Casey unpacks what it means to be a fractional CMO, the responsibilities of this pivotal role, and why it’s the ideal path for marketing leaders ready to tackle bigger problems and deliver impactful results. Whether you’re curious about strategy versus execution, building a marketing team, or creating a thriving fractional CMO practice, this episode offers actionable insights to help you lead confidently and succeed in this exciting career path.
Here’s what we talked about:
00:00:00 Casey: Hey, it’s Casey, welcome back to another episode. I want to talk to you about your belief system as it relates to being a fractional chief marketing officer. So I think it’s interesting how beliefs really shape how we show up. And if we believe one thing, we’re going to act in a certain way. So I want to talk to you about some beliefs that I’ve heard recently from a couple folks inside the fractional CMOx Accelerator that we have at CMOx and how I think you should consider the beliefs that you have and maybe challenge your beliefs.
00:00:30 Casey: And if you follow what I say, I think that you’re going to find that there are ways for you to subtly shift what you’re thinking or how you’re thinking about things or what you say to yourself so that you can win bigger clients, charge more money, deliver better results, and just like kind of get out of maybe a stuck position that you might find yourself in. All right, let’s get to it.
00:00:52 Casey: Marketers of the world, why do we work hard to solve small problems? Why do we reinvent ourselves and our clients over and over? And why are we giving away marketing strategy for free? With advancements in AI, we’re all seeing the marketing department shrink from the bottom up. And companies need you to serve them as their fractional chief marketing officer. It’s time to solve bigger problems and bring home a bigger paycheck. It’s time to create the lifestyle we deserve and to make a greater impact.
00:01:25 Casey: This is the Fractional CMO Show and I’m Casey Stanton. Join me as we explore this growing industry and learn to solve bigger problems as marketing leaders. The Fractional CMO Show is sponsored by CMOx, the number one company to teach you how to attract, convert and serve high paying fractional CMO clients on your terms.
00:01:49 Casey: All right, so let’s talk about your belief system. So in your belief system, there’s this way that you see the work that you’ve done. And one of the first things I wanna bring up to you is other people’s beliefs about you and your abilities. So the first thing that I think of is back when I worked at the marketing agency, I started there right after college. It was about a year after college, I met the owner of a marketing agency at a bar. I was on a date that was really just going south and bumped into a guy and he and I, became buddies versus this woman that I was on a date with.
00:02:23 Casey: And I dove into the marketing agency and I was really green. I hadn’t done a whole lot in marketing before. I consumed some Dan Kennedy stuff, some Eben Pagan stuff. I studied Perry Marshall’s definitive guide to Google AdWords, and I was doing some Google Ads for a client. But I was just kind of like excited, but not very skilled. So I started working for this agency and I learned a ton so, so quickly.
00:02:48 Casey: I was inside of great businesses, building out really exciting marketing things. I was writing email copy. I found that I was kind of naturally good at writing copy. I was doing sales work. I was doing project management. I wasn’t very good at the project management. So I’m doing all these different things and learning and I’m growing like consistently, like year over year. And I could see myself and how much I had learned over just a few years at the agency.
00:03:14 Casey: Yet, it seemed as I was always in a dynamic with the agency owner where he just didn’t see my growth. I was always to him, his little kid brother, because he was a couple of years older than me, and certainly knew more than me because he kept pacing more. You know, every time I’d learn something, he learned something else. So like the delta between us kind of always remained constant because he was, you know, a learner, great guy, really smart. But the dynamic was like this belief that like I could never take on big projects or have more responsibility or even go off on my own in his eyes, just because I was the kid brother, like I was always going to be the kid brother.
00:03:50 Casey: And what I had to do, ultimately was leave the relationship and go off on my own. There was no way that the agency could be a place for me to build my fractional CMO practice or really to grow further. It wasn’t even to be a fractional CMO. It was just like to grow help more clients get bigger, you know? He just didn’t he just didn’t believe in me the way that I felt like I kind of deserved to be believed in. So I had to do the one thing which was to take the risk.
