I’ll be honest. “Fractional” is a pretty confusing way to label yourself.

It tells you something about how a person commits their time, but very little about what they actually do or how involved they become in the business.

For some companies it means a part-time executive, an occasional adviser or a freelancer working through a monthly list of projects. They’re all useful. They’re also very different relationships.

When I describe Banks as fractional growth and creative support, I mean something closer to this:

An embedded marketing lead who can help decide what matters, then write, design and launch the work needed to move it forward.

Some days I’m helping a CEO work through next quarter’s growth priorities and OKRs. Others I’m in the weeds listening to sales calls, rewriting messaging guides, building a landing page and designing the ads that will send people there.

Some weeks call for more leadership. Others call for rolling up my sleeves.

Let’s answer your (likely) top question

“So what can you even do for us.” Fair question.

Before getting into when companies usually bring me in and how the relationship works, here’s the quickest version of where I can lend a hand:

• Quarterly priorities and the operating plan
• Positioning, messaging and campaign direction
• Landing pages, campaign concepts, copy and creative
• Agency and specialist direction
• Performance reviews and reporting
• Coaching and support for the internal team

When I usually get the call

Most companies don’t reach out and ask for “fractional growth and creative.” I wish they did. It would be way easier to turn on some paid search ads for lead gen 😂

They reach out because the internal marketing lead recently left and no one’s sure what to do next. Or I’ll hear, “Our current team is capable, but everything still feels like random acts of marketing.” Or maybe pipeline has slowed, so every channel is suddenly being questioned. Or marketing is busy, but all that activity doesn’t add up to a coherent plan.

Sometimes the company is earlier than that and has reached the point where founder-led marketing and a collection of one-off efforts are no longer enough. It needs its first real glimpse of structure, consistency and polish, but hiring a full internal team would be premature.

Regardless of the situation, they all feel surprisingly similar.

There are plenty of ideas, but no agreement on which ones matter most. There’s work happening, but it’s difficult to connect that work to revenue. The founder is still reviewing or rewriting nearly everything. The team needs direction, but it also needs someone willing to help carry the work forward.

Bringing in another agency or specialist might help with production. Hiring a full-time exec might eventually be the right move. But there’s often a stage in between where the company needs experienced judgment, greater building capacity and someone who can connect the two.

That’s usually where I come in.

Where we typically start

I rarely begin a new partnership with a giant strategy or a preset 90-day playbook in hand.

My first job is understanding what we’re trying to accomplish, what growth currently looks like and where things are breaking down.

That means looking at pipeline, both in aggregate and channel-by-channel. I want to understand the full prospect journey to date: how they move from glimpsing their first ad or email to visiting the site, becoming a lead, entering a sales conversation and eventually producing revenue.

I dig deep into the data. A lot of the time there isn’t much… and that’s a place I’m comfortable in. But the reporting dashboard is only part of the picture.

I’ll talk with the founder, the marketing team and the people closest to revenue. I’ll review the website, current campaigns, previous strategies, sales materials and whatever system the team uses to track its work. I’ll listen to sales calls when I can because a few real conversations will often reveal more than another hour discussing personas.

The goal of all this digging isn’t to find twenty new things to do. Most teams already have more ideas than they can even roll out.

The goal is to decide what matters now and give the rest of the work some direction.

Because a surface-level list of tasks isn't always the best next step. A request for more leads might reveal a conversion problem. A conversion problem might actually be a positioning problem. A sales enablement request might expose that everyone inside the company is describing the product differently.

That’s why I don’t separate strategy from execution as cleanly as some consulting models do. You often don’t fully understand the problem until you start trying to make the solution.

What a real week can look like

This past week started with reviewing pipeline and campaign performance for one of my partners. We looked at the total picture to see where we stood against annual revenue targets. Then we worked through each channel to understand what’s producing volume, what’s delivering quality and where the funnel was showing gaps.

The company was preparing for its next fundraise, so I also worked with the CEO and GTM leads on the upcoming quarter’s OKRs. We needed the marketing plan to support the larger story the company was trying to prove, not simply continue a collection of campaigns because they were already running.

Later in the week, I listened to two new sales calls. The same sticking point surfaced on both. Prospects were getting hung up on a single slide, and the sales team was having a hard time explaining around it. We’re tackling that full talk track this week. Working directly with reps and cleaning up the visuals on that slide to be more clear.

That same week, I built landing pages, tightened the copy as the story came together and moved into the ad designs so we could wrap the campaign and launch it over the weekend.

The pipeline review shaped the priorities. The fundraise goals helped determine what mattered most. The sales calls challenged the message. The message shaped the landing page. The page gave us the direction for the ads.

