Why Founders Should Look for Entrepreneurial Experience in a Fractional CMO

If you are a fintech founder considering a fractional CMO or fractional RevOps leader, one factor matters more than most people realise.

Has this person actually run a business themselves?

There is a clear difference between someone who has spent their career in marketing roles inside organisations and someone who has built, run, and sustained a business of their own from the ground up. Both may be excellent marketers. Only one truly understands what it feels like when marketing spend comes directly out of the same pot that pays salaries, software, and suppliers.

That lived experience changes how marketing decisions are made.

When you have built a business, every pound or dollar spent on marketing carries weight. You naturally focus on return on investment, not as a buzzword, but as a necessity. That does not always mean every activity has an immediate or obvious financial return. Some outcomes are intangible, such as credibility, trust, or positioning. The difference is that those outcomes are still intentional, measured, and understood within a broader commercial context. This is why I have never been comfortable with vanity metrics as a way to explain marketing performance. Clicks, impressions, and views might show activity, but they do not explain impact. They rarely help a founder understand whether marketing is genuinely contributing to the growth of the business.

Instead, I focus on metrics that connect marketing to commercial reality. Share of voice. Cost versus return. Pipeline influence. Revenue that can be attributed to marketing as a first touch or a contributing touch. These are the measures that matter when you are responsible for keeping a business healthy and moving forward.

Running a business also forces you to think operationally. Marketing does not exist in isolation. It affects sales teams, onboarding processes, customer experience, and reporting structures. An entrepreneurial fractional leader understands this instinctively because they have had to make all of those parts work together before. They know that great marketing without the right operational foundation underneath it creates friction, not growth.

This perspective is especially important for early or growth-stage fintechs. At these stages, marketing cannot be about big gestures or flashy moments. A billboard in Times Square might look impressive, but it does not help if you are not consistently driving qualified traffic to your website, generating leads, and converting those leads into revenue. Early on, every activity needs a clear purpose and a clear outcome.

That also means spending money where you know you will see impact. Founders do not have the luxury of wasting budget on things that sound exciting but deliver little value. This is where experience helps cut through the noise. There is no silver bullet in marketing. Anyone promising one should be treated with caution. Real marketing success comes from multiple channels working together. Content, email, paid media, partnerships, events, and sales enablement all reinforce each other when done properly. If you invest time in creating content, you should be extracting maximum value from it across channels. Nothing should exist in a single-use vacuum.

Most importantly, the foundations for measurement need to be in place from the very beginning. This is not something to fix later. Without a clear framework for attribution and reporting, it becomes impossible to understand what is actually driving growth. A fractional leader who has run their own business will push for this early, because they know how painful it is to make decisions without reliable data.

When you work with someone who brings marketing, commercial, financial, and operational experience together, conversations change. Priorities become clearer. Decisions become sharper. Marketing becomes a growth function rather than a cost centre.

That is the real value of entrepreneurial experience in a fractional CMO or RevOps role. It brings realism, focus, and accountability to the table. And for founders building in complex, competitive markets like fintech, that clarity is often the difference between momentum and wasted effort.