How We Work
One Retainer. Two Stages of Intensity.
What The Engagement Costs
Phase 1
Diagnosis & Strategy
Customer interviews, fieldwork, and a full audit of your funnel, synthesized into a current-state journey map, a prioritized roadmap, and a dollar figure on exactly what’s leaking and where.
Phase 2
Ongoing Retainer
We execute against what Phase 1 found, running your marketing day to day, adjusting as the data updates. As the system matures and runs leaner, the goal is to cost you less, not more.
The Intensive Stage
Duration: Three months. Price: $12,000/month.
What you get
Full revenue system audit. ICP analysis. Current vs. Suggested State journey mapping with forecasted KPIs. Competitive assessment. RevOps baseline. Technical audit. Four working sessions with your leadership team, culminating in a prioritized strategic roadmap with financial projections on the top-priority initiatives.
What you walk out with
Not just findings. A prioritized, financially-modeled plan for the most important work, and the rest of the roadmap fully sequenced, waiting for us to work through in order.
The Ongoing Engagement
Every client’s ongoing retainer is set to the actual work their system requires. Most clients start their ongoing engagement closer to the top of our $5,000–$15,000/month range, we’re still building infrastructure, standing up channels, deploying AI, and the work is heavy.
As the system matures, we step that number down. Most clients land around $10,000. Some settle lower once everything is running smoothly. What you won’t see is a number that fluctuates month to month, the retainer is set, and when it changes, we tell you, we explain why, and we give you time to plan around it.
We don’t commit to a fixed timeline for the step-down because your business isn’t a fixed timeline. Sometimes the infrastructure is bigger than we anticipated. Sometimes it comes together faster. The retainer reflects the actual work, not a rate card.
What drives the number
- How much measurement infrastructure already exists vs. needs to be built.
- How many revenue streams we’re running.
- Whether the website needs optimization or a rebuild.
- How many channels we’re standing up or rebuilding.
- How complex your sales-to-marketing handoff is.
- How much AI infrastructure we’re deploying.
This is a revenue operating system, not a subscription. The investment reflects the value the system is producing, and we’re accountable to proving that every month.
Seafoam vs. the alternatives
Most mid-market companies buy some combination of CMO, RevOps, and execution capability. They rarely buy all three, and almost never from one team. The picture below shows why.
Every option except Seafoam leaves at least one function uncovered. Most leave two or three. Here’s how those options compare on the dimensions that actually move your P&L.
| What you’re buying | Seafoam | Full-time CMO + team | CMO + agency | Agency alone |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Strategy (CMO) | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Measurement (RevOps) | Yes | Rarely | Rarely | No |
| Execution | Yes | Hired separately | Yes (agency) | Yes |
| Ramp time | 3 months | 6-12 months | 6-12 months | Fast |
| Handoffs | None | Internal telephone | Vendor telephone | One function only |
| Annual investment | ~$120K | $360K-$560K | $270K-$430K | $36K-$96K |
The agency-alone option looks cheapest on paper. It’s also the one where nobody owns strategy, nobody owns measurement, and nobody is accountable to revenue, which is why it’s the option most of our clients were using when they came to us.
The honest math
A full-time CMO costs $210,000–$310,000 a year in salary alone. Then you hire the team underneath them, a marketing manager, a content person, a digital specialist, maybe an analyst. That’s another $150,000–$250,000. Or you hire the CMO and pair them with an agency, now you’re paying the CMO salary plus $5,000–$10,000 month to the agency, and they’re still playing telephone with each other about what’s working.
You get all three functions, from a senior team that’s done this across dozens of companies, for less than the CMO hire alone. No recruiting fees. No ramp time. No wondering if you hired the right person.
Already paying an agency?
You almost certainly are. Most companies at your scale pay a marketing vendor between $3,000 and $8,000 a month. You’ve been writing that check for years. It hasn’t moved the business.
Here’s what you’re paying for: execution. Someone runs your ads, updates your site, sends your emails, and reports on what they did last month. That’s it. Strategy, if it exists, comes from you, or from a fractional CMO who doesn’t control the execution. RevOps, the measurement layer that would tell you if any of it is working, doesn’t exist at all.
Seafoam replaces all three under one accountability line. The opening months cost more than your current agency, because we’re doing the work nobody’s been doing. Once the infrastructure is built and the system’s running, the retainer settles into a number that’s often comparable to what you’re paying now, but for a complete marketing department instead of an execution function. You’re not upgrading agencies. You’re replacing three hires you either made incompletely or skipped entirely.
If you’re happy with your current agency and the business is growing the way you want it to, we’re not the right call. If you’ve been wondering why you pay what you pay and can’t point to what it produced, we should talk.
Where Seafoam works best
But we’re happy to recommend someone who is!
Right Fit
- Mid-market companies where senior leadership is still in the room for strategic decisions.
- Companies without a full in-house marketing function — or with one that’s stretched past what it was built to carry.
- Leaders who think in financial terms and want marketing accountable to revenue.
- Companies willing to invest in understanding the problem before jumping to tactics.
Wrong Fit
- Startups looking for their first customers.
- Companies with a strategic CMO who owns marketing decisions.
- Companies that want “more social media posts” or a campaign.
- Anyone looking for the cheapest option.