Why most companies hire a CMO too late and pay for it twice

Here's a pattern I've seen more times than I can count.

A founder builds something genuinely good. They get early traction. Revenue starts moving. Someone on the board says "we need to get serious about marketing" and suddenly there's a job spec circulating for a Chief Marketing Officer with a six-figure salary and a mandate to "own the brand and drive growth."

Six months later, the CMO is still trying to figure out the tech stack, the team is confused about priorities, and the board is quietly wondering whether they made the right call.

It's not the CMO's fault. It's not even the board's fault. The problem is timing.

Most businesses bring in a senior marketing leader at exactly the wrong moment. Not too early — too late, and in the wrong format. By the time they're ready to hire, they've already accumulated a mess of disconnected tools, mixed messaging, a team pulling in different directions, and a brand that's drifted from what they originally stood for. The new CMO spends their first six months untangling rather than building.

And here's where the double cost kicks in. First, you've lost the time and money it took to get there. Second, you're now paying a senior salary for someone who is essentially doing remedial work before they can do the job you hired them for.

So what's the alternative?

Bring in senior marketing leadership earlier, but in a format that matches where you actually are. Not a full-time CMO with a big salary and an expectation of a five-year tenure. A fractional leader who can come in, assess what's working and what isn't, build the right foundations, and help you figure out what kind of full-time hire you actually need, and when.

I've built marketing functions from scratch inside businesses that had nothing, and I've walked into businesses that thought they had everything but had actually just accumulated noise. The ones that got it right brought in senior thinking early, stayed lean, and scaled their marketing investment in line with their commercial reality.

The ones that got it wrong waited until the pressure was unbearable, made a big hire, and hoped for the best.

You can probably guess which group paid for it twice.

If you're wondering whether now is the right time to get senior marketing leadership involved in your business, the honest answer is that it probably already was. The second-best time is now.

Gareth Foster is the founder of crowd. — fractional CMO and marketing consultancy services for businesses that need senior marketing leadership without the full-time overhead. If something here struck a chord, book a free 30-minute call and let's figure out whether we can help.