for a general solution. All right. So how do you get your next bigger client? You just increase the floor. The floor is the minimum you’re willing to accept. If you want a great book on this, Dr. Benjamin Hardy’s new book, The Science of Scaling, killer book. And in his formula, he talks about just increasing the floor. It’s very kind of of the times right now. I think it’s the best business book I’ve read all year.

00:35:03 Casey: And he talks about raising the floor. What’s the minimum you’re willing to accept?  And for a lot of you, you’re accepting $500 a month clients doing SEO stuff or Google ads stuff or meta ads or your $2,000 a month here for some amount of work. Here’s where I want you to peg 250 an hour minimum is what you’re paid for the labor that you do. That’s it, 250 an hour. That’s your minimum. It could be a couple thousand bucks an hour. That’s fine too.

00:35:30 Casey: You’re going to find that opportunity as you continue to grow and find  clients who have bigger problems and you really define yourself as the biggest and the best and the right person to hire, but 250 an hour is your minimum. So do the math. If you’re working with a client right now you’re like, Hey Casey, I’m charging 10K. What are you taking home out of that? Is it 250 an hour or is it something far less because you’re throwing cash out to vendors to do work. So increasing the floor is, is what it allows you to do is just turn people away that are a non-fit.

00:36:00 Casey: If they’re not good for you, you just turn them away  and maybe send them to somebody else, fine. But you don’t want to service them. You don’t want to service them even for 30 days or 14 days or buy this one package. It’s a flat fee and I can turn out these reports with ChatGPT. Just don’t do that stuff. Just don’t be that person.  Be the person who exclusively solves big problems and find bigger and bigger and more fun and more lucrative problems to solve. And when you’re in that position, the client quality that’s coming to you is increasing dramatically. 

00:36:29 Casey: The fun is increasing dramatically because your marketing budget increases. I worked at a company, uh it was a private email company and uh we had just like 10 bucks to get a new customer. They gave me a $10 bill and I had to go find us a new customer with it. That was my job in marketing. Man, that was hard. It’s hard to find a customer for $10. However, on the other side, I worked at the same time with a company where we were selling an investment opportunity in grocery anchored commercial real estate.  And I could attract that person for a couple thousand dollars. So two separate things I’m working on, right? 

00:37:06 Casey: One is like getting people to sign up for an email service. The other one is investing $50,000 in a uh grocery store. One, I can spend 10 bucks. One, I can spend, let’s say a thousand or 2000 or $3,000 to acquire that person. Spending that thousand bucks is way more fun. We can have way more fun. can do cool stuff. We can invent stuff. We can hire better talent to help. And all you need is three to five clients. If you have three to five clients, you’re done. I do not want you to believe that you have to have like 20 clients. I saw that. I saw like an article someone wrote recently, like how I landed 20 fractional CMO clients in my first year. 

00:37:45 Casey: And my first thought reading that is Jesus, like that’s awful. Like why would you need 20? Right? It’s like going on  21st dates, like, you can probably get better than having to go on 21st dates to find someone good, right? You can be like a little bit more exacting in your outreach, in your conversation so that you know that you’re talking to quality people. I don’t want you to have 20 clients. I want you to have three to five. You want to increase your revenue over that? You start replacing your low paying, low fun, annoying clients or clients that aren’t moving fast enough or whatever. You replace them with better clients. You upgrade them to the next level of clients.

00:38:22 Casey: That’s one big idea. And then the second one is you get upside.  So as your rates increase, so does your opportunity to solve bigger problems  and then find ways for you to get asymmetric upside. Asymmetric upside is saying something like, I’ll do it for  $12,000 a month plus 5 % of upside on all revenue generated from marketing. We’ve got some members that are doing that and their quarterly checks are pretty fat. know, like that’s an easy way for them to make an extra  hundred. $200,000 per year and that’s paid out quarterly.

00:38:58 Casey: So there’s really no limit to what you can make as a fractional CMO. You just have to get over that $10,000 a month hump. And once you’re over it, it’s Joseph Campbell’s here with a thousand faces, right? You go and you slayed the dragons and you figured it out and you got the golden chalice and you came home and everything’s kind of the same except you see the world a little bit differently. You see the problems that are bigger and you just kind of have a way of talking about them and working with those clients and helping them. And they just have a way of paying you higher rates and you solving bigger problems and it’s a beautiful relationship. That’s where you want to be. 

00:39:33 Casey: So from the outside, these people might look the same. Someone who’s doing less than 10K a month is a fractional CMO. Some are doing 20,000, 30, 40, 50, 80,000 a month. But the big difference is how they view the clients that they’re working with, the opportunities that are in front of them, the problems that they’re solving and that kind of stuff. So I want to share with you something that we have coming up on October 6th. That’s Monday, October 6th. Yeah. So like in a week and a half.

00:39:59 Casey: There’s something that business owners want in Q4 that isn’t you being a fractional CMO with them. Sounds weird, but there’s something that they want. So I’m doing a special training for our members on that. And it’s all about what to sell in October to these folks so that you can dominate October and November and December to line you up for radically high paying 2026. And we’re doing that inside the CMOS Accelerator. And I’m dropping the link in here. You know the shtick. I want you guys to book in a call if you haven’t before talk to Justin on my team and just see if you’re a good fit. Justin will ask you questions just to qualify you. 

00:40:34 Casey: Do you have the marketing experience to be a fractional CMO? Can you join our map of fractional CMOs all across the world? Are you the right kind of person who can actually solve problems for clients? Can you think at that level?  Are you close?  If he thinks that you’re potentially a good fit, he’ll introduce you to one of two people on my team, John or Melissa. They’ve both been with me for years. uh John’s been with me the longest, but Melissa’s my sister-in-law  and they’ll ask you questions more about you and they’ll share anything you want about the accelerator and what we do and we’ll see if it’s a good fit for you. 

00:41:07 Casey: But it’s my belief  that  Q4 is it. Like it’s about getting in front of the right clients right now in Q4 so you can dominate, win business and start servicing them. This is going to give you the easiest Q4 holiday season potentially with the highest revenue you’ve had maybe in a while or ever. I can think we have a member in our WhatsApp group in boardroom and he just shared, I can pull up the message WhatsApp’s loading.  He said something like he just had his biggest revenue month  ever. Which is so cool to see. Might take me a minute to… on track for my best month this year so far. Okay, great. That’s what he said. Best month this year so far. And he says that he’s deep in his first 30 days with his new engaged client, but things are going smoothly. Just has to keep his head down and get the new team wrangled in. That’s what it’s like when you bring a new client in. 