00:04:14 Casey: So that’s an interesting belief. I can’t change his belief. I don’t even know today what his belief is of me. Right? But I certainly can’t change his beliefs, he might change them, but I can’t change them for him. I can’t prove to him that I’m a different person. It’s just how it is. And I have to just kind of accept that as a fact. Was hard to kind of accept. But ultimately, I knew that I had to go out on my own and try things.
00:04:40 Casey: Just as a quick aside. It is the entrepreneur, the person who takes the risk that gets the reward. So this is like, this is I think this is really important. If you’re in an environment where you feel like you’re kind of entitled to something like increase in pay, more responsibility, whatever, yet you’re not taking risk, like you kind of aren’t in some ways entitled to much else. You know, if someone else is taking the risk to do the thing, they’re putting their name and their brand and their effort, their long hours at night, you know, maybe even a few years ago that they did that. They took the risk that build the opportunity now for you to perform inside of, they get the reward, not you. That is a fact of life.
00:05:20 Casey: And if you’re inside of someone else’s risk taking vessel and you want a larger reward, it’s gonna be hard to get that. You gotta go take the risk on yourself. Because the moment you take the risk on yourself, you’re responsible for all the outcomes. You’re responsible for all of the lows that will potentially come. You’re also responsible for all of the highs, right? So you get all of the money, but then also you get to have the difficult conversations on getting a loan if you need it or something to support your business. With that responsibility comes the opportunity for growth.
00:05:49 Casey: So let’s go back to that agency owner. His belief was that I was never going to be the kind of person that could do the kind of things that I wanted to do. So it’s a belief that he had. As an external belief, I disagreed with it. Sometimes I tried to prove to him that he was wrong, but ultimately there’s nothing I could say or do. He believed what he believed and I had to move on. So you might have external beliefs that happen like that in your life. Maybe it’s with your partner, like your romantic partner. Maybe it’s with a parent, maybe it’s with a friend. Some of your friends just don’t believe you can do the thing.
00:06:21 Casey: When I graduated college, I just didn’t know what to do. I graduated into that 2008 housing crisis. And I lived in my sister’s basement in Ann Arbor for a little while. And then ultimately got on the road and made my way to New Orleans and lived there for a few years.
00:06:36 Casey: And I like I just had to leave the comfort of what I had known because there was a bunch of people in my life who like, it’s not that they didn’t want me to succeed. It’s just they didn’t have the same vision of what my success would look like. And I knew that if I wanted to be successful, I would just have to go. So external beliefs could be family, could be a romantic partner, could be friends, could be a colleague, could be someone that owns the business that you work for whatever it is, you might be inside of someone else’s belief system where they say you can’t because whatever.
00:07:06 Casey: You can’t take on a fractional CMO client at night while you’re working with us full-time because I want your full-time effort. That’s their belief system. Yet you know, I could totally take on a client where I’m working four or five hours a month for them. Like no problem, I could do that. You might have a conflicting belief system with that employer. And if you do, you gotta figure out what you’re gonna do. Do you launch your fractional CMO practice in secrecy? Do you go win a client through talking to strangers and building a book of business that way? Can you advertise publicly what you’re up to? It’s going to be dependent on your certain circumstances. However, I think it’s important that like, you realize that sometimes you’re inside of someone else’s belief system that doesn’t have to be your belief system.
00:07:50 Casey: Let me tell you about another belief system that I’ve seen someone have. So recently, a woman joined the CMOx Accelerator. And I was on a coaching call with her. And she brought up she’s not from the US. And she says, in my country, businesses like they want someone full time, they don’t want someone fractional. And, you know, they wanna like take care of that person, they wanna have them long term and all that. And she had this belief that her country was different, it was unique. And I don’t doubt for a second that the person that she talked to did in fact want that, and that was like their belief system. The problem was is that she took that as fact and assumed that other businesses wanted it too. And I think that that is just patently false.
