January 23, 2026
Author: Jason Faber
Last August, a potential client reached out to me on LinkedIn looking for a Growth Advisor.
He’d recently stepped into a senior leadership role at an existing business, more of a “head of” role than a founder role. He wasn’t a marketer by trade, but marketing now rolled up to him. Growth was his responsibility, and he was doing the right thing: asking for help.
SEO came up early in the conversation. It usually does.
After a 60-minute call, I told him something most SEO consultants wouldn’t:
SEO wasn’t what he needed. And I wasn’t the right hire—at least not yet.
A few months later, he came back and hired me to do SEO.
This isn’t a story about luck or clever selling. It’s a story about timing, restraint, and what it actually means to sell value as a fractional leader.
When someone books an intro call, there’s an unspoken pressure to convert.
You feel it:
The problem is that this assumes the problem they think they have is the one that actually matters. Often, it’s not.
In this case, the founder came in asking about growth. SEO felt like a logical place to look. Traffic wasn’t where they wanted it to be, and the blog had been on their mind for a while.
But as we talked, it became clear that SEO wasn’t the constraint.
The product itself needed attention, specifically onboarding and activation.
Users weren’t getting to value quickly enough. That meant retention was fragile, and any improvements to acquisition would likely leak out the bottom of the funnel. They were also in the early planning stages up updating their brand identity and revamping their entire marketing team, with a new website coming in 2026.
Investing in SEO at that point would have created activity, not progress.
This is a pattern I see often. SEO is visible, measurable, and easy to blame when growth slows. But it’s rarely the first domino that needs to fall.
So instead of pitching SEO, we spent the call talking about:
At the end of the call, I told him plainly:
SEO wasn’t the right investment right now.
I also did something else that matters.
I recommended another fractional leader—someone who specialized in product onboarding and activation—who would be a much better fit for what the business needed at that moment.
He hired them.
I didn’t send a proposal. I didn’t try to wedge myself in. We stayed loosely connected, exchanged the occasional Slack message, and moved on.
Over the next couple of months, we stayed in touch in small ways. He’d reach out to ask a quick question. We’d bounce an idea. Nothing formal.
At one point, he said something like: “I know there’s a lot of value you could offer, but I don’t really need an SEO retainer or a big project right now. But I want to work with you more closely."
He was right. And trying to force one would have helped neither of us. So we waited.
What did make sense at that stage was flexibility.
So instead of proposing a retainer or a defined project, I suggested a prepaid block of consulting hours—a flat fee upfront for 10 hours he could use as needed.
Now, I don't typically charge hourly, but this idea of a block of hours came from another fractional consultant who recommended it to me.
Low commitment. High leverage.
This worked incredibly well for both of us.
He was in the middle of a brand refresh, shifting their focus on their target ICP, and an upcoming website redesign. He was trying to re-hire the right growth and marketing team. He still had SEO in the back of his brain. Having access to senior growth perspective during that process, without overcommitting, was exactly what he needed.
Most of his hours were spent on advisory calls or back and forth conversations on Slack around "should I hire a growth person or a product marketing person first?" and "should I keep my help center on a subdomain or move it to a subfolder?".
Simple work for me. There was no prep, no hours of deep research, no heavy weight strategy documents. Just access, conversation and advice.
And for me, it meant staying close enough to understand the business as it evolved, without forcing scope where it didn’t belong.
As we approached the new year, the situation changed.
The product was stronger. Onboarding and activation had improved. Positioning was clearer. A better, more effective team was in place. A new website was in the works.
Now the blog and content strategy mattered in a very real way.
SEO was no longer a distraction. It was becoming an important and immediate area of focus.
That's when he hit a tipping point.
He came back and asked what an ideal engagement would look like. We had a few discussions with led to me presenting him with a proposal.
What followed was:
This time, the work made sense. The timing was right. The trust and working relationship was already there.
Hiring me was a no-brainer.
The reason this worked wasn’t clever positioning or patience for patience’s sake.
It was restraint. I didn’t force SEO on him. I treated the intro call like a consulting call, not a sales pitch. I put his goals ahead of my services.
Trust was built first. Traction came next. Then a formal engagement followed.
This is something that’s easy to say and hard to practice, especially when you’re running a services business.
This is the part of fractional consulting that doesn’t show up in playbooks or LinkedIn threads.
Not every lead needs you. Not every lead needs you yet.
The job isn’t always to sell your services. It’s to help leaders make the right decision for their business, even when that decision points away from you.
When you do that consistently:
Fractional leadership isn’t about being everywhere. It’s about being useful at the right moment.
Selling value doesn’t mean convincing someone to buy what you offer. It means helping them see clearly.
Sometimes that clarity leads to immediate work. Sometimes it leads to a referral. Sometimes it leads to nothing at all—and that’s okay.
But when the timing does align, the work starts from a place of trust, respect, and shared context. That’s the long game. And in my experience, it’s the only one worth playing.