00:42:09 Casey: The first 30 days with them is hairy. I want you to bite off that first 30 days with them  in like October, November, so that you don’t have to do it in December or January.  And you can get to building a great strategy and pushing the team forward for 2026. That’s what it’s all about here. So that’s where we’re at. What was the option? So, okay, let’s move over to Q and A. I’d love to answer any questions that you all have on this. And if you got something out of this, just like, will you let me know? Like this was valuable. I had this takeaway. Would you write it in the chat or just come off mute and share something? It’s helpful to know kind of what’s landing for you all here.  And come on video if you can’t do, unless you’re an AI. 

00:42:45 Guest: One thing that landed for me is just the fact

You should increase your floor. Like I’ve noticed just as I have conversations and I just don’t open the door for certain  conversation, certain aspects of conversation that have in the past, it just goes a different route, different direction. As far as like I just start talking to like, I  used to open calls talking about just newsletters and stuff. And then I’m like, actually, need to know how this fits in your whole strategy. And they’re like, Oh man, we only have sales. And so it’s like, so then now let’s meet with the owner and talk about it. So just a little shift makes a big difference. 

00:43:17 Casey: Let me give you a nugget on that. Get on with the sales leader. I have like this vision of what like a good salesperson is. They’re kind of crazy, right? They’re like super hyperactive. They’re terrible at note taking follow up. But like you throw them in front of anybody and they could somehow extract money out of them. So I want to talk to them. I’m going to pretend like you’re the guy. I’m like, Ryan, welcome, dude.  We’re just chatting about kind of what you guys are doing in sales and everything. I hear that you’re killing it.

00:43:44 Casey: But listen, I bet you’re not logging things in the CRM or the team’s not doing follow-up and that kind of stuff.  And I’m wondering if marketing could take that off your shoulders, what would it look like? What kind of stuff would they take off your shoulders?  And you hear them like, nothing, we’re good. It’s like, yeah, I hear you, but like, what if all this stuff happened for you? So you could just spend more time talking to these people and selling. What do think you could do? Like, how could your quota, you know, could you hit your quota better? You start enrolling them  and did not happen to be CRM monkeys, like going in there and filling out the CRM stuff. Those people start loving you and then you’ve got your sales guy fighting for you to get hired.  

00:44:19 Guest: That’s awesome. Yeah. That’s good. Thank you. 

00:44:21 Casey: Yeah. You’re welcome in. Awesome. Who else? Mark, you got something? 

00:44:28 Mark: No, I just said that. I mean, you need a relationship with the decision-maker maker. That’s, that’s, that’s the bottom line. And you know, if you can’t build that trust  and prove to them a serious return on investment, you know,  it’s all for naught, but yeah. So I’m just saying build a relationship with the decision maker, which is sometimes hard. I mean. 

00:44:58 Casey: Yeah. Yeah, it is. Oftentimes  getting on the call though, with the decision maker, if you can get on the call with them, Mark, my recommendation is you just ask them open-ended questions  about like where they’re going. Like I wanna be enrolled in someone’s future. That’s my number one goal. I want you to tell me where you’re going. Cause either I wanna cheer you on or I wanna cheer you on and offer ways that I can help or people I know can help. Right? But just like enroll me. So asking that open-ended question, Hey, what are you guys doing in 2026? What are you excited about? What’s growth gonna look like? Are you guys growing your sales team? 

00:45:29 Casey: Are you guys launching any new products? When you get enrolled in that, then you start kind of like pulling out where marketing might be failing. And then you can transition to maybe how you can help. Literally with this line. Hey, Mark, do you mind if I share how I think I might be able to help? 

00:45:42 Mark: Sure. 

00:45:43 Casey: Yeah, go ahead. Right. Easy transition. And that’s like your soft pitch. Taylor, I got you after Ryan. Mark, what else you got on that? Anything?  

00:45:51 Mark: No, I was just going to say, I mean, and  my approach to this business has been, I mean,  I was corporate America for  ever making great money.  Now I started my own agency and it’s like, here’s what I’m doing to these guys. I’m like, it’s gain share. I mean, if you win, I win. Right.  You know, period. So I don’t want to. 

00:46:15 Casey: Yeah. And I love the agency model. 

00:46:16 Mark: Going to the point, but. 

00:46:18 Casey: Let me just share on the agency model real quick. I think the agency model is a great model. I love agency work. think agencies are also finding that folks are…  that their agency is less powerful in a lot of ways than they used to be. Like before an agency just had like the talent that no one else could get access to. However, it seems like agencies now are there’s certainly specialized agencies, but I think there’s like pressure to like.

00:46:38 Casey: Some people are going direct to hire folks off Upwork or Fiverr.com or whatever.  And I think the agency owner needs to add fractional CMO services where they are the fractional CMO and they’re paid a monthly fee outside of the agency as if it was a separate company. So Mark, you’ve got your agency, your agency’s billing, let’s just say five grand a month for agency work. Cool.  Mark comes in, fractional CMO, you’re billing on top of that five grand a month or 10 grand a month or 15 grand a month… kind of depending on the problems and what the client can afford. And there are two separate things. The agency P&L, you’re going to find your 30, 40 % margins, your fractional CMO work, you’re going to find 9,500% margins. 

00:47:19 Casey: So that’s the route that they work together. And then you say, Hey, I can cover these things. My agency can do it. We’ll put that together in a proposal and pitch it to you. You want to them separate. And this is really tricky. I think the, is the most tricky for folks that have partners in their agencies because if I have a partner, Mark, you and I are partners in an agency and I go do fractional CMO work, I don’t wanna pay you for it, dude. I don’t want you to take half my money for all the work I’m doing.  So you wanna peel that off and go do the fractional CMO work and maybe you pay the agency a 10 % recurring fee for driving the traffic or whatever it is, that might be okay. But generally speaking, if you’re doing the labor, you should command that check in totality. 

00:48:06 Mark: Amen.  Yeah, great. Thank you, brother. 

00:48:07 Casey: Yeah. Thanks Mark. Ryan, what’s up?

00:48:11 Ryan: So you had mentioned, had two quick questions. One you had mentioned about some quarterly payment or something. I just didn’t catch that. And then the other,  that was a quick thing. 

