A fractional CMO with a build team attached.
Senior marketing leadership for owners and founders, from Indianapolis to anywhere, at $1,200–$4,800 a month. You built something real. We bring the plan, and the hands that build it.
What a fractional CMO does here
A fractional CMO is a senior marketing leader you hire for a slice of the week instead of all of it. Someone sets the strategy, owns the numbers, and answers for them. Ours comes with one difference you can check: the team that sets your direction also builds what the direction calls for. Pages, automations, ad accounts, reporting. One hallway.
The cost is simple because it isn’t special. Marketing leadership runs through the same three published retainers as everything we do: $1,200, $2,400, or $4,800 a month. How often we meet, and how much of the doing runs through us, is spelled out tier by tier on the pricing page.
For context, the 2026 guides from MarketerHire, Chief Outsiders, and Kalungi put typical fractional CMO retainers at $3,000 to $15,000 a month. We sit under that floor on purpose. The category prices for funded startups. Most of our clients are owners doing real revenue in central Indiana, and the retainer has to make sense against an actual month of their margin.
One opinion we’ll defend on the first call: most owners hire marketing leadership late, then ask it to make up the lost time in a quarter. Here at CPC, we aren’t afraid of a hot take: earlier and smaller beats later and desperate.
Many fractional CMOs hand you a plan. Then they hand you the problem.
Don’t get us wrong, plenty of fractional CMOs are sharp. The usual way the model falls short: they give you the plan and don’t run the work. The deck is sharp. The to-do list lands on you, your office manager, and whichever vendor you can still afford after paying for the deck.
We built the consultancy so that handoff never happens. The person who decides your follow-up is too slow sits on the same team that builds the automation to fix it; that build muscle is our Technical practice. The one who says your landing page is losing you customers can have it rewritten by Thursday. Advice and execution stop being two invoices.
And if what you need first is the plan itself, start with the one-time $3,000 strategy engagement. You can start there, then keep us on afterward as the marketing brain on call, with half the fee ($1,500) credited toward the retainer.
The plan and the hands, on one team.
Against a full-time hire. Against an agency.
MarketerHire’s published guide puts a full-time CMO at $175,000 to $300,000 and up in salary. Almost no business under a few million in revenue should buy that. An agency is the opposite trade: capacity without a leader. Here’s the plain version.
| Dimension | Full-time CMO | Marketing agency | Fractional CMO with us |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it costs | A full executive salary, year-round | A retainer per channel, with ad spend on top | $1,200–$4,800 a month, published |
| What you’re buying | One senior leader, all week | Hands for channels you’ve already chosen | A senior marketing brain for part of the week, plus the hands |
| Who owns the outcome | They do, once they’ve ramped | You do. Agencies own deliverables | We do, and the monthly report answers for it |
| When it fits | Past a few million in revenue, with a team to lead | After strategy is settled and a channel already works | From roughly $500K in revenue, or a founder before the first marketing hire |
What does a fractional CMO cost?
The market ranges next to ours. Where the money goes, and the situations where it isn’t worth spending.
Read the cost breakdownFractional CMO vs. marketing agency
One buys clarity, the other buys capacity. Which your business needs first.
Read the comparisonWho this is for. And who it isn’t.
- You own a business doing roughly $500K or more and need a marketing brain on call, not another vendor to manage.
- You’re a founder between the strategy engagement and your first marketing hire, and you want the playbook documented before you hand it to anyone.
- You keep buying tactics, canceling them 6 months later, and starting over. Someone has to own the whole picture.
- You’re before product-market fit. A retainer can’t fix that; customer conversations can. We’ll say so and send homework.
- You want a full-time executive in the office every day. That’s a hire, and a good one past a few million in revenue.
- You’re shopping for the cheapest possible posts-and-logo package. That money belongs in your Google Business Profile first.
The two groups we serve best have their own pathways: local business owners whose word of mouth stopped scaling, and founders carrying sales on their own back. Both pages say the quiet parts out loud.
8 clients. 3 months. Then month to month.
The cap is structural. We take 8 clients at a time, so the person advising you actually knows your business between calls. 3 months is the minimum, because marketing leadership judged in week 6 gets judged on noise. After that you stay month to month, and everything we build is registered to you from day one.
Here’s the part we’d rather say before you ask: there’s no shelf of named founder case studies here yet. Our proof today is local business and nonprofit work, and on the first call we’ll walk you through it, numbers included, along with what carries over to your stage and what doesn’t. Inventing a logo wall was the other option. We passed.
What people search before they call
What does a fractional CMO do?
A fractional CMO sets your marketing strategy, owns the numbers, and directs the people doing the work, for a part of their week instead of a full-time salary. Here the role comes with hands attached: the same team that sets the direction builds the pages, automations, ad accounts, and reports it calls for.
How many hours does a fractional CMO work?
There isn’t one standard. We scope by retainer tier instead of an hourly meter, and each tier’s advisory cadence is spelled out on the pricing page, so you know what a month looks like before you buy one.
When should I hire a fractional CMO?
Our rule of thumb is somewhere past $500K in revenue, when marketing decisions start costing real money and guessing stops being cheap. For founders, it’s when selling eats more of your week than building. If you’re before product-market fit, don’t hire one, including us. We’ll tell you that on the call and send you off with homework instead.
What does a fractional CMO cost in Indianapolis?
Ours costs $1,200, $2,400, or $4,800 a month, the same three published retainers as everything we do. The wider category runs far higher, because it prices for funded startups. We wrote a full article on where that money goes.
Do you only work with Indianapolis businesses?
No. Marketing leadership travels well over a video call, so this practice works nationwide. The roots stay local: we’re in Indianapolis, most of our clients are in central Indiana, and that proximity is part of why the 8-client cap holds.
Borrow a marketing brain for 30 minutes.
Bring the decision you’ve been circling: the hire you’re weighing or the channel that quit working. You’ll get straight answers, and if a retainer isn’t the right buy yet, you’ll leave with homework instead of an invoice.