Essay
Every growing B2B service business I meet has the same shape of marketing function. There is a website that was good two years ago, a Google Ads account someone set up and nobody owns, a freelance designer or two on retainer, an SEO supplier sending PDFs nobody reads, and a founder who is the de facto marketing director on top of running the company. Spend is happening. Activity is happening. Decisions are not.
That is the gap. It is not a creative gap, it is not a tooling gap, and it is almost never a budget gap. It is a leadership gap. Nobody in the room is senior enough, or close enough to the commercial picture, to look at the agency invoice, the ad data, and the pipeline at the same time and make a call.
Hiring another agency does not close this gap. Another agency adds another supplier to manage. What closes the gap is putting a senior marketer in the chair where the decisions are actually made.
Agencies are production engines. The good ones are very good at what they sell. A performance agency runs paid media well. A content agency produces content. A web agency builds websites. Each one is optimised, fairly, for the thing it bills for.
What an agency cannot do is sit on your side of the table. It cannot tell you to stop spending on a channel that is its core revenue. It cannot weigh a brand investment against a sales hire because it does not see the sales pipeline. It cannot tell another supplier their work is below standard and hold them to a deadline, because suppliers do not manage each other.
These are not failings, they are structural. The model is the model. The mistake is asking the model to do something it was never built to do.
A fractional Marketing Director sits inside the business, not on the supplier side of the line. The job is small in hours and large in scope. Four hours of director time per month, applied at the right pressure points, will change more in a marketing function than forty hours of executor time.
The work, in plain terms, is this. Read the data and tell you what it actually says. Sit in supplier meetings and hold the standard. Decide what the business spends on, what it stops spending on, and what it tests next. Write the brief the agency could not write for itself. Report on ROI in language the leadership team uses, not in screenshots of dashboards.
It is a senior seat at a fractional cost. The maths is simple. A full-time marketing director in Australia costs $150k to $220k plus on-costs. A fractional director gives you the same calibre of decision-making for a fraction of that, and the decisions are what move the number.
There are four questions I ask owners on a first call. They are the cheapest diagnostic in marketing.
First, when your best supplier sends an invoice next month, will anyone in your business know whether the work is worth what it cost. If the answer is no, you have a leadership gap, not a supplier gap.
Second, if I asked your three suppliers to describe your marketing strategy in one paragraph, would the three paragraphs match. If not, you have a leadership gap.
Third, when was the last time someone in your business told a supplier their work was not good enough, and held the line. If you cannot name the date, you have a leadership gap.
Fourth, can you point to the three numbers that actually matter to your marketing this quarter. Not the dashboard, the three numbers. If you cannot, you have a leadership gap.
You can hire all the agencies in the world and not one of those four answers will improve. The seat that fixes them is the director seat.
The first month of a fractional engagement is not about new campaigns. It is about getting the room in order. I read the contracts, the analytics, the briefs that have been written, and the work that has shipped. I sit in on one cycle of supplier meetings and listen. I write a one-page strategy that everyone, including the suppliers, has to agree with or argue against.
The second month is about stopping things. There is always work in flight that should not be. There are usually one or two suppliers who need a clearer scope or, occasionally, a kinder offboarding. Spend gets reallocated to the channels that earn it.
The third month is about pace. Reporting cadence is set. Briefs go out cleaner. The leadership team starts hearing marketing decisions framed in pipeline language. The business begins to feel, for the first time in a while, that marketing is being driven rather than reacted to.
That is what the seat is for. It is not glamorous. It is not creative-led. It is the quiet operational discipline that takes a marketing function from busy to compounding.
I keep a maximum of five retainer clients at a time. That is not a marketing line, it is a working constraint. Director-level attention does not scale past it. If you want a logo on your homepage and a junior account manager on your email, there are agencies for that and they are good at it. If you want the senior seat filled, that is a different conversation.
The first step is usually a Discovery Workshop. Ninety minutes, a one-page strategy, and a clear recommendation. From there, either you bring me in or you take the strategy and run it yourself. Both outcomes are fine.
The point is to stop adding suppliers and start adding leadership. That is the only move that changes the number.
More writing
Different industries, different revenue bands, different problems on the surface. Under the surface, the same five marketing decisions show up wrong almost every time. None of them require a new agency, a new tool, or a new budget line.
Offshore creative teams are the single biggest unlock available to a growing B2B service business with more marketing work than budget. The talent is almost never the problem. The brief, the feedback loop, and the reporting line are.
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I write about the work I do every day. If you recognise yourself in any of it, book a discovery call or send a message.