Fractional Director of Growth Marketing

Get recommended where your buyers already look.

Nicole Lehmann-Haupt, Fractional Director of Growth Marketing at NAC Worldwide

Your next customer is already asking someone they trust — a review site, a roundup, a creator, a colleague. I get you into those conversations, and run the marketing function around them. The research behind it is automated. The relationships aren't.

A decade in growth and marketing leadership — consumer, subscription, fintech, and SaaS.

As seen in
Worked with

Puzzle.io · Keepsafe · Brain.fm · OneNotary · UNAGI · Thistle · MATRIX Powerwatch · Oui Shave · Homeaglow

What we do — 01

Relational marketing.

Rather than renting attention from a platform, you earn it from the review sites, roundups, creators, and partners your buyers already trust. It takes longer to start, and it doesn't switch off.

spend pauses Paid media Relational Time
Illustrative — the shape of the two curves, not measured data.

We find the partners. You build the relationships.

Finding who to talk to is a research problem, and we've automated it. Everything after that is a person doing the work.

  1. 01FindThe review sites, roundups, and creators already recommending products like yours.
  2. 02ScoreRanked by fit, audience, and how likely they are to say yes.
  3. 03VerifyA real, checked email for a real person at each one.
  4. 04PitchA first draft in your voice, matched to the right ask.
  5. 05ApproveNothing leaves under your name that you haven't seen.

Then comes the part that isn't automated: someone follows up, negotiates, and stays in touch long after it closes. That's the actual job — these five steps just mean we do it forty times instead of four.

What we do — 02

Paid media, amplifying share of voice.

The relationships come first; paid makes them travel further. The reviews, roundups, and partner mentions you've earned become the creative — and the spend behind them is measured against what actually landed in Stripe, Shopify, or HubSpot, not what Meta and Google each take credit for.

4.0x Google reports 6.0x Meta reports 2.1x Actual Return on ad spend, same period
Example scenario published by AdBliss, our attribution tool.
  • 30–50% higherWhere most brands' true CAC lands once platform double-counting is stripped out.
  • One source of truthSpend reconciled and deduped across Meta and Google against first-party sales data.
  • Flat feeNever a percentage of your ad spend, so the incentive is to cut waste, not grow budgets.
Proof

What that's looked like.

3.5x+ ROAS
on paid social and search
Consumer hardware launch
4:1 LTV to CAC
held while scaling
D2C subscription brand
40 vetted partners
29 pitches, one afternoon
B2B SaaS
Who you'd be working with

Hi, I'm Nicole.

I'm a growth marketer and creative operator based in Northern California. I've worked across agency and in-house roles, specializing in growth for consumer and subscription businesses — building teams, owning P&Ls, reporting to boards — and I work with brands and early-stage companies on marketing strategy, growth, and positioning.

The work that held up longest was always relational — the affiliate that turned into a third of new revenue, the reviewer whose "best of" list is still sending customers years later. Each took weeks of unglamorous research and a lot of individual emails, and each outlasted the campaigns running beside it. So I built software for the research and left the rest alone: the judgment, the pitch, and the relationship stay with an operator.

NAC stays deliberately small — a few clients at a time, each led by a senior operator who owns the engagement end to end. Today that operator is usually me, and this year I'm growing the bench. If you're an operator who works this way, I'd love to hear from you.

What comes off your plate

Five tranches of work.

This is the job a founder is doing themselves until someone senior takes it. Engagements cover some or all of it, depending on the tier.

  1. 01

    Marketing P&L

    Budget, forecast, and the CAC and LTV maths underneath it — what each channel costs, what it returns, and what to do about the gap.

  2. 02

    Strategy & content

    Positioning, ICP, messaging, and the content that carries it, on a cadence you can hold.

  3. 03

    Growth & paid media

    Channel strategy, testing, and the day-to-day of paid — budget moved toward what actually drives sales, not what the platform reports.

  4. 04

    Partnerships & affiliates

    Sourcing, pitching, and negotiating affiliate, creator, publisher, and press relationships — then keeping the good ones warm.

  5. 05

    Production

    Landing pages, creative, and the assets each campaign needs, shipped instead of sitting in a queue.

What you get

Three ways in.

Every tier is one senior marketing operator, with the sourcing engine behind them. Flat monthly, never hourly. One contract, cancel with 30 days' notice. Department and Frontier are priced on the scope of your marketing function.

Department

Series A–B
Let's talk6-month minimum

All five tranches. I run marketing as a function, with relationships as the growth engine underneath it. Weekly ops reviews, board-grade reporting — a senior hire and the team behind them, on one invoice.

Book a call

Frontier

Series B–C
Let's talk12-month minimum

Department plus a dedicated operator on your account, the sourcing engine built out for your category, and quarterly reviews of the whole partner portfolio. For companies where marketing is the engine.

Book a call

Let's work together.

I take a small number of clients per quarter, and it starts with a 30-minute call.

Not ready? Start with the Partner Map.

Two weeks, $5,000. I map every review site, roundup, creator, and affiliate already ranking in your category, score them by fit, and hand you the list with verified contacts and the right ask for each one. Hire me and the $5K credits against your first month. Don't, and you keep the map.

Book the Partner Map