00:48:21 Casey: So just with upside. So if you’re working with a client and they’re paying you monthly, my vision is you get paid monthly with clients. Let me just tell you, I signed a client in November, I think last year, and I signed them and we signed a two year commitment together. So first of all, it’s a two year commitment  and then it’s a monthly fee. And then with upside, I can get paid quarterly on the upside. So that would be like a percentage of revenue generated for marketing or if we hit certain goals or whatever. And it’s really nuanced kind of depending on the company and the growth and the capitalization they have and all that stuff. But that’s the idea. You just don’t want to compute your bonus every month just because it’s a pain, dude. 

00:49:04 Casey: It’s like, you want clients that are good for the money. And then every 90 days you invoice them. 

00:49:08 Ryan: Wait, so you’re paying the normal payment is the monthly and then the quarterly is the… 

00:49:14 Casey: The quarterly bonus, yeah. Yep. Yeah. And then what changes in you, Ryan, is you start treating them more as a partner. You know, and if your incentivization structure is right, if your incentivization structure is wrong, you’re just going to try to like maximize revenue in the short term, take your cash and then leave. But because you get that ongoing monthly… You actually just, want that ongoing monthly to persist, but you also want your quarterly dividends or payouts to be high. 

00:49:43 Ryan: It makes sense.  I was in a mastermind this week and I  started, I just kind of said, Hey, here’s what I’m doing now. Kind of let everybody be aware. And I talked about fractional CMO and then two guys said, Oh, they have fraction of CMOs. And then, so I was kind of talking with them about it. And then the one guy really, what he was describing was an agency. And so I said, Oh, it sounds more like you’re working with just an agency that’s doing social media and ads. he said, well, yeah, that’s  yeah. Is that a normal confusion or was that just that one guy on earth confused about it? 

00:50:09 Casey: So there’s a company, Hawk Media, they sell like outsource chief marketing officer.  They’ve been around for a long time.  I personally don’t think that it is ethically in line with the client’s best interest. Like an agency that sells internal to them a fractional CMO, I think… I don’t find that to be ethical. That’s why I think it needs to be two separate companies. So in Mark’s example, Mark’s got his agency, Elliot Enterprises, but then he’s got Mark’s Fractional CMO business  separate. And he only brings his agency when it makes sense. That’s the ethical line, because that’s what’s best for the client. So yes, I think it is common that people hear that. There’s kind of an interesting tool. I’m not going to recommend it, but icon.com. It is an AI ad generator.

00:51:03 Casey: It’s cool, it’s like a little early, maybe give it a year and it might be super, super cool. But they claim to be like your AI CMO, you know? It’s just like, no, like anyone can call them anything that they want, but like that ain’t this,  you know? That’s not Ryan being in there fighting for it, meeting with the sales team, showing up with the sales guys and being like, why aren’t you guys calling my leads? And they’re like, they don’t get into CRM and then you go chase the CRM techs down and get that figured out.

00:51:31 Casey: You know, get your reporting right. Like that’s what the CMO does. The agency has never incentivized to solve those problems. So the agency is incentivized to find agency work exclusively. Like that’s their job. So if there’s another problem, like another problem is we need to get, whatever. We need to do  a,  one of our locations is going to go do a live event at a home and garden show. And we need to like put the booth together for it. The agency’s like, we don’t do that work.

00:52:02 Casey: It’s like, someone’s got to, you know? So like that kind of stuff, think falls outside of the utility of the agency. And that’s why I want to see in-house marketing technicians. That’s also going to increase the value of the business. So if you’re with the business, Ryan, from where it is today to exit, if you’re with them to exit, you want to build lower cost in-house labor so that exit value is higher so that you get a piece of that.  your incentivization structure, I think is much bigger.

00:52:32 Ryan: Awesome. And I don’t know if there’s another question. have another follow up, but if there’s another question.

00:52:36 Casey: Go for it. And then we’ll go to Taylor.

00:52:38 Ryan: Okay. I’m doing like, I did some LinkedIn and then I did newsletters. Like I came from corporate America too, but I was in like supply chain management and ops management. And then now I see a lot of transferable skills now that I’ve learned a lot of marketing stuff. And so I was just planning on doing newsletter ghost writing. And then I started to have more strategy conversations with people. And that’s just the way I think about stuff. And so I’ve got some clients now that our newsletter, but I think I could easily,  you just start to kind of have–

00:53:09 Casey: I have a new offer. This is kind of what I’m doing. But then, it’s very, here’s tradition. I don’t have a new offer. Hey, now that you have this newsletter thing locked in, we got to go now and solve the bigger problem. Let’s talk about what that looks like. By the way, I call that my fractional CMO work. I’m not introducing a new offer. I’m telling them that they’re now in a place where the pain that they have requires a new solution.

00:53:25 Ryan: Okay. That makes sense. And then for people that I am doing the CMO slash advisor… Like the newsletter stuff is also very  lucrative. But, I don’t know. I guess, do you think I should still kind of have an option to do it myself  or–

00:53:40 Casey: Do you have the newsletter stuff? 

00:53:42 Ryan: Yeah. 

00:53:43 Casey: So I think that fundamentally the answer is  like  the answer publicly is no. And the answer privately is whatever you want to do, Right. Like, so publicly I only do fractional CMO work. I’m working, I’m helping a guy out right now. Client of mine years ago, he’s like relaunching his emails. He has 120,000 people on his mailing list. He didn’t mail them for two years. How do you mail 120,000 people? I don’t know anyone that can solve the problem. So I’m like, fuck it, let’s do it together. I’ll do it for you for free. Like, let me just do this for fun, because I’m learning. I  hired a woman in Romania and she’s like building out all the email sending stuff and she’s managing all that, but like we just had some problem with personal identifiable information and like, I’m just like learning and playing and doing stuff and I’m fine to do that stuff, Ryan. 

00:54:33 Casey: I’m not going to stop doing that because I enjoy it, but I’m going to ever offer that on the front end. It’s like, you can have me as your high price fractional CMO or like I can work for free and do this stuff or I can work low price and write these newsletters, you know,  never do that stuff.  Only sell the big vision of what you do  exclusively. 

00:54:51 Ryan: Yeah. All right. Thank you. 

00:54:53 Casey: Yeah, you’re welcome. Taylor. What’s up Taylor? Where are you based?

00:54:55 Taylor: I’m in Little Rock, Arkansas, and I think you just you just said you’re a dabbler. 

00:55:00 Casey: Yeah, I’m a dabbler.

00:55:01 Taylor: I was listening to that podcast yesterday. It was good. I definitely identify as a dabbler, too. I am meeting today with John. I’m really excited. I’m hoping that before the end of this week, which is less than 24 hours away, that I am signing up for the accelerator program. So I’m really excited to join. I’m excited to hear about the October call to talk about how we can really set up for success and how we can close out the year well. Is there anything else that’s coming up this year for people on the accelerator course? What else can we look forward to? 

