Commercial Architect | Marketing(Fractional CMO)
You work inside growing companies on the strategy that decides the demand that reaches them, from 20 hours a month each, with clients we find and match to you, a method supporting you, and a platform that keeps the strategy current.
Brief
10+ years in marketing leadership, at director, VP or C level, in businesses growing fast enough to break their own processes. You have owned a demand number, rewritten positioning when the market moved, and turned a set of campaigns into something that produced customers.
You work inside client businesses from 20 hours a month each. Companies of roughly €1M to €100M+ in revenue, across Europe.
Your positioning reaches the people who act on it. A method covering the whole commercial picture, held in a platform, so what you set reaches the people selling and the people keeping customers and stays current from your client’s own systems.
A senior operator, working in the business, working on the strategy.
Our clients are typically growing companies based in Europe, at the point where a chief marketing officer would change the trajectory and the full-time seat is still ahead of them. You take that seat. You sit with the founder and the commercial team, work out what is holding the number back, and then work alongside them to implement it.
You are an operator inside the business, part-time and interim by design. You are in the room when the positioning is argued over, in the review when a channel stops paying for itself, in front of the team when the definition of a qualified lead changes, and close enough to them that they bring you the awkward ones.
We call this a commercial architect. You design the structure the business runs on, and you build it as you go.
Everything you work out goes into the client’s own workspace as you go. The positions, the evidence behind them, the logic joining them up. They keep it, and so does the next quarter of your work, which starts from where you left off.
The bar.
Clients are buying the person as much as the platform. This is the standard we hire to.
10+ years in marketing leadership
At director, VP or C level. CMO, VP of marketing, marketing director, head of demand or the equivalent, in the role itself.
You have owned a demand number
Owned pipeline contribution, owned the reporting that proved it, and lived with your own calls. We ask about this early, and we ask for specifics.
Fast growth, and the mess that comes with it
Businesses growing quickly enough to outrun their own processes. You know what breaks at €3M and again at €20M, because you were there when it broke.
You have repositioned something
Rewritten the positioning when the market moved. Changed the category a company sells into. Turned a set of campaigns into a demand engine. Built an audience around a founder’s expertise. Change you led.
You can hold the whole commercial picture
Marketing is the seat, and the causes sit across sales and customer teams. A lead-quality problem often starts in positioning or ends in a qualification standard the teams read differently. You say so, then work the fix with whichever team owns it.
You communicate clearly
Much of this job is putting a position and the reasoning behind it into words a team can act on. Written down, your judgement reaches the whole team and keeps working after the session ends.
Most of all, we want people who are obsessed with creating lasting value for the businesses they work in: unlocking growth, giving a founder confidence in their strategy, and helping a team make better commercial decisions.
What you own.
Marketing is the span, which runs from what a company is known for to the moment a lead is worth a salesperson’s time. In a typical engagement you own:
- The diagnosis. Where demand actually comes from today and where it leaks, named and evidenced, inside the first weeks. Founders often arrive with a channel in mind and a budget behind it. Your job is to test that against the evidence and report what you find.
- Positioning and the story. The value only that company can deliver, the buyers it is worth most to, and the language that makes it obvious to them in their own words.
- The audience. Who the company should be known by, what earns their attention, and the case for being worth it. Reach is easy to buy and an audience is not.
- Demand generation. The routes to market that produce customers, the economics behind each of them, and the discipline to stop funding the ones that produce volume.
- Thought leadership and the founder’s voice. Turning what the business genuinely knows into positions the market recognises, published often enough to compound.
- The handover to sales. What a qualified lead is, agreed with the people who work it, and the loop that carries the outcome back to marketing.
Every week you also weigh the signals coming up across the business. Plenty of them look important. Your depth of experience is what tells a team which ones actually are, and where to put their energy and focus.
How the work runs.
Fractional, with enough structure that the hours land where they count.
From 20 hours a month, per client
That is the floor on our Operating engagements. It rises to a day a week and beyond when a client is pushing on a reset, and eases back when the rhythm is holding. Clients review it quarterly.
A weekly rhythm with the leadership team
You work with the founder, the leadership team and the commercial function. You find where the growth is, review the insights coming through, bring your experience to bear on them, and help the team make better decisions about winning and growing customers.
The breadth you bring
Most of our architects are already operating inside one or two other businesses on a fractional basis. That range is part of what our clients are buying, and we build your portfolio around it with you.
What you build with a client is available to them and their team around the clock, in the commercial brain and from the AI tools they already use. Your thinking reaches the people executing on a Wednesday afternoon, keeps working between your days, and is still there for the next architect.
What you get.
- We find the clients, and we match them to you. We source the business, qualify it and agree the engagement. We place each one against what you are strongest at and what that company actually needs, so your hours go on work you are good at and want.
- Premium rates. We pay at the top of the market for senior fractional work. Engagements are bought in blocks, starting at half a day a week per client and scaling with what that client needs.
- They have already bought in. A client came to us for senior judgement and a structure to hold it. You arrive expected and briefed, into a business that has decided it wants this.
- The picture, already assembled. You walk into a session knowing what moved since the last one, because the platform has been keeping the picture current while you were elsewhere.
- A method to work from. A structure covering the whole commercial picture, so every part of it gets looked at. Yours to apply, and yours to sharpen.
- Work that compounds. What you set in the first quarter is still there in the fourth, current, and being used by the client’s team. You build on it.
- Colleagues at the same level. Operators with the same background as you, and a standing habit of putting the difficult calls in front of each other.
What we do, and who we do it for.
Liffey helps businesses make better commercial decisions, so they win and grow more customers.
Every company knows things about how it wins. Which buyers are worth most, what the price should be, why the last deal landed. That knowledge usually lives in a few people, and the rest of the team works from a version they half remember.
We put a senior commercial architect inside the business. An operator who has run a commercial team before, working alongside the client’s team to define the strategy and then execute it with them.
They work from a method that covers the whole commercial picture: the value only that company can deliver, the buyers it is worth most to, how it reaches them, and what happens after the win.
And it is all held in a commercial brain, kept current from the systems the business already runs, answering questions in plain English with the evidence attached, reachable by everyone who has to make a call.
Judgement, method and knowledge together, on the one question that decides revenue. That is commercial intelligence.
For twenty years I’ve worked in commercial seats in companies from scale-up to PLC, lining up the systems, the processes and the people behind a strategy.
The same thing happened everywhere. The strategy would be good, and then it would fade. The document sat unread, the team drifted, and what one person had worked out stayed with that person. Engineering solved this decades ago with their repos. Commercial teams have been waiting for their equivalent.
Liffey is that equivalent, and commercial intelligence is the category we are building. What I want is a business where the thinking is written down, kept current, and applied by people who have actually run something.
Let’s talk.
Complete this short form and we will set up a conversation.
Want to understand the work first? How an engagement runs and the method are the two pages worth your time.