You're running a £2M business. You know your marketing needs senior leadership. The question is what shape that leadership should take — and most founders default to the wrong answer because it feels safer. Here are the actual economics.
01Option A: A full-time Marketing Director
A genuinely senior marketing director — someone who has built and scaled a marketing function in a comparable business — costs £90,000 to £140,000 in base salary. Add 20% in employer's NI, pension, and benefits. Add equipment, software, recruitment fees, and onboarding time.
You're at £120,000 to £170,000 fully loaded before they've run a single campaign. And they will, quite reasonably, want a team underneath them to execute against the strategy they're being paid to set.
02Option B: A mid-level Marketing Manager
This is what most £1M–£5M businesses actually hire. £45,000 to £60,000 fully loaded. The problem is that you are now paying a manager to do work that requires a director.
A marketing manager manages tasks. They run the agency. They schedule the posts. They format the reports. They are not equipped — by experience or seniority — to challenge an underperforming Google Ads account, restructure your attribution, or sit in a boardroom and defend a £150k annual marketing budget to your shareholders.
You spend £55,000 a year and still have no senior commercial voice in the room. The strategic vacuum doesn't get filled; it just gets buried under activity.
03Option C: A Fractional CMO
A fractional CMO is a senior operator embedded into your business for a defined number of days per month — typically four to eight — at a fixed monthly retainer.
The retainer model is what makes the maths work. You get director-grade thinking, accountability, and boardroom presence at roughly 30–40% of the cost of a full-time hire — with none of the recruitment risk, holiday cover, or notice-period drag.
What you actually buy
- A senior owner of the marketing P&L who sits across strategy, agency oversight, tracking, and reporting.
- Direct involvement in setting cost-per-acquisition targets and holding every channel against them.
- A single point of accountability for whether marketing is — or isn't — generating revenue.
04The honest decision framework
Hire a full-time CMO when your marketing function justifies a leader plus a team underneath them — typically over £8M in revenue with a multi-channel ad budget above £40k per month.
Hire a marketing manager when you have a senior commercial leader (often the founder) who genuinely has the time and capability to set marketing strategy, and you just need someone to execute it.
Hire a fractional CMO when you're between £1M and £20M, spending meaningfully on marketing, and you need senior thinking and accountability now — without the cost or commitment of a full-time hire.