00:08:31 Casey: Businesses want growth, they want revenue, they want profit. You know, they don’t need full time employees to make it happen. They know that AI is great. Right? They know that marketing can be a value driver in the business. They don’t need you full time in the business in order to make that happen. You might have to do some education around that but this belief that my country doesn’t want fractional CMOs is a limiting belief that was self imposed. And the term is an introjection. I don’t know if you’ve heard that term before, introjection. So I’m just gonna read the definition of it.
00:09:08 Casey: Introjection is a psychological defense mechanism that occurs when a person adopts the ideas, values or behaviors of another person. It can be an unconscious process that impacts the person’s self image. Very interesting.
00:09:24 Casey: So I was definitely fighting early in that agency with the interjection that I wasn’t good enough, that I’d never be able to rise to the level of CMO or own a business or be successful or whatever. I’d like lived in that reality, though it was someone else’s reality, self-imposed. Well, I took it on and I adopted it. Someone said, do you wanna wear these clothes? And I jumped right into them and I thought they were mine. Right, so I want you to think, where are there interjections that you’ve accepted as being true? Where are their belief systems that other people have had about your work as a marketer that you believe to be true?
00:09:58 Casey: Here’s a question for you. How much money do people make who come from where you come from? I grew up in a small town. My high school, we had the largest graduating class in high school and we were just shy of a hundred people. So pretty small. I don’t even know what it is today, but it’s probably in the, I don’t know, forties, fifties, maybe. So we were the biggest class by a long shot and it’s a small town, lot of people still live there. Or maybe they moved, you know, to neighboring cities and things like that.
00:10:26 Casey: Not a lot of great opportunities to make a lot of money or have a lot of impact in the community. A lot of farming, a lot of tourism. I’m from Northern Michigan. So there’s a lot of like wonderful summer tourism and winter tourism and fishing tourism and things like that. There’s the cherries, there’s the apples, people can work on farms, but like to kind of have a runaway success business, pretty uncommon. And I wonder if you have some belief system about where you’re from about how much money people make because of where they’re from.
00:10:54 Casey: From where you’re from, the town, the small town, the big town, whatever, like how much do people make? Do people really leave that community? Have you left it? Do you kind of like have this feeling of how things ought to be just because of where you were born? An interesting thought, right? Maybe something happened to you when you were younger that’s like shaped the way that you see yourself. And I just wanna like offer in this that a belief system that someone else might have imposed on you that you’ve put on and accepted as reality.
00:11:23 Casey: So what’s the opposite of an interjection? Assimilation. That’s what it is.Â
Assimilation. So we’ve all heard about cultural assimilation, right? Which is the process through which individuals or groups adopt the cultural traits or social, excuse me, or social norms of another group, often the dominant culture to fit in or integrate. They may involve, it may involve changes in language, customs or values. That makes sense, right? We understand like cultural assimilation. I’m an American, if I moved to Japan, could I really act like an American in Japan? Probably not. I’d probably kind of assimilate to the culture, to the values, to the language of the Japanese. Just be very different.
00:12:05 Casey: So much of the same way, when we join businesses, when we work with other people, we kind of assimilate to the culture that exists. But psychological assimilation is the process by which an individual incorporates new experiences or information into their pre-existing cognitive structures or schemas. And that’s the one I’m really interested in.
00:12:25 Casey: So if you’re from the States and you move to Japan, you know that you’re going to change, right? But could you adopt the values of the Japanese while still living in the States? Probably. It would take like more effort maybe because it’s not surrounding you. But if you were to create a culture where you could assimilate into some kind of structure that you want to be a part of, what would that look like? Well, I think it’s pretty simple. You just surround yourself with the people that you want to be like. And if you don’t have that community available to you, you just do it through like audiobooks and books.
00:13:00 Casey: I’ve got a great group of people that I’ve been with, yeah, for a long time. Six, seven years, we’ve been meeting once a month for like three hours. And they’re just my buddies. I’ve only met one of them in person all this time. These are like ride or die buddies. They’re all across U.S., Canada. There’s like seven of us, U.S., Canada. And then one guy is just, he just kind of travels. I think right now he’s in Portugal.
