★ The Retainer Layer

A senior operator,
inside your brand team.

Fractional Chief AI Officer, Head of Partnerships, Creator, or Press. Project-based, retained, or as long as you need the firepower. We place a senior operator directly inside your marketing or executive team, plugged into your tools, your KPIs, and your Slack from week one. The cleanest way to add enterprise-grade execution without enterprise headcount.

★ Lead Role

Fractional Chief AI Officer.

AI strategy that ships. No deck-ware.

Karen embeds with your executive team as a fractional Chief AI Officer. We audit your current operations, identify the highest-ROI AI opportunities, build the implementation roadmap, and stay on through deployment. The same operating system that runs Lightmakers internally, applied to your business.

Who it's for
Founders, CEOs, and COOs at $1M-$50M companies who know AI matters but don't have the bandwidth to implement it cleanly.
Engagement format
Quarterly retainer. Embedded standups. Board reporting on cadence. Custom packages by scope.
What ships in 90 days
  • AI operations audit (current tools, workflows, gaps)
  • 90-day implementation roadmap tied to real KPIs
  • Tool selection and vendor evaluation
  • Workflow automation design and deployment
  • Team training and adoption support
  • Ongoing advisory (standups, model evaluations, board reporting)
Apply for a Discovery Call Custom packages by scope · Pricing on call
Who Hires This Lane
CMO · Founder · Head of Brand
"We need creator marketing, partnerships, or press leadership inside our team, but a full-time hire isn't right yet. We don't want a vendor. We want a partner who runs the function while we figure out what comes next."
What We Do

Plug into your stack. Ship in week one.

This isn't consulting. It's operator-grade execution placed inside your org, with the authority and accountability of a department head, at fractional cost. You get the seniority you need without committing to permanent overhead.

  • Fractional Chief AI Officer (AI strategy, implementation, and operational adoption)
  • Fractional Head of Partnerships, Creator Marketing, or Press
  • US market-entry leads for international brands launching stateside
  • Launch-window project leads with brand authority and budget oversight
  • Embedded in your Slack, your project tools, your KPI dashboards from day one
  • Backed by the wider Lightmakers operator network (creator network, vendors, press relationships) and proprietary AI infrastructure
  • Transition planning if and when you're ready to hire permanent
What We Don't Do

The structures we won't take.

Fractional Operators only work when there's enough brand authority for an operator to actually operate. These structures don't.

  • "Coaching the existing team" without execution authority
  • Sub-fractional engagements under our weekly hours floor
  • Reporting into someone who can't make a decision
  • Replacing a department where the actual issue is leadership
  • Indefinite scope without a defined success measure
Why It Works

Senior, dedicated, accountable.

Most fractional engagements fail because the operator is spread across a dozen clients and answering to none of them. Fractional Operators are senior, dedicated, and accountable to your KPIs the way a permanent hire would be. The difference is on the contract, not in the work.

The brief lands in your inbox the same hour it's written. The decisions get made on your timeline, not the agency's. The handoff (if and when it comes) is to a permanent hire you've coached together, not a stranger.

See how the operating model ships in practice →
Ready When You Are

Embed the operator.

Tell us the role you'd hire if you could, the goal you'd hand them, and the timeline. We'll come back with a scoped operator proposal and an operator ready to start week one.