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So what exactly is a fractional CMO, and how do you become one? A fractional CMO is a fractional chief marketing officer, which is like the top role in marketing. In this episode of Radical Disruption, marketing strategist and fractional CMO Jess Shirra breaks it down: it’s “somebody who leads marketing strategy and a marketing team. So you’re doing strategy, leadership, advisory, like you’re not actually doing any marketing.” Jess built a seven-figure business in this model as a mom of two, and she says you don’t need to have been a CMO before to do it. “It’s so much more about how you think than your background.” Below she shares how she left corporate after becoming a mom, how she actually runs a business with two little kids, the mom guilt she had to work through, and the marketing money leaks she finds in almost every business she audits.

What is a fractional CMO?

A fractional CMO is a fractional chief marketing officer, which is like the top role in marketing if you look at a corporate org chart. “Essentially what the role is, is somebody who leads marketing strategy and a marketing team. So you’re doing strategy, leadership, advisory, like you’re not actually doing any marketing,” Jess says.

What she loves about the model is that it fit the life she wanted as a mom. “You actually don’t need a lot of clients and it’s quite light on meetings and you’re not trading time for money. So there’s a lot of boxes it was ticking for me.”

Leaving corporate after becoming a mom

Before her business, Jess spent her twenties in corporate marketing in Vancouver. “I started out in the tech startup space and then ended up relentlessly applying to Lululemon until I got hired there. I was there for quite some time leading their global marketing. I worked at Deloitte. And my life at that point, my early twenties all the way through until having kids, I lived to work. I do love marketing, but I definitely had a very unhealthy hustle balance, and that was kind of the corporate culture at the time.”

Everything changed the day she had her first daughter, Blair. “Something just immediately changed in me. It was like a day after having her, I was holding her thinking, I cannot go back to work the way that I know work. My relationship to work completely changed. It was like suddenly I had this wake-up moment of, whoa, there’s so much more to life outside of just what I do for work and who I am at work.”

During her maternity leave, a friend running a nonprofit for women entrepreneurs asked for help taking their in-person programming online during COVID. Jess jumped in, and that job gave her a first taste of a different way to work. “Sometimes I’d be holding my daughter on my lap in a Zoom meeting, or I’d be breastfeeding on a call. It was so cool to be in a culture that allowed me to have my baby on my lap or go take her for a walk. It was this taste of freedom that I just knew viscerally. I will never go back to not having this.”

Then her second daughter, Ella, came along, unexpectedly and fast, and it made the decision for her. “It was probably three weeks before I had Ella that I started building my website. And I was like, well, I guess I’m doing this. So I had her and then I started my business. I honestly had no idea what I was doing and I was scared. But I also had this naive air about me, because I just didn’t know what I didn’t know, which was a good thing.” As Mya put it, “I call that my beginner energy. When you start something and you’re like, I have no idea what I’m doing, and I’m just going to send it. There’s so much power in that.”

How did Jess discover fractional CMO work?

Jess kept hitting the same wall in every role: she loved the beginning of a project and hated the execution. “The realization I had was that I really love doing strategy. I love helping solve problems. I like leading teams and giving feedback, but I don’t actually like doing any of the marketing.” Her honest fear at the time: “I don’t think anyone’s going to pay me for this. No one’s going to pay me to just tell them what to do and not do it.”

Then she found the term. “I somehow came across the term fractional CMO, did a deep dive, and the more I learned about it, I was like, this is exactly it. This is exactly what I’ve been saying I’d like, and it’s a thing. I actually can do this.” She started with the goal of just replacing her salary. Instead, “I stumbled into fractional CMO work and I 5x’d my salary. I was making six figures in the first six months and I made a million dollars a year in my last fiscal.”

How do you run a business with two kids under two?

Slowly, and with support that built up over time. Jess is candid that it did not start out looking like a seven-figure operation. “The first six months really looked like me just working while my daughter was napping. I wasn’t doing fractional CMO work, I was really dabbling. Whoever came into my life, whatever they needed, I’d do it. Branding projects, managing social media and email, a couple of websites, marketing strategy. Everybody knew I was on maternity leave.”

