Fractional CMO: Half the Time, Double the Impact! (Part 1)

Emma Rainey, fractional CMO and former global marketing director at several US IT, SaaS and FinTech businesses, joins Adam and John to talk about what it really means to work fractionally — and what she's seeing on the ground when it comes to hybrid working and return-to-office mandates.

Guest: Emma Rainey – Fractional CMO

Shownotes

What is a Fractional CMO?

• A senior marketing professional who works part-time across multiple businesses
• Typically 4–8 days per month per client, building a "portfolio career"
• Fills the gap for companies who need strategic marketing leadership but can't justify a full-time CMO salary (average ~£125,000/year)
• Two common scenarios: SMEs with no marketing strategy, or larger businesses with a team but no senior leader at the table

How Emma works

• Treats each client as if she's a full-time member of the senior leadership team
• Logs all hours, every minute has to count
• Prefers longer-term relationships over project work to truly embed into a business
• Rolls her sleeves up, it's not just strategy, there's execution too

Hybrid working: what Emma's seeing

• Most SME and tech clients have retained flexible working; some have shut their offices entirely
• Larger companies (Tesco, Asda, Morrisons, JD Sports, Boots, Amazon) are pulling back on flexibility
• A Forbes article cited 91% of Amazon employees dissatisfied with the return-to-office mandate, with 73% looking for new jobs
• A McKinsey survey found nearly 38–40% of working parents (specifically women in the study) considering reducing hours or quitting due to workplace policy changes
• The term "resenteeism" is emerging, people staying in roles under protest

The real purpose of the office

• Forcing collaboration rarely works. People go in, put headphones on and do the same thing they'd do at home
• Different teams need different things from an office: sales teams want energy, finance teams want quiet, marketers want whiteboard sessions
• The office should be a tool, not a mandate

Management in a hybrid world

• Good managers lead through outcomes, not oversight
• You don't need to see someone to know if they're having a bad day, video calls give you facial expressions, tone, body language
• A survey cited found only a 1% difference in how connected employees felt working 4–5 days vs 2 days in the office
• Emma's take: poor or untrained managers may be driving return-to-office decisions upwards because it's simply easier to manage people when they're physically present
• Roughly 78% of managers are "accidental managers" (referenced from a previous episode), being promoted for doing a good job, not for being good at managing people

The plant analogy

• When a flower doesn't bloom, you don't blame the flower, you look at the soil
• Fractional CMOs can often spot and fix retention issues early, saving the cost and disruption of replacing someone

Coming up in Part 2

• Common challenges of fractional CMO work
• Culture: how do you truly embed as a part-time leader?
• What does success look like?
• What Emma misses about corporate life (big budgets...)
• What's next for Emma