Amanda Rabideau On Lessons Learned as a Fractional CMO

Mixing Board Studio Session

Amanda Rabideau a Fractional CMO and the Founder of ARCH Collective. After she left her marketing leadership role at a Fortune 1000 company in real estate data and analytics in 2019 and began interviewing for four different CMO roles with San Francisco-based tech startups, she noticed similar challenges and needs across each company. This sparked an idea: “Wouldn’t it be more efficient for the companies if she could simultaneously work for ALL of them?” She now helps startups and companies of all sizes find momentum and push forward. 

In this Studio Session, Amanda and Mixing Board Founder Sean Garrett talk about optimizing your time as a consultant and the formula for figuring out the right client load, educating leaders on marketing and defining the role of a fractional CMO, the evolving relationship between comms and marketing, and always paying women what they ask. 

SG: Tell us about your perfect life and how you got to this moment?

AR: So we're making the assumption I'm living my perfect life? I like it. It's actually a great way to frame how I got where I am because about five years ago, I was living the opposite of my perfect life – one that I felt was extremely unfulfilling. I wasn't happy. Like a lot of people do, I went out and I found myself an executive coach. I interviewed lots of coaches and was shocked to hear some of their processes and how they worked with clients. But I found this woman, Sophia Ladera Garcia, who I've been working with since the fall of 2018. She is a tough love, no BS kind of coach, which was perfect for me.

I had a lot of work to do. I describe the work I did with Sophia akin to – I feel like I'm getting an MBA, but about myself. A deep dive on the good, the bad, the ugly, the amazing. Through this journey, I was able to shed some of the things that prevented me from stepping into being who I really am and start going for it. A lot of that was just fear. The company I was at was doing layoffs and I took a package. I joke that the CEO of the company was my first angel investor because I had this package to leave with. 

Ultimately I started ARCH Collective. Always, in the back of my mind, I thought that I’d want to start something on my own. I've come from a family of entrepreneurs. Both my grandfathers, my dad, my uncles, but never a female entrepreneur. I always had in my head that that's who I would be in the family. While I was interviewing for multiple CMO roles, I had to put together marketing plans towards the end of the interview process and I was like, "These are all the same plan." Not because I wasn't being thoughtful, but they were dealing with very similar issues because they were all post-Series A funded B2B tech startups. I thought, "I should just take a job with all of them because I'd be super efficient at knocking all this stuff out."

Once I said it, that's where that entrepreneurial bug stepped in. I couldn't stop thinking about it and I thought, I have to do this. For the first couple of years, I didn't know what I was doing 90% of the time. Now I’m almost five years into it, and I am still learning a lot, but it's been an incredible journey and I'm grateful for where I am. I like being my own boss. It comes with its own challenges, but I can't imagine being anywhere else. In that regard, I do feel like I'm living my perfect life.

SG: Explain ARCH Collective in a nutshell. What's the remit? What are you taking on?

AR: I don't particularly care for the word agency, but it's a nice anchor for people. In a way, ARCH Collective is a marketing services agency where I am the fractional CMO or chief marketing officer. Then I have, what I call my collective, or my network of freelance marketers and creatives that I can bring in to help execute on the strategy that I put into place. 

Probably not shocking to anyone who's reading this, but a lot of times when I come in that post-seed or round seed or series A stage, the marketing team is extremely lean or non-existent from a full-time perspective. While I may be able to create the world's best strategy, your CMO probably shouldn't be the person, from a cost efficiency perspective, that executes on that. They may not have the funding to build out an entire marketing team, so I can help them get these things done in a much more cost-efficient way, while still having an executive in the room who can help guide them more strategically to series B and beyond.

SG: There are many more consultants today in 2024 than there were in 2018, and everyone's learning along the way. It seems like this is one of those roles where you can't really teach it, you’ve got to experience it. What would you impart to those who are just entering the consulting field now that you've learned over six years of doing this?

AR: Like anything in life, you have to live it. If someone said, "Well, what am I going to do as a parent?" You don't know until you get the baby in your hands and then you figure it out. I just had a conversation with a woman, fantastic background, great schooling, and she was looking at going into consulting. She was basically asking me, what's the silver bullet or the magic thing you do to make this all work? The short answer is, there isn't one. 

