Fractional Growth Partnership
we help early-Stage founders build Their growth system
Before you’re ready to hire a Head of Growth, 4th Quarter becomes your embedded growth partner for six months, building and validating the system that can take you from early traction to $10M.
Talk to Zac about a Growth Partnership30-minute call. No preparation required.
“Zac and 4th Quarter helped us grow from $10M to $300M+ invested on Roots by building the system behind our growth”
Daniel Dorfman, CEO and Co-founder, Roots
$100M+
in ad spend managed
$85M
exit to Fox Corp as partner
$10M → $300M+
invested on Roots
1B+
streams and pageviews
5 startups
grown from zero to $10M+
If you’re thinking…
- “We have demand, but growth still depends too much on the founder.”
- “We already have a media buyer and creative engine, but scaling still feels fragile.”
- “The team is running tests, but the learning is scattered across product, creative, paid media, and lifecycle.”
- “We have agencies or channel owners, but nobody owns the full growth system.”
- “We’ve tried agencies and fractional help before. The work was too abstract, too slow to ramp, or too far from bottom-of-funnel outcomes.”
- “I don’t need another consultant. I need someone who can turn the analysis into operating cadence, tests, and decisions.”
- “We need to know what to scale, what to fix, and what team we actually need before we hire.”
- “We have several possible growth paths, but we need to know which one deserves real investment.”
The Fractional Growth Partnership gives you senior growth leadership without committing to a permanent hire and spending months building the function internally.
How it works
Diagnose the gaps in your growth system and build a plan.
We start a twice-monthly testing cadence to prove or disprove the hypotheses in the Growth Action Plan.
In six months, you know what your growth system needs to look like, what worked, what did not, and what to build next.
“Not to overstate it, you completely transformed The Pour Over’s growth strategy: we began feeding a quality/value signal back to Meta, shifted optimization toward higher-quality leads, doubled click rate in comparable cohorts, and increased spend by 30% while improving LTV to CAC in the process.”
“Zac and 4th Quarter helped us grow from $10M to $300M+ invested on Roots by building the system behind our growth. They connected our data, channels, and testing cadence into one operating machine, giving us a repeatable way to find leverage, understand what’s driving performance, and compound what works.”
“4th Quarter is Fieldcrest Ventures’ secret weapon. They audit growth assumptions before I invest and serve as the plug-and-play growth operating partner once I invest, de-risking my investments and improving returns.”
What you get
The plan
Growth validation plan
The core question, decision scorecard, and path to evidence.
Prioritized growth backlog
Ranked opportunities and tests.
The operating rhythm
Two growth sprints a month
Focused sprints once readiness gates are passed.
Weekly standups
During off-sprint-planning weeks.
Monthly executive readouts
Evidence, economics, risks, and scale, iterate, or stop decisions.
The decisions
Month-three checkpoint
Continue, narrow, or stop.
Month-six decision plan
Budget, team design, roadmap, and next-phase recommendation.
Is this for you?
For founders and CEOs at post-revenue companies, around $1M to $3M in revenue, that have strong product-market-fit signals but no repeatable growth system yet.
You may already have
- A paid channel that works, but cannot 3 or 4x it
- Creative production, but not enough message-learning discipline
- Product and lifecycle tests, but no shared growth scorecard
- Customer data, surveys, or interviews, but no path from insight to execution
- A founder, product lead, media buyer, or operator holding the system together manually
- A major question like: “What has to be true before we double spend, hire the team, or expand the product?”
This is strongest when you have
- Real demand, customers, distribution, or differentiated assets to build from
- A consequential growth question that can be answered in six months
- An executive sponsor with authority to make decisions
- Internal technical and operational capacity to support the work
- Budget for the growth team, media, software, and required dependencies
Investment
In six months you will know which growth system can take your startup from early traction to $10M because we will have built and validated it across the parts that matter: plan, people, process, technology, and timing.
Hire a Head of Growth
$250,000+
year one, loaded
- A $200,000 base salary, before equity and recruiting
- Plus ramp time, before the system is proven
- A permanent commitment made up front
Fractional Growth Partnership
$120,000
six-month term, at $20,000 a month
- Senior growth operators
- Evidence before you commit to the permanent team
- A mutual checkpoint at month three
You may be wondering
Both. We work alongside your team, and the split depends on who you already have. We agree on it together before we start.
Together, we build the plan, design the tests, and run the weekly and monthly meetings where decisions get made. If you have a media buyer, designers, or an agency, we work with them so everyone is aimed at the plan we create. Where there are gaps, we pitch in on copy, creative briefs, and test setup, and help you figure out who to hire first.
What we need from your side: a leader who can make the call, access to your data and ad accounts, engineers to ship product changes, and the media budget.
An agency typically runs one channel, like paid social or email, and a fractional CMO usually leads the brand and the marketing team. This partnership looks at your entire growth system, its people, process, technology, and timing, and creates a six-month plan to test the gaps. By the end of six months, we’ll have validated the system you’ll keep building on to get from where you are today to $10M.
At month three, we look at what the tests have shown and decide together: keep going, narrow the focus to what is showing promise, or stop. You are not locked into six months of something that isn’t paying off.
You get a plan for what comes next: how much to spend, who to hire, and what to build first. Then you choose: run it with your own team, extend with us for another six months, or stop. Renewal is never automatic.
See if a growth partnership is right for you
