You Don’t Need a CMO. You Need a Day a Week.

Why so many food and ingredients businesses are hiring a full-time leader when what they want is the right person, one day a week.

A founder called me last year, sure of what he wanted. “Mike, we need a chief marketing officer.”

So we talked it through. He had a sharp copywriting team. He had people who could run a campaign once someone aimed them at the right target. What he was missing was anyone to set the direction and keep them honest.

He didn’t need a chief marketing officer. He needed someone good in the room a day a week, steering the people he already had.

A full-time CMO would have cost him a fortune by the time you tallied salary, bonus and the rest, and there wasn’t the work to fill the week. He’d have paid top money to watch a senior person hunt for things to do.

I’ve had a version of that conversation many times over the past year, in the UK and across the US. And it points to something changing in how food and ingredients businesses build the top of the house.

The stopgap that became a strategy

The fractional executive used to be a sticking plaster. Someone went on maternity leave, or a director walked, and you brought in a pair of hands to hold things together until the real hire arrived.

That’s shifted. More businesses now use fractional and advisory leaders on purpose. A marketing director who comes in two days a week, sets the plan, and lets the team run it. A finance leader who sits with the management accountant once a month, says what needs to happen, and checks it landed next time. The expertise, without the full-time salary.

A few things have pushed it along. The hiring market in 2026 is cautious, and I’ll come to why. Costs are up everywhere, so a senior salary you can swerve is a senior salary you swerve. And there’s a wave of people who spent their careers inside the big ingredients houses, took early retirement, enjoyed three months of golf, then went looking for something to get their teeth into. That group is a gift to a smaller business. Decades of judgement, a day a week, with no urge to build an empire.

I’ve watched it work in places you might not expect. Not only early-stage scale-ups, but firms twenty-five years old who worked out they can buy direction at the top and keep the doing further down.

Top-heavy and out of road

The model works. The way founders set it up often doesn’t.

The trap I see most sits in early-stage businesses with investors who want a marquee name in every C-suite seat. The belief is that you can’t raise the next round without a full executive team on the slide. So the founder hires ahead of the revenue, the cost base swells, the runway shrinks, and now those same investors are nervous about the burn rate they pushed for.

The order is backwards. In this industry the sales cycle runs twelve, eighteen, sometimes twenty-four months. You don’t meet a buyer on Monday and ship a pallet on Wednesday. So a founder can fill the boardroom, watch the run rate climb, and still sit a year short of the revenue that was meant to pay for it all. Fewer generals and more boots on the ground serves a fifteen-person company better than a crowded top table.

The second trap is quieter, and it ends more of these arrangements than cost ever does. Founder and hire turn out to want two different things from the same seat.

The doer and the wise owl

Two very different people both answer to the word “advisor,” and mixing them up is where it falls apart.

One rolls up their sleeves. Builds the commercial plan. Sits with the team. Leaves something behind that wasn’t there when they arrived.

The other comes to share their wisdom. A long, senior career behind them, they’ve seen it all, and they’ll tell you about it over a coffee. Real value in that, in the right seat. It isn’t the same as doing the job.

The damage starts when a founder wants the first and hires the second. The founder expects a worker. The retired executive expects to counsel from the side and then drift off until next month. Both mean well. Nobody set the terms at the start, so six months in they’re both quietly let down and neither can say quite why.

The repair is dull and it works. Agree, before anyone starts, what the day a week is for. A worker, or a wise owl? What do they own? How hands-on do you want them on a wet Tuesday when a customer pulls a forecast? The straighter you answer that up front, the better the odds it holds.

If you’re writing the cheque

Back the business rather than run it, and the same gap shows up from your side of the table.

I’ve sat with founders who closed a round and went straight to filling the org chart with full-time C-suite hires, because they thought that was what the money was for. Often the better use of that cash is one experienced advisor on the board and the team kept lean beneath, until revenue earns the next appointment. I watched one business put a seasoned ingredients finance leader on its board a day or two a month, instead of recruiting the full-time CFO it didn’t yet need. The founder got the judgement, kept the cash, and the advisor was straight enough to say it out loud: you’ll want a full-time CFO one day, just not this one.

That straightness is the whole point. The right fractional leader tells you when you’ve outgrown them. The wrong full-time hire, made too soon, drains the runway while everyone hopes the revenue turns up in time.

Questions worth putting on the table

If you’re weighing a senior hire this year, a few questions are worth sitting with before anyone writes a job spec.

Have you got a week’s worth of work, or a day’s?

If it’s a day’s, a full-time hire spends the other four justifying the salary, and you’ll both feel it by month three.

Do you want someone to do the work, or to steer people who can?

A team that can deliver but lacks direction wants a steer. A team that can’t deliver wants hands. Different problems, different hires, and a costly mistake to confuse them.

Could you write down what good looks like from this person in ninety days?

If you can’t, you’re not ready to bring anyone in, fractional or full-time. The clarity is the first job. The hire is the second.

Before you write that job spec

The cautious market won’t hold forever. The change in how founders think about leadership might outlast it. Once a founder has felt what senior judgement a day a week does for the business, the old reflex to hire a whole C-suite starts to look expensive.

Full-time leaders aren’t finished. Plenty of seats need someone there every day, owning it, living with what they decide. The skill is telling those seats apart from the ones that don’t, and being honest about which your business needs this year rather than which looks impressive on a funding deck.

So before you write that next senior spec, ask whether you need a full-time hire at all. Or whether what you want is the right person, a day a week, and the discipline to be clear about what you’re asking of them.

Get that right and it’s one of the cheaper good decisions you’ll make all year.

Before you write the next senior job spec, be honest about what the business actually needs.

Full-time leadership, fractional expertise, advisory support, or simply more clarity around the team you already have?

Getting that decision right can save money, protect runway, and stop the business becoming top-heavy before the revenue is there.

If you’re considering a senior appointment in food, ingredients, nutrition, or food tech and want to think it through properly, feel free to drop me a DM.

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This is part of my “Behind the Scenes” series, where I share what I’m picking up from conversations with the leaders, founders and operators shaping the future of food. If something here landed, I’d like to hear how you’re seeing it.

Mike Meyrick is Founder and CEO of Meyrick Consulting, an international executive search firm operating across the food and food ingredients sector.