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02 · Analyse and adviseSenior marketing judgement in the board room.
Strategic Board Advisor supporting high growth companies to scale commercial operations and transform how they acquire and retain buyers. Craig leverages deep CMO experience to align go to market strategy with measurable revenue growth, giving leadership teams clarity across the customer journey.
Boards see the revenue number. They rarely see what produced it.
Marketing arrives at board level as a cost line and a slide of activity. Campaigns delivered, pipeline generated, cost per lead. None of it answers the question the board is actually asking, which is whether the commercial engine will still be producing growth in eight quarters, and what it would take to make it do so.
The result is a board that can approve a marketing budget but cannot evaluate a marketing strategy. Spend gets cut when it should be redirected, or defended when it should be questioned, and nobody in the room has the standing to say which.
Marketing is an enterprise value question long before it is a budget question.
What the advisory seat covers.
| Area | What that means in practice |
|---|---|
| Insight to strategy | Translating customer and market insight into a go to market strategy the board can actually scale, rather than a plan that works only at current volume. |
| Growth leak review | Helping leaders identify and fix growth leaks across the buyer journey, naming where value is lost between functions rather than inside them. |
| Unit economics | Improving conversion and unit economics through better commercial alignment, so that growth and efficiency stop being presented as a trade off. |
| Marketing performance oversight | An independent read on whether marketing is performing against commercial objectives, in language the whole board can interrogate. |
| Executive counsel | A sounding board for the CEO, CFO and marketing leader between meetings, where the real decisions usually get made. |
Advisor, consultant or non executive.
| Strategy consultancy | Generalist NED | Board advisor | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brings | A project team | Governance experience | Operating depth in marketing and go to market |
| Horizon | The engagement | The term | The growth plan |
| Output | A recommendation | Questions in the meeting | A strategy the executive team can run, and the challenge to keep it honest |
| Cost profile | Large fixed fee | Fixed annual fee | Light, recurring, scaled to the board calendar |
| Where it fits | A defined question | Statutory oversight | Beside the executive team, accountable to the board |
How the seat works.
Week zero. Fit call.
Thirty minutes with the chair or the CEO. What the board needs to see, what it currently gets, and where the disagreement sits. If an advisor is not the right answer I will say so on the call.
Weeks one and two. Spot the gaps.
The buyer journey reviewed end to end, using your own systems and numbers. The board receives the scored view whether or not the seat continues.
Each board cycle. Challenge and counsel.
A written read on commercial performance ahead of the meeting, the awkward questions asked in it, and time with the executive team between meetings to act on what came out.
Each quarter. Re score.
The same measurement repeated, so the board sees a trajectory rather than a series of unrelated updates, and can tell improvement from activity.
About the advisory seat.
Is this a non executive director role?
Not by default. An advisory seat carries no statutory duty and can be arranged quickly, which suits a board that needs marketing judgement now. Where a formal NED appointment is what is wanted, that is a separate conversation.
How much time does it take?
It is built around your board calendar: a read ahead of each meeting, the meeting itself, and time with the executive team between meetings. It scales up around a raise, an acquisition or a repositioning.
Do you work with the marketing leader or around them?
With them, always. The role is to give a marketing leader senior backing and honest challenge, not to audit them. Where the seat is empty, the fractional CMO engagement is usually the better answer.
What size of company is this for?
B2B technology companies with a board that is serious about growth: PE and VC backed scale ups, and listed and FTSE businesses where marketing has become an enterprise value question.
Give the board a straight read on marketing.
Thirty minutes with the chair or the CEO. What the board needs to see, and what it currently gets.
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