00:55:35 Casey: Yeah, so much. So much. So we do on average, we haven’t finalized, Michael and I will finalize tomorrow the agenda for October, just to ink it in. But we typically do somewhere around like 15, 16 live calls a month. So it’s about four days a week of calls. We’ve got a double header today. We’ve got a great copywriter coming in to talk about leveraging AI to build brand voice. So this is a nice way to get like, if you work with a CEO, it’s like a CEO founder led brand kind of thing, to be able to get their voice out in a way that is low friction and high value. 

00:56:14 Casey: Yeah, I mean, we have a ton of calls. So we’ve got calls on things like identifying your niche, that’s how you’d be onboarded. So you’ve got your sales ready process. How do you get sales ready? It’s like, who are you selling to and what are you selling? And then where are these people and how do you go talk to them? Like that’s the first thing to figure out. And then we want to get you into that road to 10K, which is getting to that $10,000 a month.  So we have recurring calls that are based on that. So every other Friday we do a call with Raphael. Raphael spent with me the absolute longest. I hired him when I was living in the RV  and  Raphael coaches you on what you have to do over the next two weeks. It helps you do a plan around that. 

00:56:56 Casey: The opposite Fridays, we have it just for people that are in that sales ready process to get to sales ready. We also have a recurring call for everyone that’s in that road to 10K. So everyone talks about what they’re doing. So those are like kind of your basis, kind of like foundational stuff. Then on top of that, we have calls for identifying your prospects to do outreach to. Yesterday, I just held one on copyright. I’m like, how do you talk about your story? I’ve got this member, Taylor, she is amazing. She did big stuff but she never talks about it. She’s like too humble. And you can’t be humble when you talk to somebody. 

00:57:29 Casey: Like you gotta be like, hey, I’m a badass, I did these things, do you wanna talk? Not, hey, I’m just a really nice person from Little Rock, maybe we could talk sometime.  You wanna showcase that you’re the badass. So if you don’t have that 20 year experience at a major like Fortune 500, that’s okay, I don’t either… but you still can talk about what you’re doing in a way that is interesting so that when someone gets introduced to you or a message from you or something, they say, oh my God, like, honey, you can’t believe who just messaged me. This person’s perfect for me. Like that’s all about the positioning. Yeah, we’ve got annual planning. So building a plan for 2026 for your client. We do that in December. We’ll do that probably the second week of December. 

00:58:11 Casey: Michael probably knows the date, but probably around the 17th of December. That way you have the full year ahead planned before Christmas,  before New Year’s, everything’s locked in. So you can go off sailing for like an easy last two weeks. We try to say that the 19th of December is the end of the year for our fractional CMOs. Cause if you treat everything like December 19th is the end, then you can kind of chill for the  next like week and a half. So we’ve got those things coming up. Yeah, we got some other surprise stuff coming up.  John can share some more stuff. Yeah.

00:58:45 Taylor: Thank you. One last small question. eh When it comes to niche,  whichever one we choose to say,  I think that’s a niche. 

00:58:54 Casey: I say both in the same sentence. 

00:58:55 Taylor: Exactly. Is it sufficient enough  to say,  for example, and I know I’m going to have a better conversation about this with John or a more specific conversation with John and with the future of the acceleration program, but is it enough to say, you know, CRO is the focus of my role as a CMO? And that’s that’s my niche is that I’m helping companies with CRO or is that still too broad and too broad? 

00:59:23 Casey: Yep. So if you’re sorry, are you in the black cat club? If a black cat? It’s the best club. OK, cool. Extra points for that one. So if  CRO is the best modality to generate the biggest result in the least amount of time. It is completely underutilized and it is an absolute killer thing to be great at. Say most marketers don’t do enough split testing or CRO. So love it. We’re talking about conversion rate optimization, right? Yeah. Here’s the problem though. What if the client is on Drupal? What if they’re on Spotify? What if they’re on a WordPress? What if they’re on a custom Salesforce stack with a bunch of like custom code?  You’re not the best for all of those? Like maybe-ish. What if it’s B2B versus B2C? You know, what if it’s social media content that drives the traffic versus B2B formal kind of selling high ticket, SaaS? Can you do both of them at the same time or would you rather just kind of simplify?

01:00:27 Taylor: I would argue that if you understand what parts of a funnel make for good improvements, it doesn’t matter whether they’re on Drupal or whether they’re on Wix. It doesn’t matter where they are as long as you understand how to reach the customer. But I do understand that that can be different and the way that you speak to the customer during the sales flow could be different from  business to business or from industry to industry. 

01:00:50 Casey: I think at a minimum, you need to niche down to  direct to consumer versus B2B. And then like high ticket, mid ticket, low ticket, consultative sales cycle or transactional sales, long gestation, short gestation, you know, that kind of stuff.  Like  we’ve got a, like a kind of a DNA formula on that.  I wrote about it in my book too, find your CMO. Kind of broke that down, but I think that’s the way that you need to look at it to kind of choose that niche a little bit tighter. So it can be irrespective of industry. You could be selling SaaS or you could be selling health care benefits, or you could be selling, I don’t know, whatever. It doesn’t matter. Travel insurance, it doesn’t matter what you’re selling as long as it follows a similar DNA, because then the person will be like, oh, that makes sense. You’re the right person because you’ve done that stuff before. And then you could talk about like,  oh, I ran a test over here at a company that sells this thing, not like what you sell, but similar for these reasons. That’s why we’re testing it.

01:01:52 Casey: People will feel like you’re giving them the upper hand,  but it is not just CRO because you need to bring in all of the other marketing and hold onto that too.  I think of myself as a copywriter as my core pedigree. You probably think of yourself as a CRO is your core pedigree, right? Great. We’ve got people that come in that are branding as their core pedigree. They’re really good  at the branding stuff. But then when it comes to like the direct response, data side, they kind of fall apart. Right? So we all have our strengths and lean on those strengths and showcase those I think in an appropriate way um is the best thing to do.  

01:02:32 Taylor: Thanks, Casey. 

01:02:34 Casey: Yeah, you’re welcome. Say hi to John for me. Javier, what’s up? 

01:02:37 J: How you doing? 

01:02:39 Casey: How I doing? I’m good. A little thirsty, but yeah. And I’m happy to stick around. I got a call in a half hour so I can stick around for a bit if anyone has more questions, but go ahead Javier. 

