A $4,500/month engagement. Three-month minimum. Each month: a 90-minute strategy session, a written priorities document, and direct Slack and email access. Each quarter: a full priorities review. Strategic architecture for businesses that have outgrown execution-only vendors.
Built for bootstrapped B2B founders at $5M+ ARR. Applies to CEOs without a CMO, operators running marketing without a strategic layer, and similar leaders buying execution without owning the strategy behind it.
The Quarterly Strategy Partnership is a $4,500/month engagement with a 3-month minimum. Each month includes a 90-minute strategy session, a written priorities document, and direct Slack and email access. Each quarter includes a full priorities review. Built for founders and operators who have outgrown execution-only vendors but are not ready to hire a full-time CMO.
The partnership creates one recurring place where positioning, demand generation, website direction, vendor output, sales feedback, and founder judgment get reconciled into a clear monthly set of decisions.
The work is not “more ideas.” It is the operating layer that decides what gets attention, what gets stopped, what gets delayed, and what the team needs to understand before another month of execution begins.
What prospects are saying, where deals slow down, and which objections keep returning.
What matters this month, what waits, what stops, and what needs a sharper owner.
Clear instructions for paid, web, content, sales enablement, and external vendors.
A documented trail of decisions, rationale, metrics, risks, and dependencies.
The partnership page has to answer the human concern underneath the purchase: “Will someone finally hold the whole marketing system in their head and tell us what to do next?”
The work is useful when campaigns, content, website, and sales asks all exist, but no one owns the priorities across them.
Every month produces a written priorities document and a strategy session. The point is cadence, decisions, and sequencing, not open-ended commentary.
Founders and operators get a senior strategic counterweight so urgent requests stop becoming the whole marketing plan.
The minimum is long enough to create rhythm and short enough to avoid a hidden employment-style commitment.
The pattern is consistent. A team of freelancers and specialists, each doing their job well in isolation: a paid media buyer running campaigns, a content writer producing articles, a web agency maintaining the site. Each of them reports on what they did. None of them coordinate the architecture above them. There is no one whose job it is to decide what the next quarter's priorities should be and why.
Monthly reporting tells you what happened. Click-through rates, impression share, organic traffic trends. Numbers, charts, annotations. What you do not get is the person who says: based on where we are and where we need to be, here is what should happen next quarter, here is the sequencing, here is what we stop doing and why.
That is the gap. Not execution capacity. Not channel expertise. The missing layer is strategic architecture: the person who owns the connection between business goals and marketing motion, who keeps the channel tactics coherent with each other, and who tells you when to change direction before the reporting does.
At $5M ARR, the cost of that gap is compounding. Every quarter without a strategic layer is a quarter where execution runs without a clear north star. Some things work. More things are unclear. Nobody can explain the causal relationship between what was spent and what was produced.
The partnership structure is the same every month, with the content of each session driven by where you are in the business. Month 1 establishes the baseline. Month 2 reviews and adjusts. Month 3 closes the first quarter and sets the next. After the initial three months, the pattern continues month-to-month until either party decides otherwise.
The cadence matters because the buyer is not paying for presence. They are buying a repeatable rhythm for strategic decisions.
Strategy diagnostic or structured onboarding if coming from a prior gate. Positioning baseline established. Current marketing motion audited. 90-day priorities set. First written priorities document delivered within 48 hours of the session.
Month 1 priorities reviewed against execution. What moved and why. What did not and why. Priorities adjusted based on new data. New initiatives defined and sequenced. Second written document delivered. Direct access used as questions arise between sessions.
Full quarterly priorities review. Positioning refresh if the narrative has drifted or a new product motion requires it. Next quarter priorities set with full rationale. Third written document delivered. Decision point: continue month-to-month or conclude. No pressure in either direction.
Monthly 90-minute session. Written priorities document within 48 hours. Direct Slack and email access for ad-hoc questions and strategic decisions that arise between sessions. Annual review of positioning and channel architecture once per year.