00:13:31 Casey: And we have a relationship and we support each other in a belief system that doesn’t exist. It feels like kind of outside of our relationship. And it’s not just entrepreneurial. I would say that these people are very lifestyle. You know, I was the second of them to have kids. So like, you know, I get to kind of talk about raising children with them. And it’s like, it’s just like a different conversation. Another one just had a kid. So we get to celebrate him all the time. And her role as a mother and like there’s things that we’re creating in kind of like a bubble of what we want, right? Like we’re assimilating ideas that we want into a structure of people so that we can kind of choose the belief systems that we have. And I gotta say, it’s not easy to do this.
00:14:18 Casey: The first thing that you have to do is identify the places where you have an interjection of someone else’s belief system. And then the second thing you have to do is like want to change it. The third thing you have to do is like know what you want to change it to. And then the fourth thing that you have to do is have repetition in order to slowly change that belief system.
00:14:32 Casey: It’s not like you can be hypnotized. I mean, maybe you can go to a Tony Robbins event and do a special move and like snap overnight or in a moment, you know, your belief system is completely changed. It might change for a week or a month, but will it change for forever? No, probably not. You need ongoing conversation.
00:14:50 Casey: So I bring this idea up to you because that first person I talked about had a limiting belief that in her country, they don’t want fractional CMOs. My belief is that company doesn’t know the value of a fractional CMO and maybe even if they knew the value, they don’t want a fractional CMO. And that’s fine. But on the other side, there’s the companies that don’t even know about fractional CMOs. And if they found out about it, they would really want one. I guarantee those businesses exist in her niche and in her country. Both are true.
00:15:25 Casey: So she can believe that people in her country don’t want a fractional CMO, or she can choose to believe that the person that they’re talking to currently doesn’t want it, may never change their mind or may with a little bit more information. She doesn’t know. But there are certainly other companies that are open to the idea of a fractional CMO and would pay her high rates. I believe that to be true, and I encourage her to believe that to be true.
00:15:48 Casey: Let me tell you about another member inside of the CMOx Accelerator. So he joined a few months ago and…I just really like the guy. Just good energy, smart guy, well experienced, but he’s just, he’s a great marketer. I can tell. Just when he shows up to calls, the questions that he asked, the quality of it, you know, he’s doing, he’s a good marketer. He’s a rock solid marketer. He’s got like Fortune 500 experience as well.
00:16:11 Casey: So his belief is, you know, kind of wavering as it’s taken him a couple months to land a client. And all along the way, some small potato projects would come up here and there or whatever. And my belief around this is like, if you need to take on a short term project to make ends meet, I am not going to stop you from feeding yourself. But I want you to keep your eyes focused on the prize, which is you’re the marketing strategist and leader as the fractional CMO for a company that can afford to pay you $3,000 to $15,000 a month, depending on the engagement level.
00:16:44 Casey: He took that to heart. He just, he accepted it. I don’t know if mentally he kind of toss that around and like, am I going to do it or not? Or, you know, maybe just him joining the Accelerator was the thing that he needed to prove to himself that, you know, I’m going to blame Casey if this doesn’t work. You know, maybe that’s what he did. I don’t know.
00:17:01 Casey: But he joined and he reached out to me on a Wednesday night. And I was at my computer late. Kind of not a common thing for me. But he sent me a message said, hey, an opportunity just came to me. Can you help coach me on this? And he had a couple questions and I shot him back a video and the next morning says did it, sold it, got it, locked it in so he got a five figure monthly client and it’s like a dream client. It’s a dream for his niche, for his experience. It’s great for them like he is the right guy for the job. I really like, in all of my years training fractional CMOx, I can’t think of anyone better than him. You know, I can think of some other people that would be like an okay alternative but not better than him like he’s really rock solid so they got the right guy with the right experience.
