How we help / Build my marketing function
Senior marketing leadership. Hands-on execution.
You've hired marketers. What's missing is the leader. Staci joins your leadership team as your fractional head of marketing & growth: she sets the strategy, directs your team and the right specialists, and builds the function your next marketing leader inherits.
CEO
Founder-led growth
Sales
Carrying pipeline
Product
Roadmap
Marketing
Owner: rethought & co.
Finance
Budget
01 / Where you are
Marketing is busy. Nobody owns it.
- You still source or close most deals yourself.
- Your first marketing hire works hard and needs direction you don't have time to give.
- You have an agency, maybe two, and you can't tell which of their work creates pipeline.
- The board asks about CAC and pipeline coverage, and the answer is a guess.
- A CMO search would take months, and you're not sure the role is full-time yet.
02 / The trade
A senior owner for less than a senior hire.
You need a marketing function. That doesn't mean six new hires. A full-time CMO means a search of several months, a recruiting fee, and a salary that's hard to unwind if the fit is wrong. Fractional leadership plus scoped execution costs less than one senior hire, starts in weeks, and ends with a function you can hand to a permanent leader.
03 / Leadership + Execution
What Staci owns.
The leadership
- Marketing and go-to-market priorities, agreed with you in writing
- Annual and quarterly planning
- Budget and KPIs, reported on a weekly scorecard
- Direction of your team, agencies and contractors
- Board and investor reporting
- Hiring, onboarding and handoff to your permanent marketing leader
The execution
- An agreed monthly execution plan with defined capacity
- Specialists in content, paid media, design and marketing operations, scoped and priced into the plan
- One point of contact. You don't manage vendors.
Monthly engagement. Six-month initial term. Scope reviewed each quarter. Ad spend and software billed separately.
04 / The first 90 days
How the first quarter runs.
1
Weeks 1 to 4: Diagnose
Interviews with leadership, sales and customers. A funnel and pipeline audit. A positioning review. You get a written assessment.
2
Weeks 4 to 6: Decide and scope
Agree on priorities, including what stops. Name the deliverables, the capacity and the specialists.
3
Week 6 onward: Run
A weekly operating cadence and a scorecard you can take to the board.
4
By month 6: Build the bench
Hire or coach your permanent marketing lead, or extend the engagement.
05 / Who leads it
Staci Cretu, your fractional head of marketing.
Staci has run marketing for more than 20 years where the sale is complex and the buyer is skeptical: as CMO of RunSafe Security, marketing director at Westfalia Technologies, and chief of advertising and public affairs for the U.S. Army. She leads every Leadership + Execution engagement herself. Nobody gets handed to an account manager.
168%
Year-over-year growth in marketing-sourced pipeline
Staci's record as CMO of RunSafe Security
29%
Share of company pipeline contributed by marketing
Staci's record as CMO of RunSafe Security
06 / Questions
What CEOs ask.
Business as usual? Think otherwise.
A 30-minute call with Staci. You'll know whether a fractional head of marketing fits, or whether a diagnostic comes first.