★ The Retainer Layer

A senior operator,
inside your brand team.

Fractional, project-based, or as long as you need the firepower. We place a senior operator directly inside your marketing organization — plugged into your tools, your KPIs, and your Slack from week one. The cleanest way to add enterprise-grade execution without enterprise headcount.

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 Head of Partnerships, Creator Marketing, or Press
  • US market-entry leads for international brands launching stateside
  • Launch-window project leads with brand-side authority and budget oversight
  • Embedded in your Slack, your project tools, your KPI dashboards from day one
  • Backed by the full Lightmakers bench (creator network, vendors, press relationships) when you need it
  • 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 authority on the brand side 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.