00:17:45 Casey: And he got the client in the capacity that he wanted them in. So he went, you know, from zero to six figures in annual revenue, annualized revenue, literally overnight. You know, I think it was like, he messaged me Wednesday night, had the conversation on Thursday and it was signed on Friday and paid and he started on Monday. So just like that fast. Belief. Right? That’s a belief system. His belief was that this idea of being a fractional CMO will work and he just has to get enough [inaudible] for it to work. And he was right.
00:18:19 Casey: Let me tell you about another guy inside the Accelerator. I was on a call with him recently. And when we were chatting, I said, hey, you had that big deal that you were working on in December, what happened to it? And it was a great deal. Like it was a big deal. And he’s like, oh, the guy went AWOL. You know, I haven’t heard from him. He’s like, okay, what happened? And this was the exact date was probably something like January 14, 15, something like that when we were, I was chatting with this member.
00:18:44 Casey: And he was like down about it. Just frustrated, sad, bummed. It’s like, I get it, dude. Like that sucks. How’d you reach out to him? He says, so I sent him a couple of emails to follow up. You know, like he had a proposal in hand, like things were gonna move forward and it just like didn’t move. Okay. Did you call him? I asked and he said, no, I don’t have his phone number. I was like, okay, well, let’s get it. Go look in the email, see if you can find it. He’s like, I looked in the emails, it’s not there. What about the website? Not there. Or there was a phone number and it was like disconnected or something. It’s like, okay, let’s find it. What’s the guy’s name? What’s his email address?
00:19:15 Casey: I literally Googled first name, last name, email address, and then the word phone number. And I found some peoplesearch.com website. They always look like a little spammy. And they had like four or five numbers. I was like, call all of them. Like right now. He’s like, right now? Right now. He’s like, okay. So I was talking to some other member and then he came back on. He’s like, I called and I talked to a woman who was kind of a gatekeeper. I don’t think she’s gonna pass the message through.
00:19:43 Casey: Okay, text him. He’s like, text him. It’s like, text him right now. So he’s like, this member’s like living in the space of like kind of collapsed, like low confidence, you know, like, ugh, I didn’t get another one. Like this other perfect opportunity and I didn’t get it. I do this too, right? He’s not alone. He certainly isn’t the only member who’s ever done it. I certainly do it too. Right? You just kind of give up. You let it go. You’re like, ah, it’s not worth the fight. It is worth the fight, right?
00:20:13 Casey: So he chased down the phone numbers again and texted them and got a reply from one. And the guy was like, I am so sorry, I’ll get a message back to you. You know, let’s get a meeting set. And that alone right there is like, that’s a good indicator of interest from the prospect, but to me, that’s not enough.
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00:20:30 Casey: I don’t want him to propose a time at some other, you know, it’s like, I’m gonna reply back and say, hey, I booked this in for Friday at noon, let me know if that doesn’t work for you. Go to your calendar, send the invite, Zoom, Google Meet, whatever, send it. He did that. The guy replied, Friday doesn’t work. I proposed a time for us on Monday. Let me know if that’s good. I remember he checks his phone. He goes Monday works, sends it back. They’re confirmed. Like that fast. It happened. Like that fast.
00:21:00 Casey: From a place of like this belief system of like, I can’t, I’m not the guy, you know, these negative things are happening to me, too. I’m in charge. I’m running this. I’m going to get a yes or a no. I’m fine with either answer, but I’m gonna charge forward on it. We have these limiting beliefs, these things that hold us back. And I am not without fault on them. If anything, I’m just better at identifying when they come up. It’s still hard for me to take action and like be courageous and get over them. But I still have these limiting beliefs and I’m sure you do too.
00:21:31 Casey: So this idea of assimilation is, in this podcast, I wanna just like share new ways for you to think about being a fractional CMO. That’s like number one, very important. Number two is, I want you to identify when I share something with you and you say, he’s overselling it, he’s, you know, I don’t believe him. That won’t work for me or my favorite, that won’t work for my market. Every market it would work for. Because you need three to five clients to hit your revenue targets. You got three clients paying you $15,000 a month. Are you happy? Right? Like, can you do it with three clients at 15K a month? And if you can’t, then you gotta get some upside.
