Strength isn't loud. It's consistent. The founders who grow the most aren't doing more — they're removing what's slowing them down.
I recently joined Shelly Spale-Cutler, founder of Strong 4 Body & Mind and Van Deeb on The Journey (KCRO 660 AM). Van built DEEB Realty from his basement into one of the largest independent real estate firms in the country before spending the last two decades speaking to business owners and sales leaders nationwide. We talked about entrepreneurship, strength, and why the fundamentals of building a business don't change as much as people think.
Listen to the full episode here.
Shelly and I speak completely different languages.
In order to make the most of it, we play a kind of charades. She describes what my body needs to be doing — specific muscles, precise mechanics, terminology you'd only know if you'd studied anatomy. I try to figure out the movement from the description. When we flip to marketing, the game runs the same way in reverse. Different language, same trust.
That's exactly why the relationship works.
For over five years, Shelly has trained me three days a week. Twice in person. Once over FaceTime in my basement.
At the same time, I've been helping her build the growth roadmap for Strong 4 Body & Mind. This effort is rarely straightforward. Founders get pulled in every direction — the tactic that worked for someone else's business, the idea a well-meaning contact floated over coffee, the shiny thing that sounds plausible until you map it against the actual goal.
Shelly wants to grow. The work is figuring out which version of growth actually fits her life, and saying no to everything else.
"Katie's a genius. She does a great job and is great at reining me in when I'm not 100% sure where to go with marketing."
— Shelly Spale-Cutler, Founder, Strong 4 Body & Mind
Different expertise. Same goal. Helping people get stronger.
When he invited us both on, I expected a good conversation. I didn't expect what it would reveal.
Most people assume strength is loud. Confident. Big. In business, that shows up as output — more initiatives, more channels, more activity. More can disguise real problems. It can cover up opportunity. It can feel like progress when it isn't.
I used to think the same about physical strength. If it hurt, it was working. But the output didn't align with the goal. Effort without direction isn't strength. It's just exhaustion.
Shelly is the embodiment of strength — physical and mental. Working with her, I started to understand the difference. She's also someone who has earned her definition of it.
Shelly has unmatched resilience. She lost her brother unexpectedly. She was diagnosed with breast cancer while in the best shape of her life — and went through surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. Later, she navigated a serious car accident that temporarily limited her ability to move the way she's accustomed, and movement was her identity. She and her husband also stepped in to raise her late sister's four children while still raising four of their own.
When someone has lived through that much, their definition of strength changes. Working with Shelly, I realized, so did mine.
Strength got quieter.
It stopped meaning "push harder." It started meaning: I can handle this.
A difficult client conversation. A board meeting with competing priorities. While my own brother was dying from cancer — one of the hardest periods of my adult life — I was still showing up to work out with Shelly. Still moving through grief. Still talking to someone who understood, from the inside, what it means to face a hard diagnosis and keep going.
She earned that trust long before I needed it.
The longer I've worked with founders and leadership teams, the more I've seen the same pattern hold in business. Sustainable growth doesn't come from doing more. It comes from removing friction and consistently executing the right things well.
That's true in the gym. It's true in companies. That's what the conversation kept coming back to for the next hour.
My honest answer: I wanted to be a writer. I got a journalism degree. I spent years discovering that what I actually loved was influencing people through communication. The CMO title came later. The instinct underneath it has always been the same.
What I see most often in founder-led organizations isn't a lack of effort. It's a focus problem.
Marketing is happening. Sales is working hard. Customers are being served. Everyone is busy. But when there's no coherent strategy underneath all that activity, the results stay inconsistent. Pipeline is unpredictable. Messaging is reactive.
You know it's broken when you realize you're the last line of defense on everything. Not because your team can't do the work — but because no one has the full picture except you. You hired experts. You just never fully let them be experts. And somewhere along the way, that became the job.
That's not a marketing problem. That's an alignment problem.
The team doesn't know which three things matter most. So everything feels equally important. And when everything is a priority, nothing moves.
What changes when you bring in the right senior marketing leadership isn't the amount of activity. It's the clarity about what will actually create momentum — and the discipline to go deep instead of wide. If you want to read more on why this happens, I wrote about it here: Why Your Marketing Isn't Working (It's Probably Not a Marketing Problem).
