What a fractional growth lead should have done by day 90

Most fractional engagements run month to month after the first quarter. That makes day 90 the moment you decide whether to keep paying. Here is what should exist by then. None of it is ambitious. All of it is checkable.

1. A written read of the accounts

Within the first three weeks you should have received a document, not a deck, that says what’s working, what’s wasting money and what’s missing. It should name campaigns, not categories. “Search is inefficient” is an opinion. “Brand terms take most of the search budget and would convert without the ad” is a finding, and a finding has a next action.

If you didn’t get this, the person started executing before they understood the account. That’s how agencies work, and it’s the thing you were paying to avoid.

2. One number, written down, that the engagement is measured on

Pipeline at a cost. Paid signups at a cost. Revenue at a payback period. The number should sit at the top of every report and the fractional lead should be able to say it without looking it up. If you have three numbers, you have none.

3. Tracking you’d let an auditor look at

Before any channel gets more budget, the measurement has to hold. That means GA4 and the ad platforms report the same conversions within a tolerance you’ve agreed, offline conversions come back into the platforms if your sale closes on a call, and the “conversion” being optimised is the one that leads to money, not the one that’s easy to fire.

This is unglamorous, it takes a couple of weeks, and skipping it is the most common reason growth work fails quietly.

4. Something stopped

A good first quarter turns things off. Campaigns that never paid back. A channel that only ever produced meetings that went nowhere. Reports nobody read. If after 90 days the account has only grown, the person is adding, not managing, and the budget is carrying the difference.

5. Something live that wasn’t before

The counterpart. At least one campaign, sequence, page or test built and running that didn’t exist on day one. Not planned. Running, with a date you can check.

6. A dashboard the P&L owner reads without help

One page. Spend, the number from point two, and the trend. If it needs the fractional lead in the room to explain it, it isn’t finished. The test we use: could the CFO open it on a Monday and know whether last week was good?

7. Evidence they’ve been in the accounts

Open the change history in Google Ads or Meta. A fractional lead who owns the accounts leaves a trail: bids moved, budgets shifted, negatives added, audiences excluded, most weeks. A trail that stops after week two tells you the work moved to someone else, or to nobody.

8. Your team or agency pointed at the same number

If there’s an in-house marketer or an agency in the picture, they should be reporting against the number from point two, in the same format, by now. A fractional lead who runs a parallel programme next to the existing one has added a layer. The job was to remove one.

9. A plan for the next 90 days you’d keep if they left

The roadmap for Q2 should be specific enough that a competent replacement could run it. That’s not a sign the person is dispensable. It’s a sign the work is real and belongs to your business, which is the point of paying a senior operator instead of an agency that keeps the playbook.

What to do with the list

Print it. Go through it with your fractional lead at the 90-day review, in that order. Anything that’s missing, ask for a date. Anything that’s missing at the next review too, that’s your answer.

We run the audit and roadmap as a fixed-price project for exactly this reason: the first three points on the list exist before anyone commits to a retainer, and they stay with you whether or not we continue.