00:22:06 Casey: I remember recently, she got a client, five figures with a percentage increase in sales as a kicker for her. Paid to her quarterly, I think. So she gets a percentage of all sales over the current run rate paid to her as a percentage every quarter. Huge, huge opportunities. And she went from no clients to, that’s like my favorite deal. I think it’s like such a good deal for the client and for her. I think in some ways she undercharged on a monthly basis. But then she got a huge kicker on the back end. So the client gets a huge, you know, huge opportunity to like, reduce their risk, but then be able to explode on the upside because she’s focused on driving revenue for the business.
00:22:52 Casey: At the end of the day, they could probably increase their price by 3% and cover all her fees or 5% or you know, whatever her percentages. So pretty exciting. So we have these belief systems that exist. And I want you to challenge your belief systems as a marketer. Yeah, we’ve got, I remember when Sheryl Sandberg, right, she was the COO of Facebook. I might have that wrong. You could fact check me. But I remember she was like the COO of Facebook, and then she wrote a book and did a book tour. And the book was not about Facebook. It was for her and her personal brand. So she was the COO of the biggest social media company, certainly at the time, and she could go and travel and go do a book tour.
00:23:32 Casey: How much COO-ing did she do during that book tour? I don’t think a lot. And I don’t think she probably took time off either. She was just like, hey, I’m the COO. I’m going to go to a book tour. It’ll help everything. I don’t think she was wrong to do it either. Yet she was still able to be the COO of the biggest social media company, right? Some people have this belief, hey, if I’m the CMO, I have to work my butt off every single day, never delegate anything, prove my worth. If I’m taking the CMO title, I have to be the first and last out, right?
00:24:07 Casey: You know that FILO, first in last out. I got to be the person who shows up first in the morning. I got to be the last one to clock out. I got to be the hardest working person. That’s an incorrect belief. My belief system as a fractional CMO is I have to be able to expertly identify bottlenecks and resolve them so we can get back on track as quickly as possible to hit the outcomes that are most important for the business. That’s a real belief system.
00:24:31 Casey: So I wrote something down. I want you to write this down. If you have a notes app on your phone, if you’re out driving, if you’re watching this way, you know, on the Peloton or whatever, grab your notes app, grab your pen and paper, whatever you got, write this down. All right?
00:24:44 Casey: So here it is. Competing beliefs create doubt. Pick a path and prove it right. Competing beliefs create doubt. Pick a path and prove it right. That’s it, just pick a path and prove it right. I’m right here because I have enough data to show you of all the members that I’ve coached inside the CMOx Accelerator, the belief that you can be the fractional CMO and lead the marketing department and do the strategy only and not do any of the labor and not be the first and last out is true. Like I know it to be true. I have verifiable data and I can prove it to you. You have to prove it to yourself. You have to go and win a client and prove that it’s true.
00:25:30 Casey: I believe in you. And maybe I can believe in you right now before you can believe in yourself. I want you to go do this. I want you to think how do I transform a current relationship I have or an opportunity that’s coming to me? Or how do I go talk about this in public so that I can win a client? And then maybe join the Accelerator so we can help you scale your fractional CMO practice. Okay?
00:25:49 Casey: Competing beliefs. Here’s a competing belief. I’m good at marketing strategy and I really want to spend my time there but to really earn my keep, I have to do all of the email writing. That’s two competing beliefs. I’m, I want to be the CMO, but I feel like I have to like understand the platforms and tools first. Competing beliefs.
00:26:13 Casey: Okay, I’m going to share two other examples. Cause I think they’re so funny that this happened in the same day. I was on two calls last week with members. And one member is she’s a boss. She’s very cool, very experienced, great marketer, Fortune 500, big brand, you’d recognize it. And I said to her like, you know, what’s stopping you from going out and winning a client right now? She goes, you know, I’ve just been in the Fortune 500 space for so long. You know, I’ve solved problems with big pay, with big budgets, by like just paying an agency to do the thing.
