Executive ownership of marketing for established Ottawa companies — strategy, team, and honest measurement — without the cost of a full-time hire.
Ottawa's business base skews toward long-cycle, high-consideration selling: technology firms in and around the Kanata North corridor, professional services, and a deep bench of companies whose revenue depends on institutional and public-sector procurement. Whatever the category, the pattern repeats — the purchase is evaluated by a committee, justified in writing, and closed over quarters rather than weeks.
That changes what good marketing looks like. Brand awareness campaigns measured in impressions are close to meaningless when eleven people have to agree. What moves revenue is material that arms an internal champion: evidence, references, documentation that survives being forwarded to someone more skeptical. Most of the Ottawa marketing budgets I've reviewed are built for a buyer who doesn't exist here.
Long sales cycles hide waste. When a deal takes nine months to close, nobody can credibly say which marketing spend contributed — so last year's budget gets renewed largely intact, year after year, because disproving any line item is impossible. The fix isn't better attribution software. It's an honest blended view of return alongside a pipeline definition that marketing and sales both signed, so the argument stops being about whose dashboard is right.
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 Ottawa 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 Eastern Ontario 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.
Yes. The weekly operating rhythm runs remotely, and I travel to Ottawa deliberately — kickoff, the First 30 Days findings, quarterly planning, and any leadership session where being in the room changes the outcome. It's a four-and-a-half hour drive or a short flight, so in-person time is straightforward to arrange when it earns its keep.
I work with companies that sell into institutional buyers, yes — the marketing discipline is the same, but the emphasis shifts toward credibility assets, reference architecture, and sales enablement rather than volume demand generation. I'm not a procurement consultant and won't pretend otherwise.
Yes, with the same caution I'd apply in Montréal: French-language marketing done properly is a second market, not a translation pass. I scope it as its own workstream with native-language execution, rather than running English creative through a translator and hoping.
Established businesses past roughly $10M in revenue, where marketing has grown large enough to need an owner and honest measurement.
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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