Executive ownership of marketing for Waterloo Region companies — built for engineering-led businesses where the product is ahead of the go-to-market.
Waterloo Region produces a particular kind of company: technically excellent, often founded by engineers, with a product that genuinely outperforms the competition and a marketing function that was assembled in a hurry once revenue arrived. The talent pipeline out of the university is world-class on the technical side and thinner on senior commercial leadership, so marketing frequently ends up owned by a capable generalist promoted into a seat they haven't held before.
The result is predictable and fixable. Growth to date came from product quality, founder relationships, and referral — real advantages that don't scale linearly. When those flatten, the instinct is to buy more of whatever was last measured, which is usually paid search, and the cost per customer starts climbing while nobody can explain why.
The good news about engineering-led companies is that they respond well to the actual fix. Marketing run as a portfolio — every channel a position with a cost, a risk, and a level of conviction it has earned — is a framing this region's leadership teams take to immediately, because it's how they already think about everything else. The work is putting honest measurement underneath it, then reallocating away from the channels that have been coasting on assumption.
How I work →A marketing plan tied to your revenue targets, with budget assigned by expected return and revisited as evidence comes in.
I build and manage the team — hires, agencies, contractors — on a two-week delivery cadence, with strategic direction staying with me.
A weekly scorecard covering your target KPIs alongside blended return, reviewed with leadership and adjusted openly.
Scope is set on the strategy call — sized to the problem rather than sold as a package.
Senior judgment above an existing team: allocation review, plan pressure-testing, and a standing session with leadership.
Best when: you have people executing, but nobody deciding.
Full ownership of the function: strategy, budget, team and agency management, the weekly scorecard, and accountability for the result.
Best when: marketing needs an owner, not another contractor.
For context: a full-time CMO typically costs $250,000+ in base salary before bonus, equity, benefits, and a search that often runs six months.
The weekly operating rhythm runs remotely and anchors to your team's hours — a scorecard reviewed with leadership, two-week execution sprints, and 90-day plans tied to a two-year vision. I travel to Kitchener–Waterloo for the moments that genuinely benefit from being in the room: kickoff, the First 30 Days findings, quarterly planning, and leadership working sessions.
That split is deliberate rather than a limitation. It means the engagement's budget goes into the marketing rather than into airports, and it produces a documented function your company owns instead of a dependency on me.
Established Waterloo Region companies past roughly $10M in revenue where marketing has grown big enough to need an owner. My work spans home improvement, technology services, travel, consumer wellness, media, and healthcare staffing — including brands operating at $100M+ revenue scale.
Not a fit for pre-product-market-fit startups, or teams looking for execution without strategy. More on what you're actually buying when you hire a fractional CMO.
It's about a ninety-minute drive from Toronto, so in-person is easy to arrange and I travel there deliberately — kickoff, audit findings, quarterly planning, and leadership working sessions. The weekly cadence runs remotely, which keeps the engagement efficient.
It's the most common starting point I see here, and it's an advantage as often as a liability — the product usually holds up under scrutiny, which is more than most companies can say. What's missing is the commercial layer: positioning that a non-technical buyer understands, and allocation discipline over the budget. Both are learnable, and both start with the First 30 Days audit rather than a campaign.
Yes to both. The go-to-market differs — hardware carries longer cycles and channel considerations, SaaS lives on retention and expansion economics — but the discipline is the same: know your lifetime value, know your acquisition cost, and allocate against evidence.
Established businesses past roughly $10M in revenue. Below that, the honest answer is usually that you need execution help more than executive leadership.
I work with a select number of companies at a time. You'll get a direct answer about whether I can help.
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