DTC Growth Consultant / Fractional CMO
I'm Zach. I work with founder-led direct-to-consumer and ecommerce brands as a DTC growth consultant and fractional CMO, from pre-revenue to eight figures. Most of the time that means owning the growth strategy across acquisition, site experience, and retention, and leading the people who execute it.
15 years in DTC. Built a brand from $0 to 8 figures. Agency side, brand side, now on my own.
A growth consultant is the person who figures out where growth is really coming from, and where it needs to come from next.
Not the channel report. The business. That means reading the numbers, the acquisition mix, the site, the retention flows, the team, and the agencies, then deciding what to fix first and who should fix it.
Sometimes the answer is creative. Sometimes it's retention. Sometimes it's pricing or the site itself. I go through the data and decide where the bets go, then stay close enough to the work that the plan actually turns into revenue.
Paid media is where I spent the early part of my career. I look at whether what you're spending is actually producing customers at a cost your margins can carry, and which channel deserves the next dollar.
Traffic isn't the problem if the site doesn't convert it. I go through the path from landing page to checkout and find what's costing you orders.
Email, SMS, and the flows behind them. This is usually where the cheapest revenue in the business is sitting, and the first place I look.
One version of the numbers everyone trusts, tied to contribution margin instead of whatever each platform wants to claim.
Pricing, product mix, inventory, and fulfillment. They decide whether growth is actually good for the business or just bigger.
A roadmap, clear ownership for the team and agencies, and someone accountable for whether the numbers move month to month.
I started out running paid search and social at Tinuiti, so I know how a performance agency is staffed, priced, and reported on from the inside.
Then I went in-house as the first growth hire at a DTC frozen meat and seafood brand and helped build it from zero to 8 figures. That job turned into a lot more than marketing: pricing, inventory, merchandising, fulfillment, and every other thing that decides whether growth is actually good for the business.
After that I ran growth for DTC brands at VaynerCommerce, with big budgets and big teams. Now I work with a handful of founders at a time.
Having both sides of that experience changes how I work. I can sit in the channel-level weeds when it's useful, but I always come back to the same question: is this making the business healthier, or just busier?
Plenty of brands need an agency, and when the job is purely execution, that's the right call. The difference is what you're buying when the problem is deciding what to do.
An agency is accountable for their channel. I'm accountable for whether the whole thing grew profitably, which means I'll tell you when a channel should get less money.
You get the person doing the thinking, embedded with your team, instead of an account layer between you and the work. Your team stays yours.
No annual retainer. If it stops being useful, we stop. That's a much better incentive structure for both of us.
Depending on who you ask, the same work shows up under a few names: DTC growth consultant, ecommerce growth consultant, direct-to-consumer marketing consultant, DTC growth strategist, ecommerce marketing consultant, fractional ecommerce CMO, or DTC growth advisor. A lot of founders also come to me looking for an alternative to a traditional DTC marketing agency.
The label changes. The job doesn't: understand what's actually driving growth, decide where the next dollar goes, and lead the team that makes it happen.
These aren't three different businesses. They're three levels of involvement, and which one fits depends on what you want owned rather than advised on.
Growth consultant
You're not sure which lever to pull. You want an experienced read on the business, a prioritized plan, and help choosing what to do first.
Fractional CMO / Head of Growth
The plan exists but nobody is leading it. I come in part-time, run the strategy across every channel, and manage your team, agencies, and partners alongside you.
Advisor
You have execution covered and want an operator who's been there to pressure-test decisions, review performance, and help decide where to place the next bet.
I work with brands at very different stages, and the work looks nothing alike from one to the next. Same question underneath all of it: what's the highest-leverage thing to fix right now?
Pre-revenue and early
The work is finding a repeatable way to get customers without setting money on fire. Positioning, the first channels that make sense, a site that can sell, and whether the unit economics can work at all.
$1M to $5M
Usually the stage where the founder is still the marketing department and it stops scaling. The work is building a real channel mix, deciding what to keep in-house versus hand to an agency, and getting reporting you trust.
$5M to eight figures
Growth isn't the only constraint anymore. Pricing, inventory, merchandising, fulfillment, and retention matter as much as acquisition. This is where a view of the whole P&L is worth more than another channel tactic.
A DTC growth consultant figures out where growth is actually coming from, where it should come from next, and what to fix first. In practice that means going through acquisition, the site, retention, analytics, and unit economics, then giving you a prioritized plan you can act on with whatever team you have.
They overlap, and the difference is how much you want owned rather than advised on. A growth consultant is usually the diagnosis and the plan. A fractional CMO is that plus ownership: embedded part-time, leading your team and agencies, and accountable for the numbers month to month. If you have a strong team and just need direction, the consulting or advisor role is enough. I offer all three, and we figure out which one fits on the first call.
The main ones are hiring an agency for execution, hiring a full-time CMO for leadership, or bringing in a fractional CMO or growth consultant for senior leadership on a part-time basis. Which one is right depends on whether your problem is execution, leadership, or knowing what to do next. I spent years on the agency side at Tinuiti, so I know what agencies are genuinely good at.
If most of your revenue comes from Amazon, your DTC site is a different business with different economics, and it needs to be built rather than copied. I'm not an Amazon marketplace specialist. My career has been on the DTC side, which is what you would be building: customers you can reach directly, a site that converts, retention you control, and the numbers behind them.
If you want the short version of how I work, start with the homepage. The work itself, the engagement options, and the background are all there.
Most engagements start with an audit. I dig into your ads, email, site, and numbers, and you get a short list of what I'd fix first. Then we figure out if it makes sense to keep going.
zp/dtc ยท Philadelphia, PA
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