01:02:48 J: And I a few lined up for you. My question basically is kind of more around the the biz def kind of piece. I just kind of started jumping into this over the past three weeks. I’ve been fortunate to have some great introductions. I’ve had some momentum. I’ve done, I want to say three proposals already. I’ve got one that’s at the goal line that we’re going to be going with just the consultation full day and then trying to do a little bit of advisory work to get them prepared for January. Kind like what you’ve laid out so far at the beginning of this.

01:03:17 J: I’m kind of working along with their budget because it’s end of year. They don’t have a ton of budget allocated for marketing, but we’re trying to build that out for 2026. And just, you know, other pieces I’ve got going on as far as opportunities of it. Like I said, have been introductions in the right niche. mean, I’ve got it dialed down. I feel like we’re B2B tech and commercial service providers. really those folks that are going to be tech. 

01:03:40 Casey: I’m just getting in commercial service.  What’s a commercial service?

01:03:45 J: So commercial HVAC, commercial landscaping, commercial plumbing. So not basically home services, but these are gonna be like facility services or contractors. 

01:03:55 Casey: You’re selling to a facilities manager, you’re selling to an HOA, you’re selling to, are we really those? Property management? 

01:04:03 J: Yes, but  looking at those kind of like the either the aggregators or the leads in there, because what happens is that those areas, they don’t have marketing at all. So I’ve  essentially have I’ve actually created the podcast in that space, generated like 200 plus  episodes… essentially, it’s of like carved out my my understanding of what’s going on there. I’ve done some great stuff in my previous company.  I guess where I’m getting to is I feel as though I’ve kind of nailed my where I feel confident to sell into. It’s more of like an either antiquated approach where they don’t have the right pieces.  It’s very sales driven.

01:04:41 J: The CEO is the sales leader. And they’re doing 10 to 50 million approximately, but there’s nothing that’s duplicatable. They’re leading on like, we found something on LinkedIn, let’s just do this. And those are the areas that I’m looking at. But I guess where I’m looking is too, like, what are folks doing to just build that biz dev piece where I’m leveraging Sales Navigator, I’m leveraging the VMs and whatnot. I’m not afraid to talk to folks. That’s easy.

01:05:11 J: It’s really just getting into like the right type of folks. Because let’s face it, you and I know this CEOs aren’t just living and dying in LinkedIn. They’re not going to be in your DMs. 

01:05:21 Casey: Right. People saying like, I only got a 10 % acceptance rate on LinkedIn. It’s like, what percentage of the CEOs do you think we’re actually on LinkedIn? 20? 50 % acceptance rate.

01:05:32 J: Exactly. So I’m just kind of curious what folks are doing there, what your thoughts are on that piece. I’ve got the content created. We’ve got the machine kind of built out. I’ve got a little bit momentum kind of going here, but I need to get things kind of planned out for 2026. I feel confident for the rest of the year on some of these things kind of laying out overall.  

01:05:50 Casey: Yeah, great. Love it. So great job taking action and just being hungry on it.  On the biz dev side, it’s… You know the answer. So let me just tell it to you in a way that like, I think we’ll snap. If I was a spy agency, and I hired you to go infiltrate a biker gang, you could do it, right? And like, what would you do? You’d identify all the decision makers and you’d kind of like start laying out who’s the president, the vice president, right? The treasurer, like you’d lay it all out. You’d have that like Sam Crow map of everything. And then you would just monitor.

01:06:27 Casey: So you gotta know everything first. So if you’re in a niche, you can start defining who the major movers are, who the companies are. And then you start tracking things like job movement. Did someone lose the job? Did they get a job? Right? You wanna be that person. You wanna have a flag in your LinkedIn that says who you are and who you serve. And it needs to be short and to the point so that when they read it, they’re like, you’re my guy. Right? And then you’re you’re commenting, human commenting, never AI commenting, ever. If you use AI for LinkedIn, you can only use it to start the conversation, but never Which is what I do.

01:06:57 Casey: I would say people who are like, but you can use it for common follow-up. I think it’s dangerous and it risks your reputation. So it’s just like, know all these people and then be where they are. I mean, I hate to say that part of the secret here, I mean, there’s a lot on like how you’re doing your outreach, what you’re saying, what you’re selling, but a lot of it is like, you got to like just infiltrate and know it and be there if you really want to define yourself as the number one.

01:07:21 Casey: But by doing that, instead of being the guy that takes on two or three clients and says, I’m good until you lose them. And then you’ve got to go find them again. You know what I mean? If you don’t want to be that guy, but you want to be the dominant guy who’s got the business, who gets respect in the industry because he’s there, he’s doing the work. You need to know the movers. And then that business becomes a business hobby that you can sell. Like I believe wholeheartedly that we’re seeing agencies, marketing agencies get bought up all the time. If anyone here is a marketing agency, that’s listed on LinkedIn, you’ve received in the last 10 days, a request from a PE company  to give you a courtesy valuation of what your company’s worth, right? 

01:07:59 Casey: We’re gonna start seeing that with the fractional CMOs, not the people who are single Pringles, but the people who are building dominance in an industry and then offering fractional CMO services. And then maybe it’s them and like another fractional CMO that they bring on. So two fractional CMOs, three fractional CMOs with recurring revenue inside of big clients.

01:08:18 Casey: I think PE is going to scoop that up, man. And then just, you know, buy it from you and then go hire people out as W-2s to fulfill that later. So the answer is you got to just map it out. We have a full like industry intelligence playbook inside the accelerator. We do a training on that monthly to come up with, you know, all the movers and shakers, what they’re doing, what they’re saying, the events, all that stuff, just so you can start infiltrating and being perceived as, you know, one of the people.  

01:08:46 J: Yeah. No, that makes sense. So this is kind of what I it’s kind of what I expected. I mean, it’s it’s funny because like that’s, you know, some of these little things that I’ve laid out over the past couple of years, like the podcast that I’ve had launched is allowed me to kind of create conversations out there with folks that never would have happened before. Just because you have an authority platform because they think that you’re just some sort of special person. And really, I’m just talking shop and and you know, like what you’re doing with your podcast and doing this as well, too. So. It kind of I can revalidates  revalidate validates um kind of my thought process. But this makes sense.  

01:09:21 Casey: Yeah, I think a book too is deadly. Like, I mean,  I will  all announces I’m going to come out with the updated version of this book. We’ll give a free copy to everyone who bought the book,  too. But the updated version, this doesn’t talk about AI at all. There’s no AI is not in here at all. I’ve got to update it. But this book is so powerful to have uh for the CMO, right?