00:26:47 Casey: She doesn’t understand how things work in the same way, right? She doesn’t understand how hidden fields on a gravity form can parse the UTM source medium campaign data and then stick that into the CRM so that you can run a report on where leads come from. When I say that, she’s like, what did you say? She doesn’t get that. But what does she get? Man, she gets branding, she gets big product launches, she gets some really cool stuff. So she has a limiting belief that companies don’t want to hire her because she just played with too big of clients. Her employer was just too big to relate to. So she exists in that belief system.
00:27:22 Casey: That same day, I talked to someone else and this was a guy and he’s only worked with small companies. What did he do for those small companies? I mean, he helped one go from a couple million to like a 8 million a year. He built out all their marketing campaigns himself. You know, he built teams, very hands-on, but like kind of small potatoes he feels. Like not big enough, like not a big enough win. It’s like these like small incremental wins. Like, yeah, I mean, you know, we scaled ads to go from a 3.0 ROAS to a 5.0 ROAS. You know, it’s not that exciting. It’s not like I launched a new product to the North American market. Both of these CMOs are like standing across the table from each other saying, I don’t have experience because I worked with too big a company and this one was I worked with too small a company. And they’re both begging for each other’s experience.
00:28:13 Casey: They need neither. They need only the experience that they have. That the clients that they’re gonna go after are going to be different. And the way that they talk about the work that they’ve done is going to be different, but it’s not like they’re lacking. Certainly like understanding more about the technical parts of how marketing works is a good thing to do. But that first CMO, she could absolutely find clients where her expertise is incredible. It’s exciting. It’s for a company that wants to go from 10 million to 50 million a year. Right? She could be that CMO.
00:28:42 Casey: The other one could work with $5 million a year companies or $10 million a year companies that wanna go to $50 million a year but they don’t have good marketing. Like their marketing doesn’t have good tracking or attribution or you know, they’re like doing the blocking and tackling wrong. They have a sloppy marketing department. They both can take the same size company and grow it to the same level, but the problems that those companies are facing are going to be different. So to me, I look at some of these CMOs and I’m like, oh my God, if I had your experience, what kind of confidence would I have? I feel that way.
00:29:15 Casey: So again, I’m not outside of this kind of broader feeling of like, like, limiting beliefs, right? But I identified myself, oh, whoa, I’m like trying to be somebody that I’m not. I’m exactly where I am. This is perfect. There’s someone who is just right for me. I need to go find that type of company. I want to talk to them in the right way and, you know, be able to track them and support them. So you have limiting beliefs. Some of them are introjections. What I want you to do is I want you to assimilate a better belief system one that actually supports you.
00:29:46 Casey: Because if Sheryl Sandberg can go on a book tour while still being the COO of Facebook or Meta, like what’s stopping you from serving one client and helping them grow from some revenue number to another or growing the marketing team or simplifying the department or reducing costs or whatever, you know, you want to start doing when you dive in with them. What’s stopping you from doing that?
00:30:09 Casey: Probably your belief that you’re not enough for some reason. I just want to tell you that, you’re good, like just as you are right now, you’re incredibly useful and helpful, and you can get better. Right? This is like the duality of being a marketer. I mean, being a professional. It’s like, I’m good enough today to help a lot of companies and I got a lot to learn. I got a lot to do to grow and get better.
00:30:35 Casey: But no doubt you can go help companies today, immediately, right now, turn around. You can think right now, close your eyes, unless you’re driving, don’t do that. Think, who’s your ideal client? If I put them in your lap, could you help them today? Who’s your ideal client? I put them in your lap and they paid you a rate that got your attention, could you help them today? If the answer is yes, that’s not an issue with your skillset, it’s an issue with your belief around do I deserve it, right? Whatever. So start thinking about those things. Start challenging those things. Get yourself a solid foundation so that you can build your fractional CMO practice.
