# Fractional Head of Growth | Yaniv Goldenberg

> Source: https://yanivgoldenberg.com/fractional-head-of-growth/
> Updated: 2026-09-01T09:55:19+00:00
> Summary: Fractional Head of Growth for B2B startups, building the acquisition, activation, and retention engine without a full-time hire. Book a growth audit.

Traffic in, revenue out.

# Fractional Head of Growth

AI-native fractional operator. A definition, a comparison vs alternatives (Fractional CMO, growth agency, full-time hire), and the engagement model Yaniv uses with post-PMF B2B SaaS, B2C, and e-commerce companies.

[Book a 15-min call](https://wa.me/972524302822)[Contact](/contact/)

By **Yaniv Goldenberg**, Fractional CMO/CGO. Scaled Elementor $200K to $20M ARR.

Elementor

100*x*

$200K to $20M ARR as acquisition lead, 2018-2020

Riverside

*+*337%

MRR growth driven as a growth operator

Across engagements

$100M*+*

ad budgets managed across paid social and search

## What a fractional head of growth actually does

A fractional head of growth runs your entire growth function on a part-time engagement. I own the funnel from first click to paid revenue. Not a channel. Not a campaign. The whole system. That means acquisition, activation, conversion, and retention all sit under one operator who reports against revenue, not vanity metrics. You get senior growth leadership without the full-time salary, equity, and ramp time of a VP hire.

A consultant hands you a deck and leaves. A fractional head of growth owns execution.Most companies hire a fractional head of growth at one of two moments. Either traffic is climbing but revenue is flat, or paid spend is rising while the return per dollar keeps shrinking. Both problems live in the funnel, not the ad account. I came up running growth inside fast-scaling software companies. I took Elementor to 100x ARR and drove Riverside +337% MRR by fixing the path from sign-up to paid, not by buying more clicks.

How the engagement runs

Week one is a diagnostic: I map your full funnel against live data and find where intent leaks. Then I build the operating system, weekly metrics and one source of truth, and work directly with your team rather than around it.

The work starts with a diagnostic. Before I touch a single budget line, I map your full funnel against your actual data: analytics, the billing system, and the source of truth for revenue. I find the steps where intent leaks out. A landing page that converts visitors but loses them at sign-up. An onboarding flow that activates 20% when it should activate 50%. A pricing page that buries the plan most buyers want. These are the leaks a fractional head of growth is paid to find and seal.

Then I build the operating system. Weekly growth metrics, one source of truth, and a prioritized backlog scored by impact and effort. Every test ships with a hypothesis and a number it has to move. I run the experiments, read the results, kill what loses, and double down on what wins. Having managed $100M+ in budgets across paid channels, I know which levers move revenue and which ones only move dashboards. A good fractional head of growth says no to nine ideas so the tenth gets real resources.

I work directly with your team, not around it. Your engineers, designers, and marketers stay in the loop because growth that depends on one outside operator collapses the day the engagement ends. I install the cadence, the metrics, and the decision framework so the system keeps running. The goal of a fractional head of growth is to leave you with a growth engine, not a dependency. For context on how product-led companies measure this, the [OpenView guide to product-led growth](https://openviewpartners.com/blog/product-led-growth/) maps the same funnel stages I instrument.

Engagements run monthly. Most clients start with a four-week diagnostic so we both see the funnel before committing to a longer build. You get a senior operator who has done this inside companies that scaled, a clear plan tied to revenue, and weekly proof that the numbers are moving. If you want a fractional head of growth who treats your funnel like a P&L and not a slide deck, that is exactly how I work. From traffic to revenue, owned end to end.

### Related

- [fractional cmo guide](https://yanivgoldenberg.com/fractional-cmo-guide/)
- [growth guides playbooks](https://yanivgoldenberg.com/guides/)
- [growth consulting specialties](https://yanivgoldenberg.com/consulting/)
- [growth marketing services](https://yanivgoldenberg.com/services/)

### Frequently asked questions

**What is a fractional head of growth and how is it different from a consultant?**

A consultant hands you a deck and leaves. A fractional head of growth owns execution. I run your growth function part-time: acquisition, activation, conversion, and retention all report to me, and I am measured on revenue moved, not slides delivered. I work inside your team, ship tests weekly, and stay accountable to the numbers until the funnel improves.

**When should a company hire a fractional head of growth instead of a full-time VP?**

Hire fractional when you need senior growth leadership but cannot justify a full-time salary, equity, and a six-month ramp. It fits companies between $1M and $20M in revenue, post product-market-fit, with traffic that is not converting to revenue. You get a proven operator in weeks, not months, and you scale the engagement up or down as the work demands.