The childcare came in stages, not all at once. “My husband’s right hand at his job, her daughter was looking for work. She was 22. I was like, I could definitely use your help for a few hours per week helping with my daughter. That started out very part time. Then I had her increase to three or four shorter days a week until Ella was about 13 or 14 months. Then Ella got a daycare spot where my other daughter was.” By then, “I had three or four clients and was making multi six figures and working about 25, 30 hours a week.”

Then came the part she says she doesn’t talk about enough: a house manager. “The stuff we were having a hard time keeping up with is the house stuff. When the kids get home, we’d love to be in our pool in the summer or making food together. We don’t want to be doing laundry. So we hired a house manager to help with all of that a few times a week. Meal prepping, dishwasher, laundry, errands, sign my kids up for swimming, just whatever’s on my to-do list that I can offload. Anyone who is juggling a business and kids and life stuff, that is a lot. I still feel like it’s a lot, and I am very supported.”

You get to do it all, you just don’t have to do it all alone

This was the part Mya wanted to pull the curtain back on. “A lot of times, especially as women, we don’t talk about this. We’re like, oh yeah, I’m running a multi six-figure business and I have kids and this whole life. Yes, you do have all of that. But let’s also pull back the curtain on how that’s actually possible, and it’s because you’re being supported. And everyone’s version of being supported is different. For me, I get my groceries delivered every week. I have a house cleaner. My husband is a full-time dad. When people are like, I get to do it all, I’m like, yes, I get to do it all, but I don’t have to do it all alone.”

Jess agreed. “I would go crazy if I was trying to do it all. It’s way too much.”

Working through the mom guilt around childcare

Choosing care wasn’t easy, and Jess doesn’t pretend it was. “When I started this business, my husband and I had always talked about, oh, maybe you can be a stay-at-home mom or work super part time from home. So the decision for me to get care for my kids was a really hard one for our whole family. It took me years of shaming myself and making myself wrong, being like, if I can stay home with my kids and I’m choosing not to, does that make me a bad mom? That was really hard to accept, that no, I’m a great mom, and I’m a better mom when I’m fulfilled, when I’m creatively fulfilled.”

Mya shared a perspective that reframed it for her, from Macy McNeely of The Salesgirl. “She was talking about how she believes God has put these individuals, like her nanny, into her life to care for her kids in a way, to love them in a way that maybe she wouldn’t be able to. Because each of us as individuals gives our children something different. And I thought that was such a cool way to put it, that this person was put into our lives to help our kids and to bless their lives in a specific way.”

Jess sees it in her own girls. “We’ve had two house managers slash nannies and they’ve both been incredible. They’ve loved our children like they’re theirs.” She told a story about a hard morning when she’d been crying, and her five-year-old came home from school and said, “Mom, come sit on the couch, we’re gonna have an emotions talk,” and asked her how she was feeling. “While she learned some of that from me, one of her teachers, they teach a lot about emotions and being a good friend and kindness. It’s just really cool to see these other adults that have come into their life and the impact they’ve had on them, because otherwise they wouldn’t.”

Who is a good fit to become a fractional CMO?

“It’s so much more about how you think than your background,” Jess says. She runs a program called Fractional CMO School, and the people who come through it are copywriters, social media specialists, and marketers who’ve been doing a bit of everything, across every industry, not just the online space.

The through-line is how you see marketing. “If you’re thinking about marketing as an ecosystem and you’re looking at the whole strategy and you’re thinking like a business owner, like will this move the needle, will this get results, why are we doing this, not just okay I’ll go do that. So much more about how you think than your background.”

Do you need industry connections to get started?

No. Jess has worked with big names like Jenna Kutcher and Lori Harder, and she’s clear about how she got there. “I didn’t know anyone in this industry. I had no connections. I actually didn’t even know who Jenna Kutcher was a week before I talked to her. I’d never worked in the online space whatsoever.”

When she started, she got clients by doing cold outreach all day. “I’m relentless when I want something and I just didn’t give up and I worked my ass off. So I say this because anyone can do this. If you want to get into a certain industry, if you want to work with a certain person, you want to build something, you can do it. You just need to put the time in and not give up.”

What is the first thing a CMO audits in your business?