01:09:42 Casey: So people can read it. They can go spend Javier three and a half hours with me on the audio book, or you can grab, find your CMO. This is for the business owner and go spend another like four hours with me. That’s a lot of time that I can spend with someone without ever having to talk to them. And they feel like they can know, like, and trust me. So you producing long form content that people can binge, know, bingers are buyers.  So a lot to be said about that and talk exclusively to the pain.  I’ll show you one quick example.

01:10:12 Casey: Let’s see if these guys still have it. So not vouching for the software. I think it’s like software to watch for like outbound dialing, like calling leads, you know, that kind of software. I just don’t think it’s there yet. At least it wasn’t there two months ago when I was demoing it, but this is software. Okay. So check it out, but they have resources.

01:10:34 Casey: These resources are so good. Why stir-shaken is essential and the problem with low tier carrier networks. That is some nerdy stuff that no one cares about unless you’re an outbound sales manager and you know about stir-shaken. Fixing your pickup rates is like doubling your sales, no fancy sales training required. Like a salesperson sees this, they want this resource. That’s value for them. For most of us, we don’t care. But for these people, the ultimate guide to warming up phone numbers, huge for outbound sales. So producing content that people want to consume that’s intelligent, that makes smart people think, that’s the litmus. Does it make smart people think? It’s not banal, it’s not news jacking for the sake of news jacking. Does it make smart people think? If the answer is yes, then you’re winning. If it’s just like, I’m posting content on Instagram or LinkedIn or whatever, just to post five times a week. No.

01:11:32 Casey: Tim Ferris said someone interviewed him and said like, what cadence of podcasts should I do? It’s like, it doesn’t matter. You want to do one a day? You want to be John Lee Dumas and do seven a day, right? Or seven a week? Or do you want to be like Tim? What does he do? One a month? It doesn’t matter. What matters is the content’s high quality. It makes smart people think. 

01:11:52 J: Yeah. Makes sense. 

01:11:54 Casey: Cool man. All right. Thank you. Good question. Yeah. EK, the book is available on Amazon and Kindle. Yep.  You can go to cmorks.co. book and it’s the audio book. It’s the audio book and the ebook for you for five bucks. ah Jane, you asked how do you make smart content? Yeah, I mean, that’s a big question. The content that people want is the content that’s actually talking to the pain that they have. I go back to this Gary Halpert strategy, which is if you and I, Jane, were selling hamburgers  and you wanted to beat me, what’s the one advantage you’d have over me?

01:12:39 Casey: You want fresher meat, you want bigger hamburgers, you want better pickles, you want fresh baked bread, have it all. I’ll still beat you. What’s the one advantage you want over me? You want lower cost? Boom, fine. You have to charge something, but I will make more money than you hands down. I have one advantage, what’s my one advantage? I have a starving crowd. If people are starving, they’ll do whatever it takes to get what’s being sold. So you got to go find the starving crowd. So find the pain that people have that makes them starve. That’s it.

01:13:08 Casey: Smart content is about helping people that are starving with a problem. Was it Halbert that said, find the bleeding neck problem? When your neck’s bleeding, you need a solution immediately. Talk to that stuff. Don’t talk about soft things, talk about the things that are pressing. I saw an ad, Q4 last year. If you guys advertise online at all, you know that Q4 CPMs go through the roof. They double in a lot of industries  and it’s expensive to advertise.

01:13:38 Casey: Why? Just because more people are buying ads for, you know, selling what they’re selling for Black Friday.  And the ad said, you’re not thinking about turning off your ads because the CPMs are high. Are you? And I remember that was like an ad that was just like, oh, you got me. Like, fuck. Like it was so powerful and it just like punched me in the face. You know, it’s like, okay, tell me more. Tell me why I shouldn’t pause my ads right now, because it’s double the cost to attract a customer.

01:14:06 Casey: And then the ad had really great reasons why. It’s like that kind of good content stops the person and makes them think. If it isn’t, we think like, oh, let’s make it easy to remember.  No, make it impossible to forget. Make it the kind of thing that someone learns and they’re like, okay, I’m gonna hold onto that one forever. So it could be around agencies. And I get that some of you have agencies and I’m sorry, but just the vilify agencies for a second.

01:14:34 Casey: I can vilify an agency and an agency’s job is to get their people working and hours billed. The agency’s job is not to grow the company, like grow the client. It’s to stay busy and get paid. So I introduced that idea and the business owner is like, I kind of knew that, but I never had the language for it. And then you’re like, and as a fractional CMO, I come in and I fight for you every single day. Now that business owner is like,  oh, like I’m a learned person. I used to think agency was the only way, but now it’s the fractional CMO. All right, Michael, you got some questions for me? 

01:15:07 Michael: Yes. So Mario was saying everyone seems further down the road. I’m interested in learning how to get started from square one. 

01:15:15 Casey: Yeah, cool. Mario kind of not really. I don’t know. I mean, some people come into the accelerator. We just had a great woman just join. And I don’t remember offhand what she was doing, but I think my 40, $50,000 a month as a fractional CMO. So she definitely started kind of like, whoa, she’s like, oh, she’s a big deal. But then other folks come in and they don’t have any clients and they’re just leaving corporate America or they’ve had an agency for years or they’ve just kind of been like the marketing tactician that does the thing. They’re the SEO person, they’re the whatever. And everyone has to start at the same place, which is you have to learn the foundation of what you’re selling. And I do that in the book, the Fractional CMO Method.

01:16:00 Casey: But what you’re selling is marketing strategy and leadership. And then you just have to talk to people and then you got to get that first sale. How you get sales ready is you got to know who you’re selling to, what you’re selling, how much it is, why it’s valuable. And you get the person to of like buy into that every step of the way. And then you sign them, you and you start working with them and you start creating upside for them. And  one of the biggest things I wanna tell you Mario is your first client, sell them marketing strategy and implementation. And I don’t care what they pay you.

01:16:29 Casey: I don’t care if it’s your buddy and they’re going to pay you 500 bucks a month. I don’t care. Just sell it. Just sell one person. Don’t make costs the reason people say no. And if you can get over that hump and you made your first sale and you’re living in the world of a fractional CMO, everything changes. We’ve got a member, Becky. Becky came in and she was, I don’t know, scared of charging more than she was going to. She was like, for some services she was going to charge like, I think 2000 was her first gig.