"For founder-level strategic advisory beyond marketing - operator decisions, company architecture, succession, and organizational structure - engagements are available with Stan Tscherenkow directly. If the strategic need extends beyond the marketing system into how the company is organized and led, that is the right path."
Both paths are valid. The diagnostic path is recommended because it gives the partnership a clear starting point. The direct path makes sense if you already have a precise understanding of your strategic state and want to move immediately into the monthly structure.
The $5,000 Strategy Diagnostic takes 10 business days and produces a 20-to-30 page strategy document covering all four axes of your marketing architecture. When the diagnostic is complete, it converts directly to the partnership. Month 1 of the partnership builds from the diagnostic document. No overlap, no repeated intake work.
This path is recommended because the partnership is more valuable when both parties start with a shared written baseline. The diagnostic eliminates the first two months of the partnership being spent on orientation instead of strategy.
Start with the Strategy Diagnostic · $5,000 →If you have a clear and current picture of your marketing architecture, entering the partnership directly is a valid path. Month 1 begins with a structured onboarding session that covers the same baseline questions as the diagnostic, though at a higher level and without the full written document output.
This path is appropriate for founders who have done prior strategic work recently and want ongoing strategic oversight rather than a new diagnostic. The first quarterly review at Month 3 will serve as the baseline document for the partnership going forward.
Start the Partnership Directly · $4,500/mo →Four thousand five hundred dollars per month. Three-month minimum commitment. After the initial three months, the engagement moves to month-to-month with 30-day notice for either party to exit. No long-term lock-in. No cancellation penalty beyond the agreed minimum.
The minimum exists because the first quarter is where the value architecture gets built. A single session does not produce a strategy. Three months produces a documented strategic baseline, a proven session cadence, and a written quarterly review that both parties can use as a working reference for the next period.
The 90-minute monthly session covers three things: a review of what moved in the prior month and what did not, a priorities adjustment based on new data or changed circumstances, and a forward-looking strategic agenda for the next 30 days. The session is structured, not open-ended. It produces a written priorities document delivered within 48 hours. The agenda is set collaboratively in advance so neither party comes in unprepared.
The monthly priorities document is a structured written output covering the top three to five strategic priorities for the coming 30 days, with rationale for each, the decision that was made or deferred, the success metric for each priority, and any dependencies or risks. It is one to two pages. It is written to be shareable with your team as a source of strategic direction, not a consultant artifact that requires interpretation.
You can enter directly. The Strategy Diagnostic ($5,000) is recommended as a starting point because it gives both parties a clear picture of where the business is before the partnership begins. It converts cleanly into Month 1 of the partnership, so the first session builds on a completed diagnostic rather than starting from scratch. But if you already have a clear picture of your strategic state, entering directly is a valid path.
A fractional CMO typically works embedded, attending team meetings, managing headcount decisions, and owning executional output. This partnership is advisory, not embedded. The distinction matters: embedded fractionals often become expensive overhead without clear strategic deliverables. This partnership produces a written strategic document every month and a formal quarterly review, making the value concrete and measurable rather than presence-based.
The 3-month minimum is a commitment both ways. At the end of 3 months, the engagement moves to month-to-month. Either party can discontinue with 30 days written notice. There is no long-term lock-in beyond the initial 3 months. The documents produced belong to you. The strategic work done belongs to you. Nothing is retained by the team if the engagement ends.
Yes. Some partnerships evolve to include additional scoped work: a channel audit, a positioning refresh, a GTM sequencing update. Those are priced separately at the gate rates and do not change the monthly partnership fee. The partnership itself stays at $4,500/month for the core deliverables. Scope expansions are always optional and always separately agreed in writing before the work begins.
Quarterly Strategy Partnership · $4,500/month · 3-month minimum · Monthly sessions, written documents, direct access, quarterly review.