Revenue and profit margins first. “I come in and I audit your entire marketing ecosystem and business. I always start with really understanding your revenue, your profit margins, because that’s such a big indicator of what are we working with here. Is there an offer that’s really profitable? How much budget do you have to play with for marketing?”

From there she moves to the offer suite, and this is where she finds work in almost every business. “I would say confidently with every single client there’s quite a bit of work to be done with their offer ladder. So there’s either way too many things or there’s not enough. And almost every single time there’s positioning challenges. People are too close to their own offers. They are completely underselling some features that people really care about, or they just don’t really see how amazing their offers are.” She’s walked into companies and told them, “No, this is incredible. Your results are incredible. You can double your prices.”

The most common money leak: doing too much

The biggest time-and-money leak Jess finds is being on too many channels. “I’d say like 60, 70% of the time, maybe more, people are doing too much. They’re on too many channels, and it’s like the 80/20 rule. 20% of what they’re doing is actually responsible for driving results, but they don’t have time to improve it because they’re spending 80% of their time over here trying to get YouTube to work or trying to go on TikTok.”

She calls it death by a thousand cuts, and the fix is a game of Jenga. “It’s really all about identifying what are the things we can stop, where it’s like a piece of Jenga where we’re gonna pull this out and it’s gonna have no impact on anything besides giving you some time back.” Then there’s a ripple effect: better results in the places that were already working, because you finally have time to do them well. Her rule of thumb: “Do less but better.”

How many social media channels should you actually be on?

For most people, two social channels, plus email. “We always want to have email, but if we’re just talking about social, I would say two is usually a safe number for most people. But I always base that decision on what’s your offer and your audience.”

Here’s what that looks like in practice. Jess worked with a solopreneur who sells a training and coaching program for Tableau, a data visualization tool, and he was on LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram. “His audience is not on Instagram. Data analysts, maybe some of them, but they’re not engaging.” YouTube was the right fit, but he was spending five-plus hours a week on it without the capacity to do it well. So they removed YouTube and Instagram and redirected his time into LinkedIn and an evergreen strategy, plus improving his marketing funnels. “He hit his revenue from the previous year by five months into that year. The ripple effect of just knowing where to focus your time and energy.”

Isn’t it risky to put all your eggs in one channel?

For most online entrepreneurs, Jess recommends two channels for exactly this reason. “I always think if your primary channel, you’re creating your content for that, then you’re repurposing. There’s nothing wrong with that as long as it’s not taking away too much time and your audience is there. Things can change. Like last year TikTok was almost shut down in the US. You just never really know.”

But the piece most people underuse is email. “A lot of people are very focused on growing their following and engagement, but they’re not focused enough on pulling those people off into an email list. That’s usually what I’m a huge advocate for.”

What should a mom making $3–5k a month focus on?

Jess splits this into two camps.

If your revenue comes from digital products, go back to the basics before you chase anything new. “People often are looking for this silver bullet, constantly doing and trying new things. But usually, most of the time when I come into a client’s business, it’s the basics that make a huge difference.” Her three moves:

1. Get an outside opinion on your offer positioning. “Are your offers positioned well? Don’t decide this yourself. Ask people who are your ideal client, or someone like a copywriter. You often understand your offer and other people don’t.”
2. Talk about what you sell far more than you think you should. “People do not talk about what they sell or do enough. It totally changed my brain chemistry when I looked at it as, no, this is service. If I share that and I can help them make more money, why wouldn’t I share that? It’s selfish of me not to share.”
3. Fix the boring basics of your marketing. Jess admits she had the same gap: freebies and small offers with no sales email sequence behind them, so people just dead-end. “There’s either a gap for something really basic that needs to be there, or there’s something that’s not performing well. You might have a sales sequence you wrote three years ago, but when’s the last time you looked at it? What’s the open rate? Do you have pinned posts about what you do and your freebies to grow your list? It’s the boring things people don’t love hearing, but those are the things that come in.”

If you’re a service provider making $3–5k and up and you want more, there are two paths. “Most really talented marketers are not charging enough, so you can honestly double your rates and still get great work. Sometimes you get more work because there’s this perception of premium positioning.” And if you love strategy the way Jess does, look into fractional work. “Either path is a really quick, easy way to double, triple, quadruple what you’re making.”

