You were told you can't afford it. Nobody checked.

A founder told me last year that his business could not afford a proper marketing person. He said it the way people say things nobody has ever asked them to prove. Flat, faintly apologetic, a settled matter. We had been talking for about forty minutes and it was the only sentence he delivered with complete confidence.

I did not argue. I asked him how he knew.

He looked at me as though I had asked how he knew the office was on the second floor, then did the sum out loud, the one everybody does. A decent marketing director costs north of a hundred grand once you have added the employer's contributions. Set that against turnover, look at the percentage, and there it is. Obviously too big.

That is not a calculation. It is a flinch dressed up as one, and an entire category of professional service has been built on top of it.

The pitch, stated fairly

It goes like this. Your business has outgrown a marketing coordinator. It genuinely needs experienced leadership. A full-time senior hire is beyond you at this stage. So buy a fraction of one. A day or two a week, senior expertise without the senior salary, in and out, no long-term commitment.

On the face of it that is sensible and humane, and I should declare an interest before going any further. I do this work. Interim, fractional, whatever the label is this year. I have made versions of that pitch myself, so this is aimed squarely at my own end of the market.

Hold the pitch still for a second, though, because it contains something odd. It concedes that the business needs senior marketing leadership. That is not a maybe, it is the opening premise, the thing that gets you in the room. And then it offers a portion of the need instead of the need.

A fraction of the thing you need is not a smaller version of the solution. It is a smaller version of the problem, left mostly where it was.

What has happened is that a real requirement has been quietly reclassified as a luxury to be rationed. And nobody notices, because everyone in the room has agreed the affordability question in advance.

One word doing an awful lot of work

Afford. Everything in that pitch turns on it, and nobody examines it.

Here is the thing my founder had wrong, and it is the same thing almost everybody has wrong. You do not fund a marketing leader out of revenue. You fund one out of the return on the money marketing is already spending.

His business was already spending on acquisition. Agencies, tools, a couple of people, sales time, discounts given away to close. That money left the building every month whether or not anyone senior was directing it. So the real question was never whether turnover could carry a salary. It was what that spend returns, and whether better leadership would lift it by more than it costs.

That question has an answer. It is measurable. What it costs to win a customer, everything counted, against what that customer is worth over the whole time they stay.

He had never seen it. Almost nobody in his position has, because nobody is measuring it and nobody is telling them. And I will be blunt about the fractional playbook here, mine included: it does not tell them either. It measures activity, leads and pipeline. Those numbers describe what marketing is doing. None of them answers whether the money is working.

What the arithmetic usually shows

I want to be careful here, because there is a comfortable version of this argument and it is not true. The comfortable version says: do the sum and you will find you had more room than you thought.

Sometimes. More often, in my experience, the sum shows something worse. Acquisition costs a good deal more than anyone believed, because the calculation left out the salaries, the sales time and the discount. Customers are worth less than the spreadsheet claims, because it counted revenue rather than margin and ignored what it costs to serve them. Put those together and a business can be losing money on every new customer it wins without a single dashboard turning red.

Which is the affordability answer arriving from the other direction. Because if an acquisition engine is quietly destroying a few hundred thousand pounds a year, the senior hire is not a cost the business cannot carry. It is cheaper than carrying on. The salary stops looking like an expense to be justified against turnover and starts looking like the least expensive item in the whole situation.

Either way the founder gets an answer. What he had instead was a guess he had been encouraged not to examine.

The bit the model cannot say out loud

Now, I do not think fractional leaders are cynical. Most of us believe the pitch, and plenty do genuinely good work. But there is an arithmetic problem sitting underneath the category, and it is worth stating plainly.

The pitch implies something short. In, fix, out. Except consider what that would mean for the firms selling it. If a typical engagement really ran a month or two, how would an organisation keep a hundred fractional marketing leaders occupied? The lead generation required would be extraordinary, far beyond anything those firms are doing. The model does not work on short engagements. It needs long ones, a year and often a good deal more. And a long engagement is a permanent need, answered with something shaped never to end.

Eighteen months in, the business has paid steadily for a portion of a person and owns nothing. No permanent leader. No capability that stays. No metric anybody is accountable for. Had it spent eighteen months building the real thing, it would have all three.

There is a supply-side explanation for all this that nobody enjoys discussing. The category did not grow because businesses discovered a better operating model. It grew, in significant part, because a lot of experienced marketing leaders could not find full-time roles. That is not a scandal, it is a market adjusting. But it does mean the word describes what happened to the sellers rather than what the buyers needed, which puts it in a long tradition. Marketing does love a new word for an old problem. The word arrives, everyone adopts it, and the question underneath it goes unanswered for another few years.

The answer was never bits of marketing

In thirty-odd years I have never once met a business that told me it did not need marketing. Not one. Every founder, every board, every managing director knows they need it. What they do not know is what it is answerable for, and that failure belongs to us rather than to them.

So the answer was never a portion of a marketing leader. It was making marketing accountable for something that matters commercially. Get that right and the affordability question stops being a mood and becomes a calculation. The hire then justifies itself, or it does not, on evidence.

That is also, for what it is worth, the difference in how I work. The point of the engagement is to end. Establish the number, build the strategy that moves it, get the business to the position where it can properly fund what it needs and hire the permanent leader who owns that number. Then leave, with the discipline still in the building. If I am still there in two years, something has gone wrong.

Three honest outcomes

None of this is an argument for hiring full-time regardless. It is an argument for not deciding in the dark. Find the number and it can only point three ways, and I would rather set them all out than pretend one of them is inevitable.

Notice that the second and third outcomes both argue against my own interest, and the third concedes the fractional case outright. That is rather the point. An argument that can conclude against its author is not a pitch, it is a test.

My founder, incidentally, has not hired anybody yet. He is working out what his acquisition actually costs him first, which is more than he was doing a year ago, when he knew the answer without having looked.

If you would rather not decide in the dark, Calibrate gives you a first read on that number in about ten minutes.