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Pricing
What it costs.
Every number is on this page. Work out whether you can afford us before you speak to us.
The numbers
The numbers.
| Phase | Duration | What it covers | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Diagnose | Six to eight weeks | Audit, market work, customer interviews, and a costed build plan | $15,000 fixed |
| Build | 3 months minimum | The five components installed, in the sequence the plan sets out | $15,000–$25,000 / mo |
| Transition | Four to eight weeks | Handover pack, in-person onboarding, reduced advisory tail | Half the build rate |
Quoted in USD, excluding VAT and local sales tax. Media spend and software licences sit outside this, paid by you at cost. Bench specialists are inside the monthly rate.
Scope estimator
Three questions, then a range.
Indicative only. The diagnostic replaces the range with a fixed number.
Phase detail
What you get for each number.
Diagnose · $15,000 fixed
What happens. We interview your team and a sample of your customers, including people who nearly bought and did not. Then we go through the CRM, the analytics and whatever the last agency left behind, and read the competitive set for the gaps in it.
What you get. A build plan. Every component, in sequence, with a timeline and a cost against it. Named tools and named channels, with the reasoning for each. Something a person can act on in the morning.
If you stop here. You keep the plan and you can hand it to anyone. Some companies do that. It is a reasonable outcome and there is no claw-back.
Build · $15,000–$25,000 per month
What happens. Two days a week is $15,000 a month. Four days is $25,000. Straight line in between, and the number is agreed in the build plan before you sign anything. We install the five components in the sequence that plan sets out.
Where it gets to. By month two you are spending on one channel and can read what it returns. By month three the pipeline sits in the CRM, revenue traces back to source for everything we built, and nobody assembles a report by hand. Your sellers are using the positioning on live calls.
What moves the number. Five things, all of them priced by the diagnostic before you commit.
- Channel count. One channel proven is a different job from four.
- Whether there is an existing CRM to repair or a clean install to run.
- Category awareness. Selling into a market that does not know the category exists takes longer.
- How many markets and languages you are selling into.
- Whether anyone internal can take day-to-day execution as we build.
Transition · half the build rate
We do not run the search. We write the spec and sit in on the shortlist, your recruiter does the rest, and all of it starts during the build. A four-month process cannot begin in the final fortnight, so by the time transition opens you should have someone signed or close to it.
We produce the handover pack, walk the new hire through every system in person, and then drop to a reduced advisory basis while they settle.
The pack contains positioning and messaging, ICP and segmentation, CRM configuration with the logic behind each automation, channel benchmarks and what was tested, the reporting stack and how it was assembled, role specs for the next hires, and logins for every system we built or configured with the reasoning behind each decision.
Not included
What we don’t do.
We design the architecture and creative direction, run the first tests, then hand over with benchmarks. Running it month to month afterwards belongs to an agency or an internal hire.
Building the engine and the templates is our job, and you own both outright at handover. Turning out posts every week afterwards is a content hire’s job.
We define positioning, messaging and the verbal side, then write the brief your design partner works from.
Quoted separately and paid at cost. Bench specialists are already inside the monthly rate.
Hire a growth marketer.
Against hiring
What hiring first actually costs.
Salary is the US national midpoint for a marketing director in the Robert Half 2026 Salary Guide. Swap in your own number if your market is cheaper.
| Hiring a head of marketing | Year one | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Recruiter’s fee, 20% of base | $26,450 | ||
| Salary and employer costs, months 7 to 12 | $82,656 | ||
| Cash out in year one | $109,106 | ||
| A full year in the seat, loaded | $165,310 | ||
| Search, onboarding, learning the market | 6 + 3 + 3 months | ||
| Before they have built anything | 12 months |
The recruiter’s fee is due whether the hire works out or not. If it does not, you restart the six-month search with less runway than you had.
A full-service agency. Twelve-month contract and a brief written off a two-hour discovery call. Work starts quickly, pointed somewhere nobody validated. At the end you own the campaigns and none of the system underneath them.
A fractional CMO. Cheaper per month than a build. You get judgement and a plan. Execution is still yours to solve, which puts you back to hiring or briefing an agency, with the same brief problem you started with.
The build. $15,000, then three months at $15,000 to $25,000. Call it $60,000 to $90,000 and about six months, against $109,106 and twelve months for the hire. Your hire then starts on a function that already runs.
You will hire someone eventually. Doing this first means you interview against a real job description instead of a wish.
Terms
Terms.
Invoiced 50% on signature, 50% on delivery of the build plan.
Invoiced monthly in advance. Three-month initial term, then rolling with 30 days’ notice either way.
Invoiced monthly. No minimum.
Prices exclude VAT and local sales tax. Media spend and licences billed at cost as incurred.
Pricing questions
The ones that come up.
Why publish prices? +
Because it saves both of us a call that ends in the wrong number.
Is the diagnostic price fixed for everyone? +
Yes, for 15 to 80 people in one or two markets. Over 80 people, or more markets than that, it gets quoted.
Can we skip the diagnostic? +
No. Building before anyone has worked out what the product is and who wants it produces the same campaign an agency would have run off a discovery call.
What if we stop after the diagnostic? +
You keep the build plan and you can take it anywhere. No claw-back and no obligation.
Can we pay the build minimum up front? +
Yes, and it makes no difference to the price. The engagement is designed to end, so there is nothing to discount for length.
What if we need to stop mid-build? +
Thirty days’ notice after the initial three months. Stop at month two and you walk away with the positioning, one channel with real numbers against it, and a part-configured CRM with written notes on what was left undone. All of it documented, all the logins yours.
Get a scoped proposal.
Tell us what’s not working and roughly where you are. A person reads it and replies inside one working day, then a 30-minute call. No sequence, no deck.
Start the diagnostic