Fractional versus full-time at Series A: the real cost
The salary is the smallest part of what a full-time growth leader costs in year one. Here's the full sum, and the point where the full-time hire wins.
Founders comparing a fractional CMO with a full-time hire usually compare a monthly retainer with a monthly salary and stop there. The salary is the wrong number. Here’s the arithmetic we walk through on calls, with your figures, not ours.
The full-time sum
Start with base salary at the level you actually need. For a person who has run six-figure monthly budgets and built a team, that’s a senior number in any market you’d hire in. Then add the parts that don’t show up in the offer letter.
Equity. At Series A a VP-level marketing hire expects a meaningful grant. Price it at what you think the company is worth, not at the strike price.
The search. A retained or contingency recruiter charges a share of first-year pay, and the search itself takes months. Count the months. Every one of them is a month with no owner of the number, and that has a cost you can estimate from your current CAC and the growth you’re not getting.
Ramp. Nobody owns a number in their first month. The first quarter goes on learning the product, the customer, the data and the team. You pay full salary for it. With a fractional operator the ramp is the audit, it’s a fixed price, and the output is a document you keep.
The stack around them. A full-time growth leader hires. Within two quarters there’s a request for a paid specialist, a lifecycle marketer, a designer, or an agency to do what the leader doesn’t have time for. That’s often right. It’s also a second and third salary that the original decision didn’t include.
The exit. If it doesn’t work, there’s notice, severance, and a second search. If it does work, the person is promoted or poached inside two years, and the search starts again anyway.
Add those up for year one and the salary is somewhere between a third and a half of the total. The exact share depends on your market and your equity, which is why we don’t publish a number.
The fractional sum
A retainer for one to three days a week, agreed monthly, that scales down as the playbook and the team take over. The audit and roadmap in front of it, fixed price. No equity, no recruiter, no severance. The ramp is measured in weeks because the operator has done this in your sector before, or won’t take the engagement.
What you don’t get: someone in the building five days a week, a name on the org chart that says CMO, and a person whose whole career is tied to your outcome. Those things matter, and at a certain size they matter more than the cost.
Where the full-time hire wins
Three signals, any one of which is enough.
The work needs five days a week. When the fractional lead is at three days and the backlog is still growing, you’ve outgrown the model. That’s a good problem. The roadmap will tell you what the full-time role should look like, and you’ll hire from a position of strength instead of hope.
You need a team leader, not a growth operator. Once there are four or more marketers in-house, the job becomes management, hiring and culture as much as channels. That job wants someone present.
The number is big enough to justify the sum. Rough test: if the year-one total from the first section is a small fraction of the revenue the role is accountable for, hire. If it’s a large fraction, you’re buying the person before you’ve proven the engine.
The honest comparison
Fractional is cheaper in year one for almost every Series A company, and that’s not the reason to choose it. The reason is that you can change your mind each quarter, the audit and the plan stay with you, and the decision to hire full time gets made later with better information. Full time is the right end state for most businesses that make it. Fractional is how you get there without paying for the wrong senior hire on the way.
If you’d like the sum worked through with your numbers, that’s what the first call is for.