01:16:59 Casey: And I was like, I think you should charge at least 4,000, 5,000 for that like minimum. She’s like, I’m thinking like 2,000 is where I’m at. So she sold it. Okay. She sold it at 2,000. Fine. I asked her like a month into it. What do you think you could sell it for if you sold another one? And Becky, like so many other people say like at $4,000 for sure. Like double overnight. Like they say, I can’t believe I sold it solo. We got a guy in the accelerator. He sold a client at 7,500. And I said, if you had another one, what would you sell him at? He’s like, absolutely 10K.

01:17:28 Casey: So just getting that first one gets over the hump and it’s new and different. Like the first time you do anything, it’s hard. We make it faster and easier, but it still is like, it’s a cognitive load. What am I doing? How am I doing it? How am I talking about myself? How do I push back on clients that ask for things that I don’t want to deliver? All that kind of stuff. So we have cohorts inside the accelerator that are moving through that sales ready process. Some people get sales ready in like two days. They’ve got like the spaciousness in their life. 

01:17:57 Casey: Other people, might take them a week. ah I guess it could take you two weeks, but I really don’t like it. I want you to get past that point. And then, beyond that, um it’s that road to 10K. So that’s all about, we have a thing called Sales Gym. So it’s like going in, doing your reps, talking to strangers, having these conversations, finding problems, proposing your solution, closing the deal again and again and again again. You do it with us so that we can help train you on the process and our full script on what to say and how to say it and tonality and pacing and follow-up and all that stuff.  

01:18:33 Casey: But beyond that, it is just effort that has to go into it, Mario. The cool thing is, is I will never not be a fractional CMO. This is it for me. I’m gonna be a business owner and a partner in businesses and all. I’m doing other stuff, but I’m a fractional CMO. I will always be a fractional CMO. I’ll always be working with clients. Because I don’t wanna come in as an investor and just give money and say, I hope this company grows.

01:18:55 Casey: I want to be the guy that comes in and says, I’m going to grow this company with you. I’m to be in the trenches. I’m going to build the team. We’re going to rock it. And when we exit,  me that nice big fat check. So I get that benefit and it’s just like a much better place to be.  I don’t think there’s any other place I’d rather be  in business. You know, like this is it. This is the number one spot. I think we get the highest leverage, the highest pay, the highest ability to help our clients. And like  our commitment time is so low.

01:19:24 Casey: So it’s about staying in the game long enough and winning the clients and servicing them. Last thing on this, and then we’ll move on. Ben, Ben joined like a year ago. He’s been on episodes before Ben Finckley. I love the guy. He’s in Texas, like in the Austin area. Ben had like one client that he was like ran with a 10K a month. And he was just kind of playing the game, you know, he’s like doing stuff and like not really trying and trying the wrong stuff and doing whatever he’s doing. And then finally he got serious. Dude just like went hard and he went from 10 to 40. And then think he went like to 30 to 55. So like 55,000 a month working 25 hours a week after October 10th or something. That’s where he’ll be at.  

01:20:04 Casey: So that’s possible, but it’s about like staying in the game long enough and just committing to this.  Cause I really believe this is the best strategy for marketers. All right, Michael.  

01:20:14 Michael: Yeah. The other questions, all of them keep coming back to where do I find the first client?  Messaging with the first offer. 

01:20:22 Casey: Let’s talk about where to get the first client. So the first client is going to come from  some of you, your employers. So if you have a full-time employer,  here’s what you want to do. Push that employer down to like, so we’ve had members of this very successfully. They join the accelerator. They follow our quarterly and annual planning strategy. They lay out these really killer plans. They start learning the art of delegation. They start delegating more stuff gets done for their full-time employer and their work drops after the second week of the quarter starts,  their work’s dropped.

01:20:55 Casey: And then they’re like, okay, what do I do? So I can just kind of keep going because we’re getting more done and I look good. Or I can go to the employer and say, hey guys, cut me a deal. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to leave my full-time role, have me as fractional. I’ll take half the pay for a quarter of the hours. If they go and get that, then they’ve got their first client. They have half their income. They just got to make the other half up. They can be off to the races.

01:21:19 Casey: That’s a great way to get your first client. If you don’t have a full-time employer, maybe you have past clients that you go to and talk to. The first client I got was through a relationship. It was through a mastermind I was in. It was a guy, I told what I was doing, he introduced me to someone, boom, next thing you know, I signed my first client, 75, 100 bucks a month. Going with people you know is really useful. But at some point you’re gonna have to start talking to strangers. 

01:21:42 Casey: And some of you can’t talk to people you know, because you’re locked into some non-disclosure agreement or some non-compete or your employer says, Hey, I had a woman, I don’t know if she’s on, she and I were messaging on Facebook and she said that like her employer won’t let her do work outside of employment. I don’t know about you guys, but I live in a world of freedom where like no one’s gonna tell me what I can’t do outside of my like work hours. That’s crazy to me. So if I was in her position, I would be plotting my exit because I’m not working with someone that’s gonna try to control me like that. That’s crazy. 

01:22:15 Casey: So  winning a client on the side. And if you can’t approach them publicly,  we’ve got a member I’m thinking of right now who’s  got a, he works for a company, solid company. You all would know the name, like a major Fortune 500. And he’s kind of doing this stuff on the side, nights and weekends. He’s building it all out, but his plan is his escape. I can think of Lisa who just closed a $10,000 month client. And you know, if she went back to the corporate world, she’d charge what? 150, 200,000 a year for like 40, 50 hours a week plus travel every, all the time. And like, she just closed 120,000 a year, one client, 10 hours a week. It’s crazy. So it’s about talking to the people that you know, or having a process in plan to talk to people that you don’t know. All right. ah Yeah, Michael, ah what’s next?  

01:23:04 Michael: I’m pretty much. I mean, you’ve answered the things..

01:23:07 Casey: I see some. Let me just jump through this. 

01:23:09 Michael: Just drop one in chat and then that’ll probably wrap us up. 

01:23:12 Casey: Great. So Lisa, you said you love building and why I love being a CMO. Hey, nice to see you. Just starting in, to be honest, that’s my big hold up. I was worried like my agency work that you never get to enjoy the work soup and nuts. That’s what you love. Okay, I got it. Yeah, lots of questions. What do you want to start? 

01:23:31 Lisa: Well, I guess the reason I’m really kind of stuck to like I’m starting but I’m like, do I really want to go all in is because I love building and then seeing the impact at the end. And I kind of always thought like as a fractional, you’re only going to see a little piece of it like when you’re working in an agency, right? The strategy. 

01:23:48 Casey: No, no, no, you’re wrong. You see everything you just don’t do it all. 

01:23:55 Lisa: Right. Okay. So to see the impact.

