A financial adviser I met last April had been in practice twenty-five years and had never done any marketing at all. Ninety per cent of his work came from referrals, mostly from mortgage brokers who sent him the insurance cases they didn't want to write. His website had been set up six or seven years earlier and not touched since. Social posts appeared on his accounts automatically, produced by his licensee, and he told me plainly he had never read them.
By every diagnostic I would normally run, that business was a mess.
He was also right. He didn't need marketing, and I told him so. His actual constraint was that he had taken on more work in a month than he would usually take in a quarter, and the thing standing between him and more revenue was not awareness. It was that he was doing his own admin. Hire the admin person, I said. Come back to me later.
I want to be honest about why that answer is more interesting than it looks, because the reason he'll need me later is the same reason most founders ask this question at the wrong moment.
The trigger isn't revenue
Almost everyone asks "when should I hire a CMO" as a revenue question. At what turnover does this make sense. There is a number people are hoping to hear, and every article obliges with one.
I can't give you that number honestly. No Australian survey publishes the revenue level at which businesses appoint marketing leadership. The figures you'll see quoted are either American, or a consultant's rule of thumb dressed as a benchmark. Revenue tells you what you can afford. It tells you nothing about what you need.
The real trigger is fixed cost that has to be fed.
Watch what happens to the adviser. Today his pipeline arrives from other people's referrals, which costs him nothing and which he does not control. His overheads are low enough that a quiet quarter is an inconvenience. The moment he hires an admin person, he has a wage to pay every month whether the referrals come or not. He now needs pipeline he can predict, and predictable pipeline is the only thing marketing actually sells.
That is not a revenue threshold. A business turning over eight million with no fixed costs and a full order book needs marketing leadership less than a business turning over two million that just signed a lease and hired three people.
Ask yourself what you have committed to that has to be paid for regardless. That is the number that decides this.
What a CMO is actually for
Marketing leadership is not the same as marketing. This is where most of the money gets wasted.
You need someone doing marketing when nobody is producing anything. You need someone leading marketing when there are enough moving parts that the parts have started to contradict each other. Different question, different hire, and the second one is far more expensive to get wrong.
The clearest description I've found is a borrowed one. Most business owners have heard of a virtual CFO by now: senior financial thinking, bought by the day rather than the year, because a business of thirty people needs the judgement without needing the headcount. Marketing leadership works the same way, and for the same reason.
Here is the distinction that matters in practice.
| What you're short of | What that actually is | What to buy |
|---|---|---|
| Nobody is making anything | Production capacity | A doer, in-house or agency |
| Things get made but nothing connects | Direction | Marketing leadership |
| You can't tell what's working | Measurement and strategy | Marketing leadership |
| The team is busy and underperforming | Management | An employed manager, present daily |
| You have no idea what to spend money on | Diagnosis | Strategy, before any hire |
Most founders who tell me they need a CMO are in row three. They can feel that the money is going somewhere and can't trace it to anything. That is a genuine problem and it is almost never solved by employing an executive.
The readiness test
Answer these honestly. You don't need me for any of them.
What it costs to get this wrong
If you did say yes, the numbers deserve a straight answer before you go further.
Hays puts a chief marketing officer at $300,000 typically across Australia, with a range from $280,000 to $400,000, and a marketing director in Melbourne at around $205,000. Those are base salaries and exclude superannuation.
The loaded cost is less brutal than the internet suggests, and worth building yourself rather than accepting a multiplier.
The cost of getting it wrong is harder to size. Robert Half found that a bad hire costs an employer fifteen to twenty-one per cent of that person's salary, which on a $300,000 executive is $45,000 to $63,000. Two things about that figure: it is five years old, and it was published by a recruitment firm, which has an obvious interest in the number being large. The much bigger figures in circulation, the ones claiming a hundred and fifty per cent of first-year salary, could not be traced to any primary study, so I'm leaving them out.
There is one more number worth sitting with.
The sequence that works
When a full-time hire genuinely is the answer but the timing isn't, the order is fractional first, employed second.
Not because I sell the first one. Because it produces the thing you'd otherwise be hiring without: a strategy, a role description built from it, a scorecard, and evidence that the role is needed at all. Then you hire against something instead of against a hunch. Measure twice, cut once.
I'll put my own incentive on the table. I would rather run a three-week diagnostic and tell you to hire someone permanent than take a monthly fee for eighteen months holding a seat you should have filled. The adviser is a version of the same thing: I could have sold him a Sprint that day, and it would have sat in a drawer while he drowned in paperwork.
Two honest limits
I've argued that fixed cost is the trigger rather than revenue, and that's a position rather than a finding. It comes from twenty years of watching which businesses got value from marketing leadership and which ones bought it too early. Nobody has surveyed this properly in Australia, and if someone does and contradicts me, believe them over me.
And if you've read this and concluded you're ready, you may well be right and you may not need me to confirm it. A good recruiter and a clear brief will serve you better than a consultant with an opinion. The version of this that goes wrong is the one where the brief doesn't exist yet, because then you're not hiring a CMO. You're hiring someone to work out what you want, which is a different job at a different price.
If you're somewhere in the middle and want a second read on it, bring me what you've got and I'll tell you which of the questions above you're actually failing.
Sources
- Hays, Salary Guide FY26/27, 2026. Base salaries, excluding superannuation.
- Australian Taxation Office, How much super to pay, updated 25 February 2026.
- State Revenue Office Victoria, Payroll tax current rates, updated 10 July 2026.
- Robert Half Australia, The rising costs of a bad hire, 2 August 2021. Published by a recruitment firm.
- Spencer Stuart, CMO Tenure 2026, January 2026. US, S&P 500.