An operator in your account.
Not a salesperson on your call.

Three concrete differences:

First, you hired me, you get me. When you book a call, you talk to the person running your account. There's no account manager layer, no junior doing the work while a senior takes the calls. The org chart is one person deep on purpose.

Second, the incentives are aligned. Agencies grow by adding clients to existing buyers. I grow by keeping a small roster of clients I can actually serve well. If I can't take on a new account without degrading the existing ones, I don't take it.

Third, the unglamorous work gets done. Most agencies treat tracking, CAPI, attribution audits, and account hygiene as setup tasks - done once at onboarding and ignored after. I treat them as ongoing work, because that's the work that compounds. Half the wins I've delivered for clients came from fixing measurement, not from a clever creative test.

That said: there are great agencies, and there are bad fractional operators. Fit matters more than category.

Week 1: deep audit. Account architecture, pixel and CAPI configuration, GA4 event setup, attribution discrepancies, creative library review, historical performance read. You get a written audit document at the end of the week - yours to keep regardless of what you do next.

Weeks 2–3: rebuild. We restructure campaigns based on what the audit surfaced, fix tracking issues, reset creative testing protocols, and align on KPIs and reporting cadence.

Week 4: stabilize and start optimizing. By day 30 the account is running clean and we have a baseline to optimize against.

Most accounts I take over have one or more meaningful tracking issues that have been distorting reporting for months. The first 30 days usually pay for themselves just by fixing what was already broken.

It does, for me. That's the point.

Annual contracts protect agencies from being fired for underperformance. Month-to-month means I have to earn the next month every month - which keeps me focused on the work that actually moves your account, not the work that looks good in a quarterly business review.

Onboarding still takes 30 days to do properly (audit, rebuild, baseline measurement). After that, you can leave any time with 30 days' notice. Most clients don't, but the door is always open.

Then we've done the job right.

Most DTC brands eventually need a full-time in-house growth lead - the unit economics demand it once you're past a certain spend. When that point comes, I help you write the job description, sit in on candidate interviews if you want me to, and overlap with your new hire for 30–60 days so they inherit a clean account and a working measurement stack instead of a mess.

There are no claw-backs, non-solicits, or transition fees. The transition is part of the engagement, not a penalty for ending it.

Eventually you should. But there's usually a window - somewhere between $25K and $150K/month in ad spend - where in-house is too expensive and a full agency is too detached.

A senior paid media hire in Los Angeles is $130K–$180K all-in, plus benefits, plus the 3–6 month ramp before they're producing. That's a real commitment for a role you may not need full-time yet.

Fractional gets you a senior operator immediately, at a fraction of that cost, with no ramp period. When the spend (and the workload) justifies the full-time hire, we transition. That's the model.

The honest answer: $25K/month in Meta ad spend is roughly the floor. Below that, the math on a fractional growth lead doesn't work for either of us - you don't have enough spend to justify the engagement, and I can't move the needle enough to earn it.

The ceiling is harder to define. I've worked on accounts spending $500K+/month at CTC. The question at higher spend isn't whether I can run it - it's whether you've reached the point where in-house is the right call. We'll figure that out together.

Meta is what I lead with - it's where I have the deepest reps and where most of my clients see the highest leverage. I'm also a TikTok Certified Media Buying Professional and run TikTok ads when the brand fit is right (younger demo, strong UGC pipeline, willingness to test creative volume). I'm proficient in Google PMAX as well as CTV.

I don't run search or Amazon. I have certifications across Pinterest, Snapchat, and others - but actively recommending and running a channel are different things, and I'd rather refer you to someone better than half-do it myself.

If you need a multi-channel paid lead, I'm not the right operator. If you need someone to run Meta ads at the level where the unglamorous details actually compound - that's the engagement.

NDA, yes - standard practice.

Non-compete in the same vertical, no. I won't take on a direct competitor while we're working together (same product, same target customer), but I won't blanket-block myself from entire categories. If you sell skincare, I can still work with another skincare brand serving a different demo or price point. If that's a dealbreaker, I'm not the right fit.

Yes. After an intro call, if there's mutual fit, I'll connect you with two or three current or past clients. They've all agreed to take occasional reference calls and will give you an honest read - including on the things I'm not great at.