You do not need a bigger retainer. You need a CMO.
Legacy is for home service and professional service companies doing $10M and beyond. It places senior marketing leadership inside your business: one seat accountable for the growth number, directing your internal people and outside vendors, backed by FirstOnTheMap's full team of specialists.
The question is no longer whether marketing works. It is who owns it.
Past $10M you almost certainly have marketing: internal staff, a few agencies, software, spend. What you do not have is anyone senior who owns all of it. So the function runs as a collection of activities, the vendors grade their own homework, and every real decision still queues at your desk between operations and finance.
You would not run finance without a controller or operations without a manager. Legacy gives marketing the same thing: leadership, accountable for a number, at a fraction of an executive hire.
Legacy fits if
- You are doing $10M or more, one brand or several, one location or many
- Internal marketers or agencies are working without senior direction
- Marketing decisions bottleneck at the owner's desk
- Growth has become a capital allocation question, not a lead question
- You want marketing led the way finance and operations are led
Legacy is not an upgrade you buy for status. If a structured program serves you better, the diagnostic will say so, and we will point you to Authority instead.
A bigger retainer buys more activity. The seat owns the outcome.
Most agencies answer $10M+ complexity with a larger scope of work. That scales the problem, not the solution. Here is the difference in plain terms.
| A bigger retainer | The Legacy seat |
|---|---|
| Sells you more deliverables | Owns the growth number |
| Reports on its own activity | Reports on the whole function, including every other vendor |
| Waits for your direction | Brings the strategy for your sign-off |
| Sits outside the business | Sits in the room when growth decisions are made |
| Grows by upselling you | Succeeds by making the number |
A leadership layer, with an execution backbone behind it.
Legacy is scoped to your structure after the diagnostic, so no two engagements are identical. Every one of them contains these two halves.
Senior direction, inside the business
- Marketing strategy owned, written and defended to you
- Budget ownership across every channel, vendor and tool
- Internal team and agency direction, with scorecards that stick
- Hiring guidance when building in-house is the right call
- Monthly operating review with the owner, in revenue terms
- Quarterly planning tied to your capacity and capital plans
FirstOnTheMap's full team, on call
- Access to our team of 30+ specialists across paid, SEO, content, web, reputation and lead management
- Authority-scale channel execution whenever the plan calls for it
- Landing pages, creative and content produced without vendor roulette
- Reporting engineered around revenue and margin, not activity
- Ad spend paid by you directly to the platforms, never marked up
Listen. Take ownership. Set the cadence.
New leadership that rebuilds everything in week one is guessing. The first quarter earns the right to direct by understanding what already works.
Listen
The diagnostic extends into a leadership audit: people, vendors, budgets, pipeline and the decisions currently waiting on you. We sit in your existing meetings before changing any of them.
By day 30, the function has been mapped, not disrupted.
Take ownership
The strategy is written and signed off. Budget is reallocated with reasons attached to every line. Each vendor and channel gets a scorecard and a number to hit.
By day 60, every dollar and vendor has an owner.
Set the cadence
The operating rhythm is running: weekly execution, a monthly numbers review with you, and a quarterly plan. Decisions that used to wait for the owner now have a place to land.
By day 90, the queue at your desk is visibly shorter.
The seat is built to be handed over.
There is no fifth program above Legacy, so the honest question is how it ends. Two ways. We keep the seat for as long as it earns its keep, or we help you hire a full-time CMO into a function that is documented, measured and already running. Either way, the capability belongs to the business, not to anyone's phone.
Talk to us about the seat →What a handover-ready function looks like
- Strategy, budgets and vendor scorecards documented, not remembered
- Demand arriving through systems a successor can operate
- Reporting any executive, buyer or lender can read cold
- A brand that belongs to the company, not to the founder's name
Even this seat starts with the diagnostic.
Custom pricing is not a mystery box. The scope, the price and the mandate all come out of the same place: a diagnostic of where your revenue actually leaks and what the function needs to own. No proposal gets written before it.
The rule does not bend for size. A $12M company gets the same order of operations as a $900K company. Diagnose first, prescribe second.
Offered after a discovery call, before any engagement. For a Legacy-stage business it typically traces:
- Revenue contribution of every vendor, channel and internal role
- Which decisions bottleneck at the owner, and what they cost
- How much of your demand depends on the founder personally
- What the seat must own first for the number to move
You keep the findings and the priority order either way. If Legacy proceeds, the $1,000 comes off your first month.
How the diagnostic works →Questions owners ask about Legacy.
How is this different from hiring a full-time CMO?
What does custom pricing actually mean?
Do you replace my internal team and agencies?
Who actually does the work?
We are thinking about an eventual sale. Does this help?
Does Legacy still start with the $1,000 diagnostic?
Put someone in the seat.
Book a discovery call. If Legacy looks like the fit, the next step is the $1,000 diagnostic, credited to your first month, and a scope built around your structure rather than a menu.