What you need to know:

• CMOs are the fastest growing cohort of fractional executives, a resource modelling approach that’s been coined the next “executive gig economy” for the potential and impact it can deliver organisations large and small.
• With marketing, it’s a case of more supply than demand at present, according to Fractional Executive Community founding member, Zachary King and fractional CMO, Taz Bareham. The pair suggest the flood of senior marketing talent on the Australian jobs market right now, plus growing complexity of role, remit and corporate expectation of the marketing chief, is triggering a rush to adopt the fractional moniker.
• Yet this short-term imbalance shouldn’t take away the appeal access to specialist operational and strategic marketing expertise on tap should have for organisations, says Shayne De la Force, the founding partner of CMO Syndicate. Operating across six countries and with 21 experienced marketers on its book, the co-op is increasingly going into mid-market and large enterprises with a “brains trust” of experienced CMOs to deliver agility and accelerate the impact marketing can have on growth and business outcomes.
• Tumbleturn is another seeing the fractional CMO model as a no brainer and one that will only grow its percentage of the employment pie. As partner, Anthony Gregorio put it: “You have either very strong, strategic CMO, or generally, more often than not, a strong operational one. But rarely do you find that unicorn who is very comfortable playing in both spaces.
• Per Gregorio: “What we also see more and more is the strategic disconnect that’s happening on the client side. They really need someone with those type of skills coming into the business, helping get that alignment and providing that independent lens, while not getting dragged into the politics as much as possible.”
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When experienced B2B marketer and former agency planner Taz Bareham took on the moniker of ‘Fractional CMO’ three years ago, there were a handful of people on LinkedIn doing the same. Fast forward to today, and the supply pipeline has grown to thousands, outpacing burgeoning demand for these forms of executives.

Why? At a current local level, a tranche of redundancies, complexity of remit and conservatism in hiring policies – and arguably sheer exhaustion – has seen a wash of senior marketing talent flood the Australian jobs market. Some have chosen to latch on to the fractional mantle as an interim stepping stone, or to bridge a gap while they seek to land the next full-time gig. 

But the bigger, longer-term picture isn’t as simple as that. With the pressures and commercial expectations of marketing arguably at their highest ever levels, executing the craft of marketing without the political and organisational angst associated with a full-time, permanent gig is an appealing – and sustainable – proposition for the likes of Bareham.

“I get back to go to back to the joy of being a CMO versus sinking under the pressure of being a CMO,” Bareham says.

A desire for better work / life balance, coping with CMO burnout, sticking with the marketing knitting instead of moving up to CEO, COO or non-executive roles, plus more opportunity to try another category are other reasons why experienced marketers are being lured in.

There are plenty of reasons for businesses to tune into this emerging executive gig economy too. Cost efficiency is inevitably one, and Deloitte has noted companies can save up to 50 per cent by getting in fractional execs over FTE. It’s also a way for scale-ups to access marketing and other senior leadership talent they otherwise couldn’t afford, and gain the helping hand of specialist or generalist expertise they don’t have in the existing team.

Then there’s the flexibility and outcomes-based construct of the arrangement. Fractional execs can be a liquid workforce, something to turn on and off, to help build or support strategy and teams as an organisation matures. They can operationalise capability faster, bring go-to-market expertise and get to commercial impact quicker. It’s certainly how US-based founding partner of CMO Syndicate, Shayne De la Force, and his army of 21 CMOs across six countries including Australia, position themselves.

“It’s about agility and acceleration. It gives an organisation both of those things. Our job is to get in there and fix the problem and get out of there as quick as possible,” he says. “You want to build a marketing organisation that can actually stand on its own feet and get from point A to B faster than what they could do themselves.”

All this means a lower-risk profile for an organisation. That risk profile is only getting more complicated itself. Tech, digital and AI transformation, along with consumer expectations, market conditions and tough regulatory forces, are throwing constant curve balls.

Too much for one CMO to handle?

Such macro forces led Tumbleturn to launch its fractional CMO service in mid-2024. The focus is on two key areas: Providing a resource for CMOs to supplement what they are doing and thinking; and providing CEOs and senior leadership teams needing specialist marketing expertise to raise things to the next level, or upskill existing marketing functions. So far, it’s finding a sweet spot with mid-market and larger organisations.

“What we found is the remit so broad, you have either very strong, strategic CMO, or generally, more often than not, a strong operational CMO,” says Tumbleturn partner, Anthony Gregorio. “But rarely do you find that unicorn who is very comfortable playing in both spaces.

“What we also see more and more is the strategic disconnect that’s happening on the client side. They really need someone with those type of skills coming into the business, helping get that alignment and providing that independent lens, while not getting dragged into the politics as much as possible.”