As Mya put it: “I love that your answer to this wasn’t, oh, you should go out and try this and also try this. It was, it’s actually not doing more, it’s doing what you’re already doing that much better. It really is in the optimization, which is that really unsexy thing, but that truly is the reality.”

A before-and-after: one change that sold an offer out

The most surprising result Jess has seen came from a single structural change. She had a client in the functional health space whose offers had bare-bones information on the website. “The only way they were really selling was when she would get on stories and talk about them. If you just looked at the website, you’re like, what is this, I don’t really know what I’m buying.”

So they rebuilt the landing page copy and design and the checkout cart. Nothing else changed. “She was doing exactly the same and that was all that changed. We did a small promotional push and we were like, whoa, stop, it sold out” in about six weeks. Six months later it’s still permanently waitlisted, and she doesn’t even promote it anymore. “Now we actually don’t even talk about that offer because it literally sells without her talking about it.” The lesson, in Mya’s words: “Small, simple things.”

Your homework: the one marketing move to make this week

If you only have a nap-time window and you can do one thing this week, here’s Jess’s assignment. Sit down with a notebook and ask yourself two questions.

1. What is my one goal? “Not goals, but what’s my goal. It needs to be short-ish term and very tangible. Like I want to sell five people into my program this month, or I want one client at 5K per month, or I want to sell a hundred of my little course.”
2. What is the fastest path to that goal? “Completely clear your head of all the things you think you should do, this funnel, that funnel, and brainstorm what is the fastest path to my goal. Usually the fastest path is something kind of unconventional or more direct. Not the sexy thing, not the fun thing, not the newest thing you’re seeing online, but what’s the fastest, quickest way to get there. Because it’s usually pretty simple.”

Mya’s add: instead of asking “how can I make more money,” ask a better question. “How can I make making the amount of money that I’m making right now even easier? What you’ll notice is that you reduce hours worked, but in the process of simplifying, 99% chance you’re also going to make more money.” Or, as she says it: “The quality of your life is on the other side of the quality of your questions.”

Where to find Jess

Jess is focused this year on Fractional CMO School, her training program for marketers who want to step into being a fractional CMO or do it better. The best place to reach her is Instagram at @marketing.by.jess, and you can learn more about her work at The CMO Office. “I’m always in my DMs, it’s me. There’s not a bot replying. I love the community side of this business and connecting with other entrepreneurs.”

Loved this one? The whole heartbeat of this conversation, do less but better and build marketing that runs without you, is what Scalability is built on. It’s Mya’s signature program for scaling to $5k, $25k, and $50k months sustainably, so you can stack income while you stack memories.

Frequently asked questions

What is a fractional CMO?

A fractional CMO is a fractional chief marketing officer, the top marketing role on a corporate org chart, hired part-time. As Jess Shirra explains it, it’s “somebody who leads marketing strategy and a marketing team. So you’re doing strategy, leadership, advisory, like you’re not actually doing any marketing.” You lead the plan and the team instead of executing the tactics yourself.

How do you become a fractional CMO?

According to Jess, it’s less about your title and more about how you think. “It’s so much more about how you think than your background.” If you view marketing as an ecosystem, love strategy over execution, and think like a business owner about what will move the needle, you’re a fit. She got her first clients through daily cold outreach with no industry connections.

How do you run a business with young kids?

Jess built up support in stages: nap-time work for the first six months, then part-time childcare, then daycare, then a house manager for meal prep, laundry, and errands. She works about 25 to 30 hours a week. Her and Mya’s shared message: you get to do it all, but you don’t have to do it all alone, and everyone’s version of being supported looks different.

How many social media channels should a small business be on?

For most people, two social channels plus email. Jess bases the call on your offer and audience, not a fixed rule. The goal is to create for one primary channel, repurpose to a second, and pour the energy you save into email, which is what actually drives revenue for most businesses.

What should a mom making $3–5k a month with digital products focus on first?

The basics, not a new shiny strategy. Get an outside opinion on your offer positioning, talk about what you sell far more often, and fix the boring gaps in your marketing, like sales email sequences that dead-end or a sales sequence you wrote three years ago and never revisited. Small, simple fixes move the needle most.