We build the marketing foundation your firm grows on: who you’re for, what you say and the team and systems to keep saying it.
Built in a year, then it’s yours.
Every firm we’ve worked with knew what made it different. The work is getting everyone to say it the same way, so the people who don’t know you yet can see it too. These are the questions we hear first. Your answers tell us where your firm starts.
Five decades leading B2B marketing in-house and at agencies, across industries. We’ve seen the same challenges at firm after firm.
The two people you meet do the work, side by side: fractional co-leads who’ve built brand, demand, marketing and sales functions inside firms like yours.
The audit and plan in the first six months, the build through the rest of the year, and a function that’s yours by the end of it. Every milestone is dated at kickoff.
Reach more of your best clients.
Finally own your differentiation.
Amplify your story in a way that resonates.
Follow a plan that’s aligned to your business priorities.
Typically, firms like yours bring in marketing one of three ways: hire a dedicated marketing professional, retain an agency at the budget you can afford or bring in a fractional CMO.
Year1 is sized for the year the function gets built: seasoned, senior professionals with in-depth knowledge of the professional services industry who build a right-sized marketing strategy and function for less overall cost.
| Marketing Hire | Agency | 1 fCMO | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Who owns the strategy | Whoever you hired, if that’s their strength | You, by default | They do, with your partners | Your partners, with us in the room |
| What gets built first | Whichever matches their strength, brand or demand, while the rest waits | Output, before the story is settled | The plan, then the hire to run it | The foundation, then the function on top of it |
| What’s left when they leave | A gap, and a restart | Files, and a renewal conversation | A strategy, and an ongoing seat if you keep it | A team, a rhythm and systems that keep running |
| Time to a working function | Six to nine months to hire, then a ramp | Open-ended | Weeks to start, at one leader’s pace | A year, with the plan in the first six months |
High-growth professional services firms spend 12% of revenue on marketing; no-growth firms spend 5%. The firms that grow agreed on what they were selling first, then built something that could hold it. (Hinge, 2026 High Growth Study, 495 firms.)
Amanda spent 20 years at Prophet and rose to Global CMO, helping grow the firm from $25M to more than $145M. She rebranded the company from a brand agency to a growth strategy consulting firm, built its message architecture and tripled the global team across brand and demand. Since then she’s built her own fractional CMO firm, helped firms develop a new way of approaching marketing and built a marketing strategy and team at AnswerLab.
Kate led marketing and sales at 8th Light, where she built both functions from the ground up. Before that she held multiple VP roles in strategic, digital and content marketing at agencies including Imagination Publishing (now The MX Group) and TMP Worldwide (now Radancy). She’s worked with leaders from small businesses to Fortune 100 companies such as P&G, where she led employer brand strategy for its global careers platform across 60+ markets. She started as an award-winning journalist, and today she runs her own fractional marketing business focused on bringing brand stories to life.
Two senior leaders, one plan, and a marketing function that’s yours at the end of the year.
Fifty years of excellent work that few people outside the firm’s relationships knew about. Roughly 90% of revenue came from referrals and relationships, and no two leaders told the story the same way. One put it plainly in the audit: “You are the blue in a sea of blues.”
Leadership took the work as its own. The CEO quotes it unprompted, the positioning line opens the capabilities deck, and one of us is in the fractional CMO seat while the first marketing hires come up.
Amanda partnered with the CEO and leadership team to create a new brand, refine the positioning and sharpen the story: a full rebrand, messaging and website. Then she built the marketing strategy and a small team to carry it, and handed it over in a year.
As the executive over marketing and sales, Kate built a cross-functional growth team and launched the company’s first integrated go-to-market strategy, along with its first employer brand and content strategies. She also led the website relaunch, which grew monthly users more than 50%.
Not every firm’s marketing needs fit the same model, so we built a different one. These are the questions partners ask us first. If yours isn’t here, bring it to the fit call.
Book a fit callBuilding strategy, brand and demand at once takes more range than one leader brings, at the pace a growing firm needs. Between us we’ve built each of them inside firms like yours, and as fractional co-leads we work in parallel, so the build moves faster. You get one plan and one fee. Once the foundation’s built, one fractional leader is often the right seat, and one of us can stay on if you want that.
It’s usually the first real question, and our audit shows where to focus first. Brand is always in service of demand, so the plan covers both and puts them in order. If the market doesn’t know what you’re good at yet, brand comes first. If it does and the pipeline is still thin, the plan leans into demand, and we’ll help you build the team to run it.
Maybe, but we’ve found it’s best to bring in a senior hire after you know whether you need brand, demand or both, and what team the plan needs. Hire before that and you’re asking one person to work out the strategy, build it and run it all at the same time. And they might not have the expertise in the areas you need. When you do hire, they’ll inherit a strategy your leadership already backs, with room to test and build on it.
Yes. Most firms we work with have one person carrying three jobs. We build the foundation with and around them, so they come out of it with a plan they helped write and a clearer job.
About a year. The audit, messaging platform and the plan are usually developed within the first six months. Building the function takes the rest of the year. Your partners set the pace with how quickly they can decide, and we plan around your calendar.
If you’re setting your 2027 plan and budget, yes. An audit now means next year’s budget funds a plan your partners agreed to.
It’s yours. We build a marketing function tailored to your business, and the team, the monthly and quarterly rhythm and the systems keep running after we hand it over. One of us can stay on as an advisor if you want that, scoped a quarter at a time.
It’s built for partner-led professional services firms of roughly 50 to 150 people. If you need a marketing manager more than a foundation, we’ll tell you on the first call.
We’ll ask about the business and tell you at the end whether this is the right call, or whether what you need is a marketing manager.