The first artefact a new fractional CMO should ask for is not the strategy deck or the funnel dashboard. It is the list of everyone outside the company currently being paid to do marketing, what each is contracted to deliver, and who last read the contract. That list is almost never ready, and the reason it is not ready is the actual problem.
Fractional engagements are usually sold as a strategy problem. The company knows it needs a clearer positioning, a better funnel, a plan for the year. What it actually has, in most cases, is four or five external relationships that accumulated one at a time over several years, each hired to solve a specific problem, none of them ever re-scoped, and no single person holding the whole picture. An SEO retainer signed under a previous head of marketing. A paid-media freelancer who reports to the founder directly. A design studio on a monthly minimum. A developer who owns the website and answers on WhatsApp. A CRM consultant from an implementation that ended eighteen months ago and never quite stopped billing.
The strategy work cannot land on top of that, because those relationships are where the money and the execution capacity actually live. Whatever plan you write will be delivered by them or not at all.
Two instincts, both wrong
The first instinct is the clean sweep. A new senior marketer arrives, sees a stack of vendors with unclear value, and cancels most of them in the first month. It feels decisive and it reads well in an update. It is also how you lose the only people who know why the tracking is set up the way it is, which pages were built by hand, and what the paid account looked like before it was fixed. Institutional memory in a small company frequently sits with its longest-serving contractor, not with any employee.
The second instinct is deference. The vendors were here first, the founder likes them, they are not obviously failing, and the fractional CMO is present two days a month. Leaving them alone is the path of least friction, and it quietly guarantees the engagement produces a plan nobody executes — because execution capacity was never actually redirected.
The useful position is between the two, and it starts with reading, not deciding.
The inventory, and what it should contain
Before any judgement, build one document. It is dull work and it is the highest-leverage thing you will do in the first fortnight.
- Who they are, and who inside the company owns the relationship — the person who takes the call when something is wrong, not the person who signs.
- What the contract says they deliver, in their words, copied from the agreement rather than paraphrased from memory.
- The commercial shape: retainer, project, percentage of spend, or an hourly arrangement that has become a de facto retainer.
- Notice period and renewal date. This determines what you can change and when, and it is the single fact most often unknown.
- What they have actually shipped in the last quarter, listed as artefacts — a page, a campaign, a report — not as activities.
- What breaks if they stop tomorrow. Access, hosting, ad accounts, domain control, the analytics property, the design files.
That last line is the one that changes decisions. A vendor delivering little but holding the ad account, the domain registrar login or the only copy of the brand files is not a cheap cancellation. It is a migration project, and it needs to be planned as one rather than triggered by an emotional email on a Friday.
Judge on the contract, not on the relationship
The awkward part of this work is that the assessment is frequently a criticism of a hiring decision the founder made personally. Handled badly, it turns into a loyalty conversation and stalls. The way through is to keep every conversation anchored to the written scope.
The question is never whether the agency is good. It is whether what they are contracted to deliver is still what the company needs, and whether they are delivering it. Those are two separate failures with two different remedies. A vendor doing excellent work against an obsolete scope needs re-scoping, and often stays. A vendor doing poor work against a scope that still matters needs replacing. Conflating the two produces the worst outcome: cancelling a capable partner because the brief went stale.
Re-scoping is the default move
In most engagements the correct first action with an incumbent is not termination and not silence. It is a short, written re-scope: here is what we now need from you, here is what we are stopping, here is how we will judge it, and here is when we will review. Most vendors welcome this. Ambiguous retainers are uncomfortable for the supplier too — they invite the client to imagine unlimited scope while paying for a fixed one, and the supplier absorbs the difference until the relationship sours.
Put a review date on it, close enough to matter and far enough away to be fair. A quarter is usually right. Write down in advance what you will look at on that date, because a review with criteria invented on the day is a negotiation, not a review.
The vendors that should go, and how
Some relationships genuinely need to end. The clearest cases are the ones where nobody in the company can describe what the vendor does, where deliverables have degenerated into a monthly report about the report, or where the scope duplicates something another vendor is also being paid for. Duplication is common and almost never visible until the inventory exists — two suppliers both quietly claiming credit for the same organic traffic is a classic.
When you do end one, sequence it: recover access first, extract the assets, document what only they knew, then serve notice. Reversing that order is how a company loses control of its own ad account during a live campaign. And do it in writing, courteously, with the notice period honoured — a marketing ecosystem in any given city is smaller than it looks, and the next supplier will ask around.
What this buys the engagement
A fractional CMO's scarcest resource is not judgement. It is delivery capacity, because they are not there to execute. Every incumbent relationship that gets re-scoped into something useful is delivery capacity the company already pays for, already trusts, and does not have to procure. The inventory usually pays for the engagement before any strategy work begins — not by cutting spend, though that sometimes happens, but by pointing spend that was already committed at the plan instead of away from it.
The failure mode to avoid is arriving with a strategy and treating the existing suppliers as an inconvenience standing between you and it. They are not the obstacle. In a company without an internal marketing team, they are the marketing team — and the job is to find out whether they know it.
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See Fracmo pricing →Keep reading
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