You can go back to the fundamentals of what we do and ask, who's your target audience? What's your value proposition? What is your offering? Where are the people that you're selling to so you can reach them? But that's putting a very academic spin on it.

It's more about, why are you going into it? Are you willing to look at these people like clients and realize that even though you are an expert, you're in a service-based business. If you haven't had any client management experience, that could get tricky. One thing I say to people is if you're going into this because you just want to be doing X, like you love putting together amazing digital campaigns. You may be doing that for 40% of your time, but if you're running a business, you're also doing accounting, recruiting, all of these different things that come with managing a business.

Be mindful about why you're doing it. I don't want to say you might be doing it for the wrong reasons, but you might have a different expectation of what being a consultant, or owning your own business, will actually be. If it doesn't align, that's often where people get disappointed, or they quit, or they end up having to walk away and do something else – whether it's going back to full-time or otherwise.

SG: I learned this lesson myself, so I'm not making fun of anyone who didn't learn it. But when you are a consultant for the first time, you're like, "Oh, I could charge $500/hour. 500 times 30, that's pretty good." Then you actually start doing it and you're like, "Wait, what about all those hours that I'm spending doing coffees, writing proposals, talking to people, attending events, all the stuff that's not those 30 hours." You're like, "Whoa, that's a lot of hours that I actually have to do to do those 30." That money basically goes to pay for all that other time, as well. It isn't $500 an hour. When you're thinking about the business, have you figured out the right way to structure it so that you are optimizing for the right amount of time with clients? 

AR: I certainly take that into account when I'm pricing out a project. I wish I was better at tracking my hours, I did that a lot more at the beginning where I used the QuickBooks timekeeping. At any given time, you need to have lots of different things happening to fill that pipeline. Some should be passive, meaning it's not taking your hourly time to do it, and others are going to be more active where it is your time. You can't pass it on to someone else, like participating in podcasts or attending events. You can't send someone in your place. It's finding that balance. 

You don't know how to do it until you do it. Outside of the actual working hours, if you say, "Okay, I'm going to do these lead-generating activities, I'm going to go to these events, meet in person and speak here," there's also who you are as a human and how you balance all of those things. I've been at all these in-person events and I haven't had this many in such a consolidated period of time in quite a while. For some people, that may be too much. For others it's like, "Oh, I want more and more because I'm an extrovert and I'm energized by being with people." Some of that you're not going to know until you've done too much or you've done too little and you learn the lesson the hard way because it is so company-specific or business-specific or individual-specific.

SG: What's your formula for determining the right client load at any given point? That is one of the hardest things about that job. 

AR: I do calendar blocking. At any given time, including right now, my calendar from 8:00 in the morning until 5:00 PM is completely blocked. I have anywhere from advisory clients, to project-based clients, to these big fractional clients, which take up the most amount of time. At any given time, I may be available for more advisory work but not fractional work, and that's what my calendar will let me know. 

I don't take on more than three fractional clients at a time, it could be two just depending on the size of them. I've got set fractional hours on my calendar and if I'm at capacity, I'm at capacity. But I can take on multiple project clients and that depends on what they are and how big they are. With advisory clients, because of the way I structure those, it's a much lighter lift, I always have capacity for those. But most people aren't asking someone they don't know to be their advisor, so it's usually coming from someone that I already have a relationship with.

I'm also a mom. I've got two kids and also take into account what's happening outside of that calendar in my personal life.

SG: Is the general assumption in the fractional world now that if they're hiring a fractional CMO, they are intending to eventually hire a CMO and this is the step towards it? Or is this more of a test phase to see, "Do we need a CMO? Is this even a thing?" How are they viewing it? 

AR: This is a little bit of a pessimistic view, but the more I do it, the more I think that hiring a fractional CMO is proof that the organization doesn't value the role marketing plays. Of course I have worked with companies where it is meant to be an interim role because maybe they've got someone on leave or maybe there's some big change coming and they're like, "We had to let the last person go but we need to have someone strategic because we're getting acquired," or we're doing whatever we're doing. I don't want to paint with a broad brush and say that's everyone, because that is not the case at all.