**How does a fractional head of growth measure success?**

Against revenue and the funnel steps that produce it. I set one source of truth, then track activation rate, conversion to paid, and retention every week. Each test ships with a hypothesis and a target number. If a change does not move a metric that ladders up to revenue, it gets killed. The scoreboard is the P&L, not impressions or reach.

**What does a fractional head of growth engagement actually look like month to month?**

Month one is a diagnostic: I map your full funnel against live data and find where intent leaks out. Month two onward I build the operating system, a prioritized test backlog scored by impact and effort, and run experiments weekly. You get a standing growth review, clear decisions, and a backlog that always shows what we are testing and why.

**Will hiring a fractional head of growth create a dependency on one outside person?**

No, that is a failure mode I design against. I install the metrics, cadence, and decision framework inside your team so the growth engine keeps running after the engagement ends. Your engineers, designers, and marketers stay in the loop on every test. The deliverable is a system your team owns, not a black box that collapses the day I leave.

TL;DR
A Fractional Head of Growth is a senior operator who joins your company part-time and owns the entire growth function end-to-end: acquisition, activation, retention, attribution, and the marketing data stack. They join the leadership cadence and are accountable for revenue, not deliverables.

The engagement is between an agency (single channel, deliverable-based) and a full-time CMO (six-figure salary, 6-12 month ramp). 4-5 hours/day per client, 1 client at a time, 6-12 month engagements.

## What "Fractional" Actually Means

Fractional means part-time, but at the same level of seniority, ownership, and accountability as a full-time hire. It is not "fewer hours of an agency" or "advisor on retainer." It is a senior operator embedded in your team, in your tools, and in your weekly leadership cadence, working the equivalent of one to two full days a week per client.

The model exists because mid-stage post-PMF companies need senior growth leadership before they can justify a $300K+ all-in CMO salary. The math works because senior operators can spread that level of seniority across 1 company without losing depth.

## Fractional Head of Growth vs Alternatives

OptionWhat you getCostTime to value

Marketing agencySingle-channel execution. Junior team. Bills against deliverables.$8K-$18K/moWeeks

Growth advisor2-4 hours per month of strategy. No execution. No accountability.$3K-$5K/moOne call

Fractional Head of GrowthSenior, embedded, owns the whole funnel. 4-5 hrs/day.$8K-$18K/mo2 weeks

Full-time CMOSenior, dedicated, owns the whole org. Hiring, team building.$300K-$500K/yr loaded3-6 mo recruit + 6-12 mo ramp

## Two Stages, Two Engagement Shapes

Same operator, different shape depending on stage.

### Stage 1: Pre-PMF / Earliest Post-PMF

Sub-$1M ARR. 4-10 person team. No marketing team yet. Hunting for the first 100/week signups, then 500/week. Hands-on operator who owns paid, content, SEO, GEO, lifecycle, and community in one head.

✓✓Funded AI / SaaS startups (seed or pre-Series A)

✓✓Founders who need a generalist operator, not a strategist

✓✓$8K-$18K/mo plus equity warrant or outcome bonus

### Stage 2: Post-PMF Scaling

$1M-$20M ARR. Existing marketing team. Senior leadership unblocking specific bottlenecks: paid acquisition at scale, GEO, attribution, retention, lifecycle.

✓✓Acquisition plateaued, need senior rebuild

✓✓Funnel leaking, need diagnostic + execution leader

✓✓$8K-$18K/mo retainer, 4-5 hrs/day average

What you actually get

## Engagement model: deliverables, cadence, and what transfers

A fractional Head of Growth engagement is scoped as a transfer, not a dependency. Here is what that means in practice.

01

### Days 1-14: Growth audit and channel map

Before strategy, a diagnosis. I read your analytics, talk to your sales team, trace where customers actually come from versus where you think they come from, and map every active channel against its real cost per acquisition. The output is a written gap map: where the leaks are, what the next experiment should be, and which channels are scaling noise. You keep this document regardless of what happens next.

02

### Month 1-3: First bets and measurement foundation

No channel runs without measurement. Before the first dollar of paid scales, the attribution layer is solid: server-side events, CRM integration, and a weekly reconciliation between ad platform and pipeline data. Then the first channel bets run: typically Google, then LinkedIn, with the sequence determined by ICP and deal size, not by what is popular.

03

### Month 3-6: Scale what works, kill what does not

With 60 days of data from controlled experiments, the picture of unit economics becomes clear. This is when the decisions get made: which channel earns more budget, which ICP segment closes fastest, where outbound should focus. The decisions are data-backed and written down so your team can make the next round of them without me in the room.

