Diligence on a target's demand engine, instrumentation in the first hundred days, margin and growth through the hold, and a function a buyer can actually verify at exit.
Quality of earnings tells you the revenue was real. It rarely tells you whether the engine that produced it will still work after close, or whether it will survive the first budget cut.
That gap is where most marketing value creation is won and lost, and it's usually a measurement problem before it's a growth problem.
In most lower and middle market companies, platform-claimed conversions plus CRM-attributed revenue exceed what the accounting system recorded, often by a multiple. Nobody is lying. Every advertising platform counts a conversion it touched as one it caused, and no platform is positioned to report what the whole portfolio returned.
The consequence is that the operating decisions in the data room were made on inflated information. Before marketing can be a growth lever, somebody has to make the numbers true.
| Stage | The question | The work |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-acquisition | Is the demand engine durable or is it a set of conditions that happen to be holding? | Concentration analysis, cohort economics, rented versus owned demand, key person and vendor exposure |
| First 100 days | What is actually true, and what can we stop funding? | Reconcile reporting to bookings, establish a defensible baseline, cut undefendable spend, fix definitions |
| Hold period | Where does marketing move earnings, and in what order? | Subtraction, then mix, then conversion, then owned demand that compounds |
| Exit | Can a buyer verify the growth story without taking it on faith? | Documented allocation, eight quarters of clean cohort data, diversified sourcing, transferred account control |
Marketing usually appears in a value creation plan under growth, which is the slowest and least certain of the ways it affects earnings. The faster ones tend to go untouched.
Spend that stops. Nearly every company at this size funds marketing it cannot defend with evidence: channels running since before anyone measured, unaudited retainers, overlapping tooling. Commonly 15 to 30 percent of the line. It drops straight to EBITDA and takes a quarter.
Mix, at constant spend. Reallocating toward what produces customers rather than what reports well. Requires reporting that reconciles first, or you are reallocating on the same fiction that produced the current split.
Conversion. A ten percent improvement in close rate on existing volume beats a ten percent increase in traffic, costs less, and improves the economics of every channel at once.
Growth. Real, and slow. Owned demand compounds and survives a budget cut, which is why it matters disproportionately at exit. It belongs in year one of a five-year hold, not year four.
The full breakdown →A buyer is not purchasing revenue. They are purchasing the probability that revenue continues without the current owners. Every part of marketing that exists only in a founder's judgment reduces that probability, and a buyer models it as both a cost to rebuild and a risk to price.
Documented allocation, reporting that reconciles, sourcing that isn't concentrated in one channel or one person, and demand that persists when spend stops are what make the engine underwritable. That effect operates on the multiple rather than on earnings, and it takes about eighteen months to build.
Why founder dependency costs you at exit →Budgets assigned by expected return rather than by last year's split. Performance measured against blended contribution rather than platform self-reporting. Numbers reconciled to what finance actually booked. And capital reallocated the moment the evidence says it should be, including away from things I argued for.
My background is Finance and Economics, and fourteen engagements as an outside executive walking into existing marketing functions with existing politics and rebuilding them without positional authority. Most were restructures rather than builds from nothing, which is the harder version and the more common situation post-close.
The result is a function that reports a number an investment committee can use, and an engine that keeps running when the person who built it isn't in the room.
Diligence. Fixed-fee, scoped to the deal timeline. A written finding on the target's demand engine, concentration risks, cohort economics and continuity exposure.
Advisory. Typically $3,000 to $4,500 per month. Senior judgment above an existing marketing team, allocation review, and a standing session with leadership or the operating partner.
Fractional CMO. Typically $7,500 to $20,000+ per month, scoped by days per week. Ownership of the function inside a portfolio company: strategy, budget, vendors, the scorecard, and accountability for the outcome.
Scope drives price. Two days a week across a multi-location platform is not the same engagement as a standing advisory session, and pricing either from a package rather than from the problem produces a bad outcome for somebody.
Takes ownership of the marketing function inside a portfolio company without the cost or search time of a full-time executive: reconciling reporting to booked revenue, establishing defensible unit economics, reallocating spend that cannot be justified, and building demand that survives a budget cut. In a hold period the work is usually accuracy first, margin second, growth third.
All four stages. Pre-acquisition for marketing diligence on a target. Immediately post-close for instrumentation and the first hundred days. Through the hold period for margin and growth. And eighteen months before exit, to make the demand engine legible to a buyer.
An agency executes channels and is paid to keep executing them. It is rarely positioned to recommend its own scope be cut. A fractional CMO decides which channels deserve budget, holds vendors accountable to targets, and reports a blended number that ties to what finance recorded.
Channel, account and person concentration; fully loaded acquisition cost by cohort over at least eight quarters; whether marketing-attributed revenue reconciles to booked revenue; the split between rented and owned demand; retention by acquisition channel; and key person and key vendor exposure.
A buyer pays for the probability that revenue continues without the current owners. Documented allocation, reconciled reporting, diversified sourcing and real owned demand support that probability. A function that lives in a founder's judgment does not, and gets discounted for it.
Advisory engagements generally run $3,000 to $4,500 per month and hands-on fractional CMO work $7,500 to $20,000+ per month depending on days per week and scope. Diligence work is scoped as a fixed-fee project.
Whether it's a target you're evaluating, a portfolio company that can't tie marketing to bookings, or an asset going to market in eighteen months. You'll get a direct answer about whether I can help, and if I'm not the right fit, I'll say so.