But I've certainly had conversations where it's clear that they don’t really take marketing seriously. This is really just a cheap hire because you don't actually think that we do anything of value. That can be a struggle. I have conversations with my clients all the time where I say, "Part of my success is if I fire myself." If I bring in a full-time CMO because we've got the business to a place where it doesn't make sense to have someone who's only fractional or part-time, that means the team's growing, the business is growing. We’ve gotten things to where you need someone that can manage all the things 24/7.

If someone readimg to this is thinking about being fractional, include those questions. Because if they only want something fractional, then they're just not looking at the impact that marketing can make, in a way that I would want my clients to be thinking of marketing.

SG: Mixing Board obviously has plenty of marketing people in it, we also have a lot of people with communications in their title. How are you seeing the intersection between communications and marketing? 

AR: I had always thought one way, and then I had comms folks and PR people have a totally different viewpoint on the role of marketing versus comms. It really opened my eyes. Some of this is through conversations with members of Mixing Board. To me, we're all under the umbrella of marketing. I'm not saying that a CMO is better than anyone who's in chief comms or chief PR, but if those two functions aren't very much on the same page, that's going to be a real problem. If one thinks one is more important than the other, then that's also a problem. 

When I think of marketing and the entire arc of what that is, PR and comms play an incredibly important role. So does branding, the digital space, events, our social media presence – all of those things are important. At any given time, one of those may have more weight or more importance. 

At the end of the day, all of us, if done right, are rowing in the same direction. If we zoom out from the PR and comms versus CMO, and look at startups, less than 15% of startup founders have a marketing background. A lot of what I do, unexpectedly at the beginning, is the education on what marketing is. 

The number of times I've said, “I get that you want a nice-looking pitch deck, but marketing is not the arts and crafts department." It's so much bigger than that and much more strategic and thoughtful. We can drive P&Ls, we can own P&Ls. We make such a huge impact. You don't need me if you just want to pretty up some slides. I did not go out to start ARCH Collective to do this, but I feel like now I've got this personal mission to let people know that marketing is an incredibly valuable part of the organization.

SG: I know that you are also working on female leadership efforts. Tell me about what you're up to there and why you're focused on it.

AR: When I started ARCH Collective, even why there is the collective, comes from my desire to empower women. And at the time, it was specifically mothers. I was a part of the marketing team for Golden Gate Mothers Group, which is one of the largest mothers groups in the country. It's an amazing resource, especially for young, first-time mothers or if you don't know people in the area. 

During my time working with all these women in 2016-2018, I met a bunch of women that were freelancers and consultants. I remember asking them like, "How did you get into this?" These are people that got their MBA from Stanford or MIT, who had these big jobs, and were executives at this company or that. A lot of them took time off to be with their children and then couldn't get back in at the level they were at before they left. I was like, "I'm going to totally tap into all these badass women I know to help me out on my clients, because there's no reason that they shouldn't be working." When I started ARCH, I wanted it to be bigger than just me and I wanted to find a way to include these amazing women.

Bringing women in and giving them a job was really important, as well as paying them what they asked. I graduated from business school in 2011. Women made 78, 79 cents per dollar for a man. Now here we are, 84 cents, so we've gone 5 cents while the cost of a gallon of milk went from $3.57 to $4.09. Things are messed up. I always want to pay women what they're asking. A lot of my work isn't necessarily new, it's just building on the things that I believe in as a woman, as a mother, fighting the good fight out there. 

When I started ARCH, I took this leap and I did this big thing because I wasn't happy. I want to empower and support other women to think bigger, to be bolder, to do that thing that maybe they don't think they can. It has been really rewarding to start my own business. And that may not be someone else's journey. But whether it's through UNC's 100 Women, which is an organization encouraging more women to get their MBA, or these women freelancers that I bring in onto projects and pay them what they ask – whatever role I can have to help these women do the big thing. Maybe they just need a nudge or the person to tell them to do it.

Interested in learning more about how to engage with the Mixing Board community of comms and brand marketing experts? Curious on how to become a member? Feel free to reach out via the “Get in Touch” button on our site.