CMO Syndicate has recognised the same problem and commonly goes in with two or three CMOs in one engagement. All marketers on its books have held a marketing leadership job for at least 12 years prior to going into the Syndicate and boast diverse category experiences, generalist and specialist skills and corporate growth trajectories. It’s a “brains trust” mentality that better adapts to the so-called 12 archetypes of CMO De la Force notes Deloitte has coined – taking its cues from the 12 Character Archetypes first codified by Carl Jung in 1919.

“We are learning from each other, and we build a better mousetrap to be able to provide better results on things. Because the remit of the CMO these days is massive,” De la Force says. “You can actually have different CMOs for all the different levels of growth available to you as an organisation.

“Then add in all the technology changes that are actually happening: There was a day where we just had to know our CRM platform. I think everybody’s seen the martech map from five years ago. There was about 6,000 martech platforms on there; in 2024, there’s over 14,000 martech platforms. How’s the CMO supposed to know which one to actually go for? Let alone owning all the other four Ps, which many CMOs don’t these days as well.”

Why a fractional isn’t a consultant

Zachary King is the founding board member of The Fractional Exec Community, a group designed to help navigate the new world of fractional work. A former VP of sales, King is working as a fractional himself after significant experience across diverse organisations including adtech players such as MediaMath and Oomph.

“In that tech space, where I focus, words like profitability and runway are now back in vogue after 10 years of being in the wilderness,” he says. “The ability to pick up a senior exec or senior marketer who’s been there, done that, got the scars to prove it, and to do it in a really flexible and targeted way just makes sense.”

Just don’t call it consulting. “You’ve got somebody who comes in and gets boots on the ground inside the company, so they’re actively involved. They’re in the leadership meetings, they’re in your systems, they’re in everything like that,” King says.

“Also, they generally tend to be a combination of both strategic and operational roles. That’s not always the case, but I see it certainly in the work I do. It’s one of the ways a fractional is very different from a consultant. They’re in there actually building things, as opposed to handing over a 100-point slide deck and wishing you well.”

Bareham has had responsibility for team members, coaching and leading staff, and operates inside the business, proactively making decisions, rather than waiting to be briefed or the organisation to constantly guide her. “You might be giving the brief to external suppliers, consultants and agencies as well, rather than being on the outside, waiting for somebody to guide you on what needs to happen,” she says.

Bareham explains her career trajectory as a “fractional CMO a few times over”, going full time on several occasions. “I’ve been engaged as a consultant on a project basis, then moved into retainer-based work, where I’ve been with a company two days a week for a year, or until such a time they’re ready to hire somebody full time. In essence, it’s been kind of try before you buy with both,” she says.

“That was before Covid and our new ways of working. I had full-time roles during Covid, then got to a point, like a lot of people, where I was asking myself: Is that the way I want to live my life? I come from an agency background as well, so I’m used to working across lots of different categories and clients at the same time, and I embrace that variety.”

Bareham has strong professional experience as a CMO in the B2B SaaS space, but since being fractional worked with software clients in a varied number of categories where the audience is completely different. Even an embroidery software company.

“Who even knew that existed? Equally, I’ve worked in healthcare, ecommerce. I even got approached by somebody in relation to IVF for horses,” she says. “Because there haven’t been lots of fractionals on the market with deep expertise in specific niches, clients are more open to talking to you regardless of what your background is, because they can see you’ve got transferrable marketing skills. They’ve got the industry expertise, and what they’re missing is the marketing expertise, so they’re still willing to talk to you and to engage you in a way they might not if they were looking for an FTE role.

“Going back to that way of working, first of all, gives me that variety. But secondly… I get to go back to the joy of being a marketer versus being slammed with back-to-back meetings throughout the week, and just being in meetings because people like having you there and feel like they need you there, being involved in the politics of a company. When you go fractional, people are a lot more careful about what they involve you in. You get to add the magic and dazzle of marketing and be more strategic, because you’ve got that thinking space around it.

“I don’t have an aspiration to be a CEO. I don’t have an aspiration to be a CMO at a big enterprise company. This enables me to do the stuff I like, but across multiple companies, and with the flexibility of lifestyle.”

More willingness to hire marketing expertise from another category is certainly something other fractional CMOs highlight as a perk. Yet there’s an argument it’s because it’s early days for the fractional model in Australia and engagement of senior talent in this way is still embryonic. Cultural fit is a major deciding factor Bareham, Gregorio and King see in play with fractional hires right now.

By contrast, one of the deciding factors companies use when they come to the CMO Syndicate overseas is industry nous.

“The biggest thing, especially in the US, is industry; they want to know we know their competitors, that we speak their language, we actually know their industry,” De la Force says. “It took us a little bit to work out industry for us is definitely the way in.

