For most growth-stage SaaS companies, neither a traditional agency nor a solo fractional CMO is the right answer. What you need is senior strategic leadership combined with a specialist execution team — without paying for both separately.
Agencies deliver activities — campaigns, content, reports. What they rarely provide is strategic CMO-level ownership: board engagement, commercial model alignment, team building or budget accountability. You get outputs, not leadership.
A solo fractional CMO provides senior strategic thinking but has limited execution bandwidth. You still need to source, brief and manage specialist teams — adding management overhead at precisely the moment you need things to move fast.
TSP provides senior strategic leadership embedded with a specialist execution team. The CMO-level strategist and the paid, SEO, CRO and automation specialists are the same team — aligned, accountable and moving together.
See exactly where typical agencies fall short — and why a fractional model changes the equation entirely.
Board-level positioning, commercial model alignment, go-to-market strategy, brand architecture, pricing narrative — the CMO-level decisions that shape everything downstream.
No gap between strategy and delivery. The same team that sets your direction builds your campaigns, optimises your conversion and publishes your content. No handoffs, no brief translation, no lag.
We join your Slack, attend your standups, contribute to your board packs. The relationship feels like an internal team, not an external vendor — with all the accountability that implies.
As your business grows, your marketing needs evolve. TSP scales engagement up or down — adding specialist capacity in high-priority channels, stepping back as you hire internally. No forced headcount decisions.
A full-time CMO costs £150k–200k+ in salary alone. Add a specialist agency retainer and you're past £300k annually. TSP provides both from £3,500/month — with flexible, rolling terms.
Rolling monthly arrangement. Scale up, scale down, or wind down — with 30 days' notice. We've designed the commercial model to remove risk from your decision, not add it.
Salary alone. Add NI, pension, benefits, equity and time-to-hire — typically 12+ months before full productivity.
A mid-market CMO plus a typical SaaS agency retainer. High fixed cost, junior execution, and the handoff friction between strategic and delivery teams.
Senior strategic leadership plus specialist execution in one team. Rolling monthly terms. No juniors, no offshoring, no lock-in.
"We'd been through two agencies before finding TSP. Both promised SaaS expertise; neither had actually worked inside a SaaS business. TSP understood our funnel, our ICP and our unit economics from week one."
"The difference between TSP and a typical agency is night and day. They don't sell you a retainer and assign a graduate. You get senior people who've built and scaled SaaS businesses."
"Fractional doesn't mean part-time effort. TSP became an embedded part of our team. They challenged our strategy, rewrote our GTM and within six months we'd more than doubled qualified pipeline."
A solo fractional CMO provides part-time strategic guidance — typically 1–2 days per week of thinking and advisory. TSP provides CMO-level strategic leadership plus a full specialist execution team embedded in your business. You get the strategic brain and the hands doing the work.
Yes — and it's where we often start. Companies with no marketing hire, a founding team doing basic marketing, or a junior marketer who needs senior leadership above them are classic TSP scenarios. We provide the leadership layer and the execution capacity in one engagement.
Absolutely. We regularly augment internal marketing teams — providing senior strategic direction, specialist channel expertise or execution capacity that the internal team doesn't have. We define clear lanes of ownership and work collaboratively with your people.
We help you get there. Part of our work is building the processes, reporting frameworks and team foundations that make an in-house CMO hire successful. We can also help with CMO brief design and search process if needed — we want you to graduate from TSP, not be dependent on us.
Rolling monthly engagement from £3,500/month. Scope, team composition and hours are defined at engagement start and reviewed quarterly. No minimum terms, no exit penalties — the flexibility is deliberate.
TSP delivers CMO-level strategy and specialist execution — in one team, on flexible terms.