The value wasn’t simply doing several different things. It was understanding how each decision should affect the next one.

That’s what working fractionally allows me to do well. I don’t need to justify an entire full-time position around one discipline. I can spend more of my time on the part of the business that needs senior attention right now.

The mix can change as the work changes. I’m not there to protect a narrow job description. I’m there to help the company move.

I want to feel like a coworker, not another vendor

I generally meet with a client at least once a week. That can increase when we’re approaching a major launch, working through an urgent challenge or building something that requires tighter collaboration.

I’ll adapt to whatever systems the company already uses, whether that’s Notion, Asana, email or something else. But honestly, Slack is best because it gives me access to the everyday context that more formal status meetings usually miss.

A quick question in Slack can save a week of building in the wrong direction. A voice note from a founder can contain the clearest version of an idea they’ve been struggling to put into a brief. A message from sales right after a call can change the campaign while there’s still time to do something about it.

Clients can text me. They have my cell. If something meaningful comes up, I can generally find time to talk that same day.

I’m not trying to insert myself into every conversation or add more meetings to everyone’s calendar. I just want enough proximity to understand what’s changing and why.

That closeness matters because marketing decisions aren’t made in isolation. The product shifts. A competitor changes its story. A campaign starts producing an unexpected type of lead. The CEO gets a different reaction during fundraising conversations.

There’s also no account manager between the client and the work. The person in the strategic conversation is the same person writing the message, reviewing the data or opening the design file.

That doesn’t mean I need to make every asset myself. There are times when a specialist, freelancer or agency is the better person for the job. I’m happy to direct those relationships, improve the brief and help the work become stronger. I’ve got a heck of a network of specialists I lean into.

But when the direction still feels abstract, I lean into building the first version myself. It gives everyone something real to react to and creates a clearer standard for whoever takes it forward.

How I know it’s working

Data and tracking are the foundation for how I evaluate the work. Checking off tasks or designing something “pretty” feels good. But I get stoked when we start getting results.

That doesn’t mean every single marketing activity can be tied neatly to a closed deal within a few weeks. B2B buying journeys don’t work that cleanly, and pretending they do generally pushes teams toward short-term decisions.

But I also don’t believe long sales cycles or brand building should become excuses for avoiding accountability.

Sometimes the earliest evidence appears in the numbers. Conversion improves. Lead quality changes. Sales velocity increases. A channel begins contributing more qualified pipeline.

Other signs show up in the way the company operates.

The founder stops rewriting every asset because we’ve established a message the team trusts.

The team can explain its three most important priorities without having to dig into a massive strategy deck.

There’s one central place to see what’s moving, what’s stuck and what’s driving results.

Those changes might sound softer than revenue. In practice, they’re often what allow the revenue result to happen repeatedly instead of accidentally.

I want the campaigns to perform, and I want the pipeline to grow. I also want the company to be better at making marketing decisions after I’m involved.

Put more simply, I want you to win, and I care about whether the work is actually helping you do that.

Sometimes the company just needs structure

Not every partner brings me in because something’s going wrong.

Some are early-stage and have reached the point where the informal version of marketing just needs to become more deliberate.

The founder has been writing most of the copy. The visual system has grown one asset at a time. Growth has come through relationships, referrals or a few successful experiments. There may be a strong product and a compelling instinct behind the company, but it hasn’t yet been translated into a repeatable marketing operation.

That’s honestly my favorite stage.

I’m not coming in to bury a company in enterprise-level process. I just try to introduce enough formality that the company can begin building on its own progress.

That might mean clarifying the story, defining the first real growth priorities, creating a stronger website and campaign system, putting basic reporting in place or helping the founder decide which marketing capabilities should be built internally.

What fractional growth and creative actually looks like

For me, it looks like being senior enough to participate in the important business conversations without becoming too removed from the work those conversations create.

It looks like reviewing pipeline in the morning and rewriting the message after hearing how prospects respond to it.

It looks like helping establish the quarterly plan, then opening the landing page when the plan needs to become something real.

It looks like coaching the team, directing specialists and knowing when it will be faster or more useful to make an asset myself.

Some weeks the role looks more like leadership. Some weeks it looks more like strategy, creative direction or production. Usually, there’s a little of each because real marketing problems rarely arrive separated into clean disciplines.

I want my partners to feel like they’ve added an experienced coworker who can understand the business, help make the decisions and stay close enough to carry them into the work.

Fractional describes the structure of the relationship.

It doesn’t have to describe the level of care, access or accountability inside it.

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