01:23:58 Casey: Yes. Here’s the big picture. Lisa, they don’t need a full time. Right. They need a strategy that you lay out. You need to install the right people that they pay for. Then they need to execute and those people need to turn to you and just ask for clarification. And then you oversee it. Like, you know, you’re like the.. just like the Lord watching over all of the workers, doing all the labor to make your vision come true. And you’re there in the end. And while all credit is due to you, you turn around and give all the credit to everybody else.

01:24:28 Lisa: All right. Perfect. And then the second one was about the equity you just mentioned like, oh, they get bought out and bring on the big money. I didn’t realize fractionals could get equity. 

01:24:37 Casey: Sure. You can do whatever you want. Right. So you can do equity. I don’t like equity. I’m not an equity guy. 

01:24:44 Lisa: Well, I’ve said no to four of them in the last month. And I’m like, everybody wants you to work for free for equity. And I’m like, no bueno. 

01:24:51 Casey: So here’s the solution. Let’s say you’re going to do engaged level work, $10,000 a month. Go sign it for 10K a month, go get paid 10K a month.  Then the second month at the third month, you go, hey guys, I have this strategy laid it out. We’re rolling on it. I think we would do better if we had a little bit more capitalization and I get that we don’t have the money. So what if I reduced my rate? But as we grow, I get this upside. So this upside is then I get this percentage of that.

01:25:21 Casey: Right. And now you’re able to fuel that a little bit or you say, I’m going to defer some of my income until we exit. And I want a 4X multiple on that deferred income. So it’s not equity. It’s revenue share revenue sharing. That I liked that a lot better. 

01:25:41 Lisa: Cause I just said yes, stupidly to like three. We’re just talking about balancing free and paid to somebody going for equity. So I’m going in and helping them build their VC pitch, right? Which I’ve done a million times, but I have a refusal if they get, win the money that I get the good, the contract, but I still feel bad. Like it’s giving away free work. 

01:26:06 Casey: What do you paid for that first part?  

01:26:10 Lisa: No, no,  it’s  for revenue sharing. I did it for shares,  but I put in the contract that if they get the VC backing that I get first right refusal for any kind of marketing.

01:26:26 Casey: I mean, first right. Refusal is. 

01:26:30 Lisa: I mean, they’re going to want it anyway, is because you show value, right? That’s kind of a sure. 

01:26:35 Casey: Yeah, I hear you. I mean, I would rather.

I mean, my preference here, Lisa, is that I’m not cheap for a little bit of me. I’m more expensive for a little bit of me. Right? So if I have to like, the first 30 days that I spend with someone is the hardest time.  I started working with a new client and it’s just like part of me is kind like, okay, all right, like I got to, this is a lot. Like there’s a bunch of new faces and people and things I have to remember. Like I need to do a good job, but it’s a lot of weight. Dunbar’s numbers is I can have 150 people in my life that I kind of know about, like know enough about to have dinner with and have meaningful conversations. 

01:27:09 Casey: Well, I’m going to go add to like 15 more people into my life because I signed this client. I like, okay, that’s a lot. That’s a mental load. So you’re to pay me a premium on that. I think you should flip that a bit, offer a premium and then just say, and if we work together, my rates are usually, let’s say you want 10K a month. My rates are usually 12K a month. If you do this package with me and then we work together, it’d be 10K a month. So you kind of put a little bit of a decoy there a little bit. If you’re unfamiliar with the decoy offer, uh look that up decoy offer  Wall Street Journal. 

01:27:44 Lisa: Got it. Thank you. Yeah. 

01:27:46 Casey: They did a great decoy offer. Kill their marketing strategy.  All right. Someone asked, just had my first client yesterday. Awesome. Love that for you. So cool. What should your first 30 days look like? You should build a strategy and it should be a strategy for Q4 and probably for most of the, I don’t know, the first part of 2026. You can’t get too far. You can’t build a two year strategy but you can build the strategy for November and December. So that’s the biggest thing. It’s like, meet with everyone, meet all the vendors, meet the team, understand the CEO, know what the CEO wants, and then simplify everything down to as few outcomes as possible that you have to deliver on. 

01:28:25 Casey: So example is, hey guys, if I do these two things in 90 days, are you happy? They’re like, we would be thrilled if you did those two things in 90 days. You’re like, great, I’m gonna do two things in 90 days. And that’s what you got to do. So simplify as much as possible, have a photographable moment when you’re done, and then keep in touch with the client. We are on track. We are on track. You said to do this, I’m doing it. We’re going to be done on this date. And then your contract just needs to auto renew. That’s the best thing that you can do.

01:28:52 Lisa: Yeah. They’ve agreed to a one year contract. So I do have quite a long runway in which to operate and maneuver. So it makes sense to take a quarterly approach and say, look, first 90 days, next 90 days and so on.

01:29:07 Casey: Love it. Yep. Perfect. 90 days is where you want to be. You want to, if you’re starting now, develop the Q4 strategy and then in December plan the 2026 kind of annual strategy. We have a strategy for that,  but mostly it’s a Q1 strategy. What do you think of an annual? It is very few things. Like at the end of the year, you want this number of sales, this much revenue, this much EBITDA, like whatever the major simple things are, that’s what you want your target for the year.

01:29:36 Casey: You can talk about the big campaigns and projects to do, but really then talk about Q1. So just keep it simple each quarter, make it photographable. 

01:29:45 Lisa: Fantastic. Thanks. 

01:29:46 Casey: Yeah. Yeah. Congratulations. All right.  Yeah. So we’re just reaching the end of time. I do have a call back up for this one, so I need to jet to it, but I want to invite you to book a call in with Justin on my team, cmox.co/call. It’s there in the chat. Go ahead and click that and just book it a call. 15 minutes, super low pressure.  We’ll just see if we can help you.  And I want you all to know I’m not like some guru who’s telling you about what I did 20 years ago. Every day I’m in it. And I feel in some ways that my CMOs here are chasing me to be better.  And  they’re closing some monster deals. So I got to one up them all the time.  And we are absolutely innovating what’s happening here in the fractional CMO space. Like this is the place for the industry leaders, the movers and the shakers, the people that are hungry, kind of regardless of age. We’ve got folks with gray hair. 

01:30:31 Casey: We’ve got folks that still live at their parents’ house. It’s kind of funny and  they all have equal opportunity to dominate. So if you’d like to have my help, you wanna be on calls with me, you wanna do more of this stuff,  book it a call right now  and  we’d love to see you. Zimbabwe, awesome, love to hear it, thank you. All right, thank you all for coming. Catch you guys later, see ya. 

01:30:56 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.