04

### Handover: the engine runs without me

The goal of every engagement is that my fingerprints are in your process documentation, not your Slack. By month 6, your team should be able to run the weekly channel review, the monthly attribution reconciliation, and the experiment log without a call with me. If they cannot, the engagement has not done its job. The Elementor growth engine ran for years after I left. That is the standard.

**What I own:** the pipeline number. Not a deliverable list, not a strategy deck. If the pipeline does not move, the engagement is not working, and I would rather that conversation happen at week six than month twelve.

**Capacity:** I run a small number of concurrent engagements. The fractional model only works if the growth head is actually present, not spread thin. If I am full, I will tell you directly.

## When It's the Wrong Hire

•Pre-product startup still searching for ICP (no PMF, no funding)

•Want only paid media management or single-channel work (hire an agency)

•Want a brand strategy deck (hire a brand consultant)

•Enterprise sales motion with $100K+ ACVs (different operator profile)

## Hard Prerequisite: Tracking

**If you can't measure it, Yaniv won't run it.**

Mixpanel/Amplitude/Segment, Stripe, server-side conversion tracking: either connected before week 1, or connected during week 1. No exceptions.

Fractional retainers get wasted in one of two ways: bad strategy, or great strategy on broken measurement. The second is more common. We fix the measurement layer first, every time.

## The AI-Native Operating Stack

Yaniv runs the same infrastructure he installs in client businesses.

Most fractional CMOs talk about AI. Yaniv lives it. 80% of his day runs on his VPS with Claude Code as the primary tool. Coolify manages 40+ applications on subdomains. n8n runs the marketing automation. Everything is connected to Telegram for real-time signal. The same stack he would install in your business if you asked.

The advantage compounds. Where most operators launch one A/B test per week, Yaniv launches ten. AI doesn't replace operator judgment; it removes the bottleneck on operator throughput.

## How Yaniv Sequences Channels

Most CMOs run channels. Operators sequence them.

Step 1

### Google Ads first

Search intent is the cleanest buy signal in marketing. Lowest CAC, fastest learning. Build from search up.

Step 2

### LinkedIn second

Once Google reveals which personas convert, LinkedIn targets them with surgical precision. Expensive clicks, qualified users.

Step 3

### Meta + Reddit + TikTok at 50+ signups/week

Below 50/week you're feeding noise. Above 50/week the platform AI starts to work. Volume unlocks algorithmic optimization.

Step 4

### Influencers when the math works

The right creator can 5x conversion. Most don't. Test, double down, or cut. This is a default, not a template. The work is knowing when to break it.

## Frequently Asked Questions

What's the difference between a Fractional Head of Growth and a Fractional CMO?Fractional CMO is a title. Fractional Head of Growth describes the scope: end-to-end ownership of the growth function, not just marketing strategy. A fractional CMO might give you a strategy deck. A fractional head of growth lives in your Mixpanel, runs your ads, writes your emails, and is accountable for revenue metrics. Yaniv does both, but the engagement is operator-shaped, not consultant-shaped.

How much time do you spend per client?4-5 hours per day on average, up to 9 during intensive periods. 1 client at a time. This isn't advisory, it's embedded operation. You'll see me in your Slack, your analytics, your weekly leadership meeting.

What's the minimum engagement length?6 months. Growth compounds. A 3-month engagement is too short to build systems that outlast the engagement. If after 3 months we're not seeing measurable progress, I'll tell you.

Do you manage a team or work solo?Both. I operate directly (ads, analytics, content strategy, technical implementation) and lead existing marketing team members. I don't bring a sub-team. I work with what you have and hire when the data says to hire.

What industries do you work with?B2B SaaS, B2C subscription products, and e-commerce. Post-PMF. The common thread is measurable growth with a digital acquisition model. If your sales cycle is 12+ months with $100K+ ACVs, a different operator profile fits better.

Taking 1 new client for Q3 2026

## Ready for Senior Growth Leadership?

15 minutes to see if the fit is right. No decks. No proposals. Just a conversation about your growth bottleneck.

[Book a 15-Min Call](https://calendar.app.google/NWiBW1eV61zza4ZD6)

Not ready for a fractional hire? The cheaper end of the senior-guidance market is mapped honestly on the [marketing mentor](/marketing-mentor/) page, including when a $50 marketplace beats hiring anyone.

Next step

## Let's turn this into measurable revenue

Book a 15-min call. I will tell you whether this is your next move, or whether your money is better spent elsewhere.

[Book a 15-min call](https://wa.me/972524302822)[Contact](/contact/)

Hiring for this role? Demand the three proofs first: the [growth marketing expert bar](/growth-marketing-expert/) filters out the growth-flavored resumes.