Not really. And that surprises almost every founder I've worked with.
Doubling a $100,000 business takes the same ingredients as doubling a $10 million one. The quantities are different. The complexity is different. The fundamentals aren't.
Clarity. Positioning. Prioritization. Alignment.
The companies that grow consistently aren't doing more things. They're doing fewer things with greater consistency.
Shelly doesn't let her clients just go through the motions. She meets people where they are, builds from there, and finds ways to make it sustainable over the long run. That's how she's worked with me for five years without a single repeated workout. That's not an accident. That's a coach paying close attention.
That's also what good fractional marketing leadership looks like. Not more tactics. Better decisions about which ones matter.
Van put it plainly on air: there are a lot of founders in Omaha and everywhere who can't justify a full-time CMO hire yet, but clearly need one. That gap is exactly where fractional leadership is useful.
Most organizations won't grow just because they hired another agency. A different list of tactics isn't the answer either. Founders and business leaders seeking growth need someone who can sit alongside the leadership team, understand the business, identify friction points, spot missed opportunities, and help prioritize the moves that matter most.
The goal is better decisions. And better decisions create momentum.
Van mentioned that the fractional model works well in markets like Omaha, specifically because it's a relationship-based environment. People know each other. They refer each other. Trust and track record matter. Going deep with a small number of companies — rather than thin across many — fits that context.
But this isn't just an Omaha story. Fractional marketing and revenue leadership is having a real moment. The number of fractional marketing leaders doubled from roughly 60,000 to 120,000 professionals between 2022 and 2024. The demand side is driving it. A full-time CMO costs $275,000 to $500,000 or more annually once salary, benefits, and taxes are factored in.
For a founder who needs that level of marketing leadership but isn't ready for a full-time executive hire, fractional isn't a compromise. It's the right tool for the stage.
The founders I work best with aren't the ones who think they already have the answers. They're the ones who know they have a problem they haven't been able to crack yet. That's where I do my best work.
Something I said on air about my work with Shelly that I truly believe and repeat often:
"The mental change is the immediate benefit. The physical changes take weeks. But the day after a good workout, I'm a different person. Better at my work. More patient. Clearheaded. Motivated and energized. If I skip a week, I feel it — and so does everyone around me."
same is true in business. Do the foundational work. Clarity is the immediate benefit. Pipeline follows.
What is a fractional CMO, and why do founders hire one?
A fractional CMO is a senior marketing executive who works with a company part-time or on retainer — typically when the business needs strategic marketing leadership but isn't yet at the stage of a full-time hire. Founders hire fractional CMOs when they're spending too much of their own time on marketing, when messaging is inconsistent, or when the pipeline is unpredictable. The goal is to own the marketing function — not just advise on it.
What's the difference between a fractional CMO and a marketing consultant?
A fractional CMO takes an active leadership role. They own the function, manage the team, and are accountable for outcomes — not just recommendations. A consultant typically delivers a strategy or audit and hands it back. The most common founder complaint about consultants is paying for a deck that resulted in nothing. A fractional CMO stays in the work.
When does it make sense to hire a fractional CMO?
Usually when the founder is still serving as the de facto head of marketing — and it's become a liability to the business. Common signals: messaging is inconsistent, pipeline depends entirely on the founder's personal network, or a previous agency or hire didn't produce results, and nobody's sure why.
How does alignment create growth?
Most growth problems aren't effort problems — they're alignment problems. When a leadership team doesn't have a shared answer to "what are we actually trying to accomplish," every tactic starts to feel important. Everything gets resourced a little. Nothing gets resourced enough. Alignment — clarity on the goal, the sequence, and the priorities — is what makes execution compound instead of scattered.
What does sustainable growth require?
Fewer things, done with greater consistency, over a long enough period that learning compounds. That's true in training. It's true in marketing. The instinct is to add more. The better move is almost always to narrow, deepen, and stay with it.
Katie Godbout is a fractional CMO who works with a small number of founders and leadership teams at a time — going deep rather than wide. Her clients include financial services firms, B2B companies, and health and wellness brands, typically from early traction through growth stage. Her practice is built on one premise: most growth problems are friction problems. If your pipeline depends on you personally, that's worth a conversation. Let's talk about what's creating friction.