What this actually is
A senior operator sitting between you and every outside partner touching your marketing. Paid, outbound, design, PR, content, whoever you have on retainer or hourly. I set the strategy, translate it into briefs each vendor can actually execute, review what they ship, and manage the relationships so you stop being the bottleneck.
I have spent 12+ years in B2B tech marketing and run GTM inside 30+ companies, including IBM, Zerve, Grepr, Steadybit, OpenMeter, DBmarlin, Instana, Shoreline, and Prodly. That means I have briefed and fired plenty of vendors, and I know the difference between an agency that is slow this month and one that is never going to get your audience. You do not learn that from a status call. You learn it from having done it across a lot of companies.
The point is leverage. You keep the specialist vendors you need for scale, and you get one person accountable for whether the whole thing is working, instead of five dashboards and a founder trying to reconcile them at 11pm.
How founders end up with a vendor mess
It is rarely one bad decision. It is a paid agency you signed when a round closed, a freelance designer a friend recommended, a PR firm from the last launch, a content shop someone on the board vouched for. Each one made sense on its own day. Nobody was ever responsible for how they add up.
So you become the integration layer. You are the only person who knows what the paid agency is doing, what the writer is on the hook for, and why the two contradict each other. Every vendor optimizes for the metric in their own contract, and none of them owns pipeline. That is not their job. It was supposed to be somebody's.
The cost is not just the invoices, though those add up fast. It is your time, which is the most expensive thing at an early company. It is the months a vendor spends learning your developer audience the hard way and billing you for the education. And it is the strategy drift that happens when five partners each pull in the direction that is easiest for them.
When an agency is the right call, and when it is not
An agency or freelancer makes sense when you already know your positioning and you just need to scale execution in a specific channel. You know who you sell to, you know why you win, and you need more paid campaigns or more content or more design throughput than you can produce in-house. That is a volume problem, and volume is exactly what a good vendor is built for.
It rarely makes sense when you still need to figure out message and audience. A generic vendor cannot find your positioning for you, and watching them try is expensive. They will test their way toward something plausible, bill you for the tests, and leave you with campaigns that sound like every other tool in your category. Engineers can smell that in a subject line, and they delete it.
Part of what I do is tell you which situation you are actually in before you sign anything. Sometimes the answer is a great paid agency. Sometimes the answer is that you are not ready for one yet, and paying me to embed like an in-house hire who already knows devtools buyers will get you further than a retainer with a shop that does not.
How I brief, manage, and cut vendors
It starts with a real brief. Not a Slack message and a vibe, an actual document per vendor that says what success looks like, what the audience cares about, what the constraints are, and how their work connects to pipeline. Most vendor underperformance traces straight back to a founder who did not have time to brief properly. That is the part I take off your plate first.
Then I hold them to it. I set the cadence, review the output against the brief, catch the developer-audience mistakes before they ship, and keep every partner pointed at the same strategy instead of five different ones. When a vendor is delivering, I protect the relationship and push for more. When a vendor is coasting, learning on your dime, or quietly wrong for your buyer, I say so early and I manage the exit. Cutting dead weight is a normal part of the job, not a crisis.
You get one weekly view of what every partner is doing and whether it is working, in plain language, so you can make the call to spend more, spend less, or change direction without reverse-engineering four separate reports.
How an engagement runs
I work as a retainer, starting at $3,500 per month USD, through my US S-corp. I am American, based in Spain, and I cover EMEA and North America, so I overlap with teams on both sides of the Atlantic. I work Monday through Thursday, which keeps the engagement focused on outcomes rather than filling a calendar.
We start with an audit of what you already have. Every vendor, every contract, what they cost, what they deliver, and what is actually moving the number. From there I tell you what to keep, what to renegotiate, and what to cut, and I take over the day-to-day management of the ones worth keeping.
From then on you have one senior point of contact for the entire outside stack. You bring me the goal, I run the partners against it, and you get your evenings back.
What this covers
A full audit of your current vendors, contracts, spend, and actual deliverables, with a keep, renegotiate, or cut recommendation on each
A written brief per vendor tied to pipeline, so every partner knows what winning looks like
One senior point of contact who owns the whole outside stack instead of you juggling it
Ongoing management: cadence, output review, and quality control against the brief
Developer-audience gatekeeping so nothing tone-deaf ships to engineers under your name
A weekly plain-language view of what every partner is doing and whether it is working
Vendor exits handled cleanly when a partner is not delivering, including sourcing a replacement
“She stepped up immediately and drove automated LinkedIn lead generation and community building, social media, email marketing, marketing ops, and more. She knows how to apply modern marketing tools and suggests cost effective solutions.”
CHRIS NEWTON · FRACTIONAL CMOQuestions on this service
Do I have to fire my current vendors to work with you?
No. We start by auditing what you already have, and plenty of your vendors are probably fine, they just need a real brief and someone holding them accountable. I only recommend cutting a partner when the work is not landing or they are wrong for a developer audience. The goal is to make your existing stack work, not to burn it down for the sake of it.
How is this different from just hiring an agency?
An agency executes in one channel. I manage all of them, and I answer for whether the whole thing is producing pipeline. An agency also has to learn your business and your buyer, whereas I embed like an in-house hire and already know how devtools buyers think. Think of me as the person you would hire to manage agencies, without the full-time salary.
What if you decide I do not need managed vendors at all?
Then I tell you that. Sometimes the honest answer is that you are not ready to scale execution because the positioning is not nailed down yet, and paying agencies to figure that out is the expensive way to do it. In that case I would point you toward the work that actually comes first. I would rather be straight with you than sell you a retainer you do not need.
Related quests
Need this handled?
Tell me where this is stuck at your company and I'll tell you honestly whether I can move it.