Yes, you can hire a fractional growth leader for 90 days, and for a defined job it is a sensible way to buy senior help. Ninety days is enough to find what is broken, fix the biggest problem and hand you a plan that runs. It is rarely enough to build a dependable pipeline from nothing, so decide up front what has to be true on day 90.
I sell this service, so weigh what I say with that in mind. But the worst version of this engagement is a founder who expects a finished growth engine in three months and feels burned when it is not there. In 15 years leading marketing and operations, I have learned the length of the engagement matters less than whether the job fits inside it.
Three months is a good length for work with a clear end. Finding out why leads do not close. Choosing the one or two channels worth your money and shutting off the rest. Setting up tracking so you can finally see what a dollar returns. Fixing the offer and the website message. Getting an agency on a real target or replacing it.
Three months is a poor length for work that compounds. Search rankings, a referral base, a brand people recognize and a long enterprise sales cycle all take longer. If that is your main problem, 90 days can start the work, but it will not finish it, and you should plan for who carries it afterward.
Something is off and nobody can say what. Spend is going out, the reports look busy and revenue is flat. A senior person can usually sort out the cause early, then spend the rest of the time fixing it with you.
Your head of marketing left, or the last hire did not work out, and a search will take months. I covered the timing in how long it takes to hire a CMO. A 90-day leader keeps the work moving, and the search gets better because someone senior can tell you what the role really needs.
You are not sure outside leadership will pay off in your business. Three months with a written target is a fair test for both sides, and far cheaper to undo than a full-time hire.
Answer these before you talk to anyone.
If you cannot answer the first question, start there. Everything else depends on it.
Put this in writing before the first invoice. It keeps both of you honest.
Days 1 to 30: find it and fix the first thing. Pull the last 90 days of spend, leads and closed deals. Listen to sales calls and read the lost deals. Set up tracking if it is missing. By the end of the month you should have one written target and the first change live. I aim for first results within 30 days, and I tell clients to hold me to that.
Days 31 to 60: put weight on what is working. Cut the spending that returned nothing and move it to what showed signs of life. Change only one or two things at a time so you can tell what caused what. Hold a short review every week against the target.
Days 61 to 90: make it run without the leader. Write down how the work gets done, who owns each piece and which five numbers you will watch every week. Then make the call: continue, reduce the scope, hire full time or stop.
Most people pay for this by the month. At MarkCMO the range is $2,500 to $50,000 a month, and most clients land between $8,000 and $15,000. That makes the usual 90-day stretch $24,000 to $45,000, plus any ad spend. For comparison, a full-time CMO runs $280,000 to $450,000 a year, and that is a commitment you cannot easily reverse in three months. The full breakdown is on the fractional CMO cost page.
Before you sign, do the plain math. Take your gross profit from a typical new client and work out how many new clients would cover the three months. If the answer is one or two, it deserves a serious look. If it is twenty, you are not ready, and I wrote about that in whether a fractional CMO is worth it.
You can do this before you hire anyone. Write the one problem in a single sentence. List every marketing dollar from the last 90 days next to what it produced, even if the answer is "no idea". Pick the number you would judge a leader on. Then ask anyone you interview three things: what they would do in week one, what they would stop doing, and what they would hand back on day 90. Good fractional CMOs answer those easily. Vague answers tell you what the 90 days would look like.
It is a senior marketing leader you share with other companies instead of employing full time. The title might be fractional CMO, head of growth or VP of marketing, and the job is the same: decide where marketing effort goes, run the people doing the work, and answer for the number. Judge the person on what they own, not what they call themselves.
It is long enough to see leading signs, such as more qualified conversations, a better close rate on the leads you already get, or spending you stopped wasting. It is often too short to see closed revenue if your sales cycle runs several months. Agree before you start which of those numbers you will judge the 90 days on, and write it down.
Take the monthly fee and multiply by three. At MarkCMO the range is $2,500 to $50,000 a month and most clients pay $8,000 to $15,000, so most 90-day stretches come to $24,000 to $45,000. Ad spend and any outside production are extra. Ask any provider exactly what is included before you compare prices.
You should not have to. I work month to month with no long contract, so 90 days is simply three months you chose, and you can continue or stop at the end. If a provider insists on a 12-month term before you have seen their work, ask why. A clear scope for the first 90 days protects you better than a long agreement.
MarkCMO provides the strategy and the roadmap, and then delivers it across three tiers, so you get direction and execution from one team instead of handing a deck to someone else to build.
Fractional CMO and COO leadership: strategy, positioning, go-to-market, and the roadmap that sets the direction.
Running the function day to day: managing teams, vendors, budgets, and the operating cadence that keeps the plan on track.
Hands-on delivery: marketing execution, software development, tech-stack build and integration, plus finance and operations support, everything a business needs to scale.
From tech to marketing to finance, strategy through execution, MarkCMO can lead it, manage it, and build it.
Book a free 30-minute call; you leave with the one thing costing you the most pipeline. I run every account myself, month to month, with no long contract.
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