Fractional CMO for Melbourne: senior marketing leadership, minus the executive salary.
Melbourne businesses hire Z10 for the same reason Sydney ones do: a senior marketing leader who owns the strategy, the budget and the number, from A$3,500 a month. The engagement runs remote-first, in your timezone, and never requires a trip to our Sydney office.
What a fractional CMO owns.
A fractional CMO is a senior marketing leader who runs your strategy and your team for a set number of hours each month. You get the judgement of an executive who has done the job for decades, priced for a business that cannot yet justify the full-time version.
The ownership is the point. A freelancer executes tasks. An agency runs a channel. A fractional CMO owns the annual plan, the quarterly roadmap, the budget, and the number the board asks about, then leads the marketers and agencies you already pay to hit it.
Three things change in the first quarter. Strategy moves out of the gaps between campaigns and into a written plan the business holds itself to. Performance gets judged against revenue, and your existing team gains a coach who lifts the standard of every decision the function makes. The full model, and everything that sits inside an engagement, is on our main fractional CMO services page. Still weighing the model itself? The fractional CMO vs agency vs in-house comparison puts the three options side by side.
How we work with Melbourne clients.
Z10 operates from 11 York Street in Sydney. There is no Melbourne office. The model was built for distributed work from the start, because our clients' teams and agencies were never in one building to begin with.
An engagement runs on a fixed rhythm: a weekly leadership meeting on video, a standing session with your marketing team, async reviews of campaigns and reporting through the week, and a quarterly strategy deep dive. When the work needs a room, for quarterly planning, a board presentation or a team workshop, we fly down. Sydney to Melbourne is 90 minutes in the air, and the travel cadence is agreed up front as part of the engagement.
Melbourne and Sydney share a clock all year, daylight saving included. A question sent at 9am gets handled inside the same business day, campaign reviews land before your team starts the next sprint, and there is no timezone gap to plan around. At no point does the engagement require you or your team to visit Sydney.
Who this is for in Melbourne.
We work with Melbourne SMEs and startups between roughly $2M and $50M in revenue: SaaS and tech businesses, fintechs, and professional services firms where senior marketing direction is the missing piece.
Founders past product-market fit
The product sells and revenue has arrived, but growth has slowed and nobody senior owns the plan to restart it.
Teams without a marketing leader
Capable marketers or agencies are executing in Melbourne without a strategy above them, and the results show it.
Businesses preparing to raise or scale
A raise, a new market or an interstate expansion, where one wrong strategic call costs more than a year of fractional fees.
Not ready for a full-time CMO
A full-time CMO in Melbourne runs well past A$250,000 a year once superannuation and equity are counted. You need the seniority sooner than you can justify that.
Pricing for Melbourne engagements.
Engagements start at A$3,500 a month for 20 hours of senior marketing leadership, the same fee whether you are in Melbourne, Sydney or anywhere between. Hours scale up as the business needs more leadership time, and scale back down once the systems are running.
Set that against the alternative. A full-time CMO costs A$250,000 to A$400,000 a year once salary, superannuation and equity are counted, plus the three to six months it takes to hire one. The full market breakdown, including what moves the fee, is in our guide to what a fractional CMO costs in Australia.
Numbers from named engagements.
The figures above come from documented client work. We grew ezyCollect, a B2B SaaS business, from A$3.5M to A$9.2M ARR while cutting cost per acquisition by 84 percent and lifting sales-qualified leads 148 percent. We led marketing for Cohen Handler, a property buyer's agency, through the growth phase that took it from A$3M to A$12M in revenue. Both engagements are written up in full in our case studies.
Melbourne fractional CMO questions, answered.
Do you have an office in Melbourne?
No. Z10 is based at 11 York Street in Sydney. The engagement does not depend on where either of us sits: strategy, reporting and team leadership run over video and shared documents, and when a planning session or a board meeting needs everyone in a room, we fly down. Sydney to Melbourne is a 90 minute flight, and the travel cadence is agreed up front as part of the engagement.
How much does a fractional CMO cost in Melbourne?
Z10 engagements start at A$3,500 a month for 20 hours of senior marketing leadership, the same fee we charge Sydney clients. Across the wider market, published Australian fractional CMO pricing runs from about A$3,000 to A$18,000 a month depending on days per week and scope. The full breakdown is in our guide to what a fractional CMO costs in Australia.
How do meetings work if you are not in Melbourne?
On a fixed rhythm. A weekly leadership meeting on video, a standing session with your marketing team, async reviews of campaigns and reporting through the week, and a quarterly strategy deep dive that can run in person in Melbourne. Both cities sit on the same clock all year, daylight saving included, so there is no timezone gap and questions get same-day answers in business hours.
Can you lead a Melbourne team and local agencies?
Yes. Directing the people and partners you already pay is most of the job. We set the plan, tighten the briefs, and hold your marketers and agencies to numbers they have agreed to, whether they sit in Cremorne, the CBD or somewhere else entirely. You keep the relationships. What changes is that a senior operator owns the priorities and arbitrates the budget across them, so the function pulls in one direction. The numbers we hold them to are covered in what KPIs a fractional CMO should own.
What happens in the first 90 days?
Four stages: access and audit, a baseline the board can trust, a strategy and budget reset, then a live operating cadence by day 90. None of it requires a site visit, though we often schedule the first strategy session in person. The stage-by-stage detail is in the first 90 days.
Is remote marketing leadership as effective as someone in the building?
For the leadership layer, yes. The work that moves the number, which is strategy, budget allocation, measurement and coaching, happens in documents, dashboards and structured meetings, and none of it improves because the author is sitting nearby. If your growth model needs a senior marketer in the building every day, that is a full-time hire, and we will tell you so on the first call.
A CMO at the table in Melbourne, without the CMO salary.
A short consultation is enough to know whether the fit is right. If a fractional CMO is not the answer for where the business is now, we will say so.