A UK-regulated fintech needed senior marketing leadership for two quarters: brand work the agency couldn't finish, performance numbers the in-house lead couldn't move, and a pipeline review the founder dreaded. Six months as fractional CMO, a tight handover, and a 4x increase in qualified pipeline at exit.
The client was a UK fintech with a real product, a real customer base, and a marketing function that had grown by accident. A junior marketing lead, a brand agency on retainer for a six-month "rebrand" that was already three months late, two performance vendors who didn't talk to each other, and a founder doing strategy in the gaps.
The numbers told the story: pipeline was flat, CAC was rising, and the gap between "brand campaign" outputs and "qualified pipeline" outcomes was four full handoffs of nobody-owns-this. Hiring a full-time CMO would take another quarter the runway didn't want to spend.
The brief: come in fractional for six months, fix the operating model, leave behind a function that runs without us.
We did not redo the brand. We did not change agencies. We sat in pipeline review for four weeks, walked through every deal that closed and every deal that died, and built one document: where leads come from, where they drop, who owns each stage. The document landed on the founder's desk in week 4 with the answer: pipeline wasn't broken at the top — it was broken at the messaging-to-product handoff. The brand agency was working on the wrong artifact.
We rescoped the brand agency to the 30% of their deliverables that mattered (positioning, sales narrative, three core landing pages) and shipped that within four weeks. The other 70% — full visual rebrand, deck templates, swag — moved to backlog. The performance vendors got a single brief and a single weekly call instead of two parallel reporting streams.
Paid spend was reorganized around three campaigns aligned to the rescoped positioning: one ICP-specific brand campaign for known accounts, one demand-capture campaign for high-intent search, one nurture campaign for the dark-funnel audience listening on LinkedIn. We killed five legacy campaigns the team was afraid to switch off. CAC dropped within the quarter because half the spend had been chasing the wrong personas.
The internal junior lead — capable, under-coached — got six weeks of structured 1:1s on prioritization, vendor management, and pipeline reviews. By month 6 she was running the weekly cadence, owning the dashboard, and presenting at exec. We stepped off. She was promoted shortly after.
"Fractional CMO is not 'cheap CMO.' It is a different shape of work — fix the operating model, install a successor, leave. Six months and a clean exit, or it didn't work."
Qualified pipeline grew 4x by month 6. CAC dropped within the second quarter as misallocated spend was reclaimed. The brand artifacts that mattered shipped; the ones that didn't, didn't. Most importantly, the in-house lead was promoted into the role we vacated, and the operating model survived our exit.
The founder later said the engagement worked because we treated our own exit as the deliverable, not as a side effect.
If your marketing function has accumulated agencies, vendors, and dashboards faster than it has accumulated clarity, a fractional CMO engagement is the cheaper, faster reset than hiring a full-time hire who takes a quarter to learn the building. Six months. Diagnostic, rescope, build, handover, exit. We treat the exit as the deliverable.
Fractional CMO engagements for fintech, B2B SaaS, AI tools. NDA standard.
