About Rodney Warner
I work with leaders of companies doing about $5M to $100M a year, as their fractional CMO or as an advisor when a big decision is on the table. I’ve owned businesses since my twenties and done the work myself, so I look at your plan the way I’d look at my own.
How I got here
From 1994 to 2005 I owned a construction company in upstate New York with my brothers. We built metal buildings, school projects and custom homes. I drew a lot of the blueprints and ran schedules and budgets, and that’s where I learned project management, estimating, sales and leadership. I’d been building websites on the side since before 2000, starting in Flash. I built the company’s first site and ended up running our marketing.
After the construction company, I moved to Colorado, drawn by its climbing culture, and ran a one-person motion graphics company for a short stint. Then I spent five years at a Boulder agency. I stood up its marketing practice and headed up the custom programming project that built the CMS every client’s website ran on, along with the project management system behind all of the agency’s internal work. Within a few years I was second in command, running the day to day.
In 2010 I started my own agency, Connective Web Design, as a one-man band. Over the years it scaled into a seven-figure agency, with a team of incredibly talented people and hundreds of clients across the country. Along the way my job moved from building websites to sitting across from owners, figuring out their pain points and helping solve them.
Across Connective’s whole history, owners have brought me in to do what a fractional CMO does, long before I called it that. For one of them, the agency running about three million dollars a month in their Google Ads reported to me. I’d run Google Ads accounts hands-on for clients for years and knew the platform’s ins and outs, so I could manage that agency from the client’s side on the strategy and on the technical details. I asked the questions, answered theirs and kept pushing them to do better. Through Connective, I also led their SEO, social media and all of their web work, and I joined the owner on every call with their other vendors to help set the direction.
I’ve played that same role for other Connective clients, an attorney among them, and I’m in that seat for a client today. The advisory work here grew out of that same job.
Most of what I know I taught myself, with help from my brothers, a former boss I’m still friends with, and people like Wil Reynolds and Rand Fishkin, who were teaching in public when I was learning.
Why I do this work
I love marketing, and I’ve been an entrepreneur my whole life, so I know what leaders carry home with them. The part I enjoy most is thinking a problem through as a marketer and as an owner at the same time, then working out what will actually move the business.
Owning businesses changes the advice. I start from what a company can afford to spend to win a customer, not from the lead target someone handed the marketing team. When the budget can’t reach the goal, I’ll recommend not running the campaign. I’ve spent my own money on marketing for years, and I’d rather say no early than spend yours on a hope.
I’m about as introverted as people come, and I’ve spent most of my career in leadership and sales. What works for me is not putting on a show.
Know the numbers before you spend.
Tell people the truth, even when it costs you the sale.
Strategy is only useful if you can act on it.
Think like an owner, talk owner to owner.
One lesson I paid for: I made a hard business to run by wanting to be excellent at everything. I’d still choose breadth, because the problems that matter cross disciplines, but I know what it costs.
Maria, my wife, is my business partner. We met in Los Angeles, where I lived for almost a decade after Colorado. When she joined the agency, she turned it into version 2.0, with much higher standards for design and brand. We’re very different. I move fast and decide quickly, and she keeps me grounded and makes sure I’m not pushing us too far into risk. Together, we’re more than either of us would be on our own.
Start a conversation
If you’re weighing a decision and want an owner’s read on it, tell me about it. I live in Houston, work with companies all over the U.S., and reply to every note myself within one business day.