Executive ownership of marketing for established Montréal companies — with the bilingual market treated as the strategic question it actually is.
Montréal's commercial strength is genuinely diverse — technology and AI research, aerospace, gaming and creative production, retail and consumer brands with national reach. What unites marketing across all of it is the language question, and the most expensive mistake I see is treating it as a production task. English creative run through a translator reliably underperforms, because the reference points, humour, media consumption, and buying triggers of the francophone market aren't a dialect of the anglophone one.
There's also a compliance dimension that marketing teams outside Québec routinely underestimate. Language requirements affect packaging, advertising, digital properties, and trademarks — they belong in the marketing plan from the start, not in a legal review three weeks before launch.
The allocation question in Québec is sharper than elsewhere: doing both markets properly costs meaningfully more than doing one, and the honest answer is sometimes to commit fully to one rather than half-serve both. That's a decision that should be made deliberately, with the return on each modelled, rather than defaulted into because the translation line item looked cheap.
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 Montréal 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 Québec 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.
I work in English. For francophone campaigns I scope native-language execution — copywriters and creative who work in French as a first language — because that's the only version that performs. My role is the strategy, allocation, and measurement across both markets, and holding the standard for the French work rather than pretending to produce it myself.
They get built into the plan from the beginning — creative, digital properties, packaging, and campaign timelines all account for them, with your legal counsel confirming specifics. It's far cheaper to plan around them than to rework a campaign that's already produced.
Yes, deliberately — kickoff, audit findings, quarterly planning, and leadership sessions worth being in the room for. It's a five-hour drive or a one-hour flight from Toronto. The weekly rhythm runs remotely.
Often the more interesting engagement. National brands frequently treat Québec as a rounding error in the plan and then wonder why share doesn't move. Sizing that market honestly is usually the first thing worth fixing.
I work with a select number of companies at a time. You'll get a direct answer about whether I can help.
Book a Strategy Call →Elsewhere in Canada: Toronto · Ottawa · Kitchener–Waterloo · Calgary · Vancouver · all of Canada