“Obviously, they you want to be nice and all that sort of stuff, and that you’re aligning exactly to their vision and mission. But we don’t see much of that [cultural fit] because we are getting in there, fixing it and getting out.”

CMO skills aggregation and the fractional tipping point

Tumbleturn and CMO Syndicate are examples of aggregate fractional models bringing more than one CMO or executive skillset to the table. They’re also indicators Australia’s fractional hiring market is still in its infancy in comparison to places like the US and UK. Abroad, these kinds of “proto agencies” and co-ops are increasingly common and gaining traction in mid-market to large, established companies as a result.

But with the underlying value proposition of a company getting access to senior talent in a flexible, targeted way such a no-brainer, there is every expectation more syndicates, along with organic partnerships between executives with differing skill sets, are on their way.

“The gig economy for the c-suite is here to stay,” King says. “For example, there’s an ABM strategic guru who does fractional work, and pulls in somebody who’s really good at the content side. It’s almost like proto agencies forming with the fractional space, and it’s super exciting to see the growth of that going forward.”

Bareham and King have even put a proposal together as a form of go-to-market VP of sales / fractional CMO bundle to a client. “More of this will start to happen, and a lot more syndicates start to form than existing in this market at the moment,” Bareham adds.

Billing, expectations and fractional learning curve

However, all panellists agree fluidity around the fractional executive model remains one of the hurdles for better take-up and understanding the impact it can have – and paying appropriately for it. Bareham cites a fractional executive who has relocated back from the US to Australia and is reportedly finding local clients less respectful than in the service-oriented industry existing in the states.

“Clients turn up when they say they’re going to they respect your time, they’re prepared to pay for your services. He suggests it’s the opposite in Australia, because they blow you out, they ghost you. They don’t turn up. They don’t want to pay. They negotiate on price,” she comments.

Ironically, marketers are nowhere near as good at marketing themselves as they are marketing to external customers, Bareham, King, Gregorio and De la Force concur. What’s helping all four to shore up expectations upfront with clients is pre-engagement audits, training workshops and a project-based, clear briefing and scoping process with each job they take on.

In cases where Tumbleturn is bringing in skills to support an existing CMO, it works to define the scope as tightly as possible. “When you’re talking to procurement and a whole bunch of other people that need to get these costs approved, that’s really helpful,” says Gregorio.

“Let’s say it’s a three-month engagement, two or three days a week to solve a specific issue. That’s not cheap, because senior people cost money. But at the end of the day, if you’re a big organisation, it’s not a huge expense. As long as it’s framed correctly, it’s usually not an issue. We just find it much more helpful to be really specific around what scope that person is engaged for because that takes a lot of those issues away. If someone’s just coming in for two days a week with a poorly defined sense of what they meant to do, well, that’s a world of pain.”

As Gregorio quips, citing a CFO he once spoke to: “There’s never going to be a time again where there’s enough people in the organisation to do all the work that’s required”.

Saving time, prompt return on investment, and a clear path to impact are also the selling points put forward by De la Force and CMO Syndicate. The Fractional Exec community is also striving to help build charging models and tackle these sorts of operational questions at scale. King points to New Zealand-based CMO co-op, Proxi, running paid workshops upfront with clients. While it’s loss leader, “it’s a beautiful indicator of commitment they’re invested, and they’ll do it”.

“Running a diagnosis workshop upfront, laying out things in three-month sprints, and what you’re working on, but you are a fractional so there is flexibility in there, is key,” he says. “Because I tend to work with fairly early stage, high-growth companies, you’ve got to have that flexibility. That’s a hard-won lesson, and certainly as part of the community, what we do is try and share those learnings upfront.”

Bareham does a marketing audit upfront before settling into a fractional opportunity, supplying a topline analysis before discussing what an ongoing engagement will look like.

“You learn quite quickly you need to have some frank conversations upfront, because it’s about a client fitting you as well as you fitting a client,” Bareham says. “I will say, engage me for X number of days, and during that time, this is what I’m going to do, I’m going to speak to stakeholders, I’m going to do some desk research. I’m going to come back to you with a topline analysis of where I think you’re at – a bit of a diagnosis, and where I see the opportunities and what I would focus on next. Then we can discuss what an ongoing engagement would look like, how many days, a week, month, you need.

“That’s versus going and trying to sell to people, saying ‘hey, you don’t know me, but let’s start a relationship for six months or so, and it’s going to cost you this much’. That’s a harder sell unless you’ve got an extremely warm lead, and you’ve already got a relationship with them. But that has also happened as well with people I’ve worked with before.”

You can listen to the full podcast episode on fractional CMOs featuring Taz Bareham, Anthony Gregorio, Zach King and Shayne De la Force here.