What it costs and why it makes sense.
Think of marketing like a budget line that compounds, not a monthly expense that disappears.
Most builders treat marketing as a cost. Something goes out every month, and you hope it comes back. The problem isn't the spending. It's the lack of direction, measurement, and strategy connecting the spend to signed contracts. Without that, every dollar feels like a gamble.
The goal isn't to spend more on marketing. It's to make what you spend work harder, and to know whether it's working at all. That's what this investment buys: direction, clarity, and a growth engine that gets better over time instead of restarting from zero every quarter.
How to think about ROI and payback
If you're a builder around $10M/year, marketing is no longer a side expense. It affects backlog quality, sales velocity, and how predictable your next quarter feels.
A better question than "What should we spend?" is "What needs to happen for this to pay back?" For many builders, one additional right-fit project every quarter can cover a large share of the annual marketing investment.
My management fee is the leadership layer: strategy, priorities, measurement, and vendor direction. Execution spend stays flexible, so you can put more behind what works and cut what doesn't.
Use the ranges below as a planning baseline, then adjust based on pipeline quality, close rates, and actual payback in your business.
| Marchitect (advisor) | Design-Build (fractional CMO) | |
|---|---|---|
| Management fee | Starting at $2,500/mo | Starting at $5,000/mo |
| Typical monthly investment | $7,000–$15,000/mo | $12,500–$30,500/mo |
| Execution budget you control | $4,500–$12,500/mo | $7,500–$25,500/mo |
| Initial term | 6 months | 6 months |
| After initial term | Monthly continuation | Monthly continuation |
For high-intensity stretches — a market launch, a major repositioning, or a compressed timeline — management fees can go up to $7,000/mo for up to 3 months, then scale back as pace normalizes. If you want outside context, see NAHB’s Cost of Doing Business Study and The CMO Survey; benchmarks vary, so we plan around your numbers and payback timeline.
Marchitect (advisor) — starting at $2,500/mo
I provide the strategy, priorities, and feedback. Your team handles execution. We meet regularly, and you have access to me between calls for questions, vendor reviews, and decisions as they come up. I reply within 24 hours, usually faster during business hours.
This is a good fit if:
- — You have someone in-house who can manage day-to-day marketing tasks.
- — You need senior direction, not another pair of hands.
- — You want a marketing director available to your business without the full-time cost.
Design-Build (fractional CMO) — starting at $5,000/mo
Everything in Marchitect, plus I manage the moving parts. I work directly with your team and vendors, keep projects organized, handle quality control, and own the marketing problem so the owner doesn't have to carry it. Your full team has access to me.
This is a good fit if:
- — Marketing decisions still land on the owner's desk and you want to hand that off.
- — You need someone to manage the projects and the specialists from end to end.
- — You want one person who sees the whole picture and keeps everything moving.
Custom projects
Not everything requires a monthly engagement. Custom projects have a clear scope, a start, and a finish.
| Project type | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Strategy call | $549 |
| Marketing audit and roadmap | $3,000–$7,000 |
| Positioning and messaging | $3,000–$6,000 |
| Website launch oversight | $4,000–$10,000 |
| Lead follow-up and intake redesign | $3,000–$7,000 |
| RevOps strategy | $4,000–$8,000 |
| AI automation and integration | $2,000–$8,000 |
| Vendor evaluation and hiring | $2,000–$5,000 |
These ranges include my time. If specialists are needed, those costs are separate, scoped in advance, and typically less than what an agency would charge for the same work — with more personalized results.
Learn more about custom projects →
Management fee vs. execution budget
This is an important distinction that most builders don't see clearly until someone explains it.
My fee covers direction and management.
Strategy, planning, measurement, vendor coordination, quality control, and the thinking that makes everything else work. This stays consistent month to month so oversight doesn't fluctuate with spend.
Execution costs are separate and flexible.
Ad spend, content production, SEO, web development, video, freelancer hours. You pay these vendors directly and keep those relationships. I help you choose who to hire, brief them well, and make sure the work ties back to the strategy.
Why this matters.
Most agencies bundle management and execution into one opaque fee. You can't see what you're paying for strategy versus what's going to ad spend or production. With this model, you see exactly where every dollar goes, and you control the execution budget based on results.
My fee plus the specialists I bring in typically costs less than a comparable agency engagement — with the added advantage that I'm on your side of the table, not theirs. I don't mark up vendor fees or take commissions.
Is it worth the investment?
Here's one way to think about it.
If you're a remodeler averaging $120k per project, and working together helps you sign one additional qualified project per quarter that you would have otherwise missed or lost to poor follow-up, that's $480k in new annual revenue. At 15% margins, that's $72k in profit against a management fee of $30k to $60k per year.
That's before factoring in the compounding effect: better measurement means smarter spend, tighter qualification means less wasted precon, and clearer positioning means the projects that come in are more likely to be profitable.
For custom builders, the math scales further. One additional custom home per year can represent $50k to $150k or more in gross profit.
The cost of not having direction is harder to measure but just as real: the money spent on channels that aren't tracked, the agency fees that can't be tied to results, the leads that leak out of a broken intake process, and the owner's time spent managing something that should be running on its own.
How this compares
vs. a full-time CMO hire.
A full-time marketing director or CMO costs $120k to $200k+ in salary and benefits. At the Design-Build level, you're investing roughly $60k to $84k per year for senior-level marketing leadership. The savings gives you budget to build a flexible team of specialists around you instead of locking that money into one salary.
vs. an agency.
Most agencies charge $5k to $15k per month and up for a bundle of services where it's hard to see what you're paying for. You don't own the accounts, the strategy lives in their heads, and when you leave, you start over. With this model, you keep everything — your accounts, your data, your vendor relationships, your strategy documents. And you get someone whose job is to make your marketing better, not to sell you more agency hours.
vs. doing it yourself.
Every month the owner spends managing marketing without clear direction is a month of experimentation and learning that could have been avoided. The real cost isn't the marketing budget — it's the time it takes to figure out what works, the mistakes along the way, and the opportunity cost of not having that time back for the things only you can do.
Guarantee
If we're not a good fit after the first 30 days, I'll refund my entire fee. No questions.