00:31:08 Casey: One of my favorite lines that I give to folks is, you know, I find these people who are just like geniuses that have like low belief systems, you know, like limiting belief systems, and maybe like some low self confidence, I challenge them. Say, I want you to, I like, we have like a kind of a race inside of the Accelerator. It’s not real. I would never publish the winner. But I say to someone, I want you to be in the running right now for the highest fractional CMO fee. I believe in you and I want you to get there.
00:31:41 Casey: And I say, if anyone else thinks that they can beat them, I dare you to try to beat them. Right? Like I wanna create a sense of competition to increase that value. Because if you’ve only charged five grand a month for a client and I help you land a client that pays you 15,000 a month, you have to deliver $15,000 a month or more in value. So you gotta level up. Any of us can get there.
00:32:00 Casey: I’m just a kid from a small town. You know, I could have easily have, you know, gotten into, I don’t know, a sales job somewhere, followed my family into IBM. Nothing wrong with that, great place to be. Safe, probably, right? I could have done that. I didn’t. I went off on my own. And the vacuum that gets created when there’s no beliefs around you, and you have to create them yourselves is fun and also really hard. So I empathize with you if you feel like there’s just so much I have to create structure around for my own beliefs.
00:32:33 Casey: But you’ll start outpacing folks in your life and start to realize these belief systems actually carry you forward. And these older beliefs that are kind of holding you back aren’t serving you. So I just encourage you to consider these things and build a belief system that supports you. If you want my help, calling out your bullshit, if you want my team’s help, my coach’s help calling out your bullshit; when we hear you say something that’s like, that’s like a little off, I want you to like restructure the way that you say that or think about that because it’s not serving you.
00:33:01 Casey: If you want our help building and scaling your fractional CMO practice so you can break in those three to five clients that pay them half million dollars a year, join the CMOx Accelerator. And the first step to do that is just super soft, super easy. Just book it a call with my team, cmox.com/call. That’s it, cmox.com/call. Booking a 15 minute call, no pressure. We just ask you a couple of questions. See if you have the experience, see if you got what it takes. See if you got the commitment, you know, if you got the time. And if you do, then we’ll share what it looks like and how we can support you. All right? Super low pressure. Don’t worry about that call, just hop on it. Let’s have a conversation. Let’s see if we can even help you. Like do yourself that solid and just know, you know, if that’s the right route, or if you should go somewhere else. Okay?
00:33:41 Casey: A couple other quick housekeeping notes. One, this is on YouTube. If you’re watching this on YouTube, awesome. Hey, give me a thumbs up, give me a like, whatever. Subscribe, please. The subscription numbers help me see who’s consuming the content so please do that. Two, if you’re not watching me on YouTube, watch it on YouTube. I’m also on Spotify and you know, all the podcast apps. If you just subscribe to it, I see the subscriber numbers and it’s helpful for me to know just what’s working so please do that. Rate the show if you can, leave a review. I read all that stuff.
00:34:12 Casey: And then the last thing is, if you want to ask me any questions, go to cmox.com/podcast. And I have a form there. And you can just ask a question. And I might cover it on an upcoming episode. So get super specific about your question. Let me know who you are, your experience, that kind of stuff. And I’d love to share my thoughts with you. All right.
00:34:30 Casey: Thank you so much for being here. You have the opportunity to really accelerate your clients, their teams, solve the problems that their customers have, think about the downstream effect that you have as a CMO doing something great, helping a great company. It’s unbelievable. You know, you are the catalyst for a lot of good in the world and I’m excited to support you along the way. All right, can’t wait to see you soon. Take care.
00:34:35 Casey: Thank you for sticking around for the full episode. As you know, learners are earners but you gotta take action on what you heard today. For more information and show notes, visit fractionalcmoshow.com. If you 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 ’em.
We are excited to announce the Fractional CMO Community Facebook Group. This aims to be a place where Fractional CMOs or marketers considering becoming a Fractional CMO can connect and share ideas.
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