Solo CMO: I manage all marketing for a B2B SME without a team. 9 a.m.-6 p.m., Sundays off. 50 days: 290 commits, 245 URLs, +86% GSC clicks. The stack and the cadence.
Atypical format in B2B marketing: I am the only one responsible for the management, acquisition, content, dev and analytics of an SME. Without an agency, without service providers, without internal service. Assessment after 50 working days and 18 months on this format.
Solo marketing sounds like a heroic promise. In practice, it’s a normal schedule: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., five days a week, Sundays off. No nights, no rush. Over the 50 working days of the last cycle – 290 commits in the repo, 245 URLs to the sitemap, 50+ blog posts, +86% clicks in Google Search Console.
This is neither a posture nor a show-off. It is a viable working format for a specific part of the B2B market. Here’s what it takes – and what it doesn’t replace.
What does “solo CMO” mean?
In a classic setup, a marketing director leads a team: SEO agency, SEA expert, copywriter, designer, developer, analyst. He coordinates, assigns, verifies. He doesn’t get involved in technology.
In solo, these roles pass into a single pair of hands:
- SEO: technical audit, schema markup, llms.txt, programmatic pages, recrawl via API, Lighthouse optimization.
- SEA: management of advertising accounts, bidding strategies, UTM.
- Copywriting: blog articles of 1,500 to 4,000 words, service pages, ad scripts.
- Dev: handmade site in PHP 8.4 without CMS, SQL base, CRM integrations.
- Analytics: Google Analytics 4, Search Console, dashboards, reports to the manager.
At the same time – direct exchange with the manager, verification of the work of the operational team via CRM, validation of contracts. In B2B SMEs, marketing almost never exists separate from operations.
The stack that makes it possible
Without the right tools, the format doesn’t hold up. Here are the four pillars that I use every day.
1. Handmade site, without CMS. PHP + SQL + .htaccess in router. No WordPress, no Tilda. Page template in five lines: header, content, form, footer. Deployment via rsync in 15 seconds. When you’re the only dev, you don’t need an ecosystem for five. You need a solution that doesn’t break on its own and doesn’t require security updates every week.
2. 17 MCP servers in the code editor. Model Context Protocol gives the editor’s AI assistant access to external tools. In my settings.json: Playwright for SEO audits, Firecrawl for competitive crawling, Programmatic Search Console, GitHub for the repo, file system for local files, Obsidian for the vault, Snyk for security, Gemini for visuals. In total – the tools that a normal team delegates to a separate analyst, a dev front, an SEO expert. For me, they run through a single interface.
3. Obsidian as a knowledge base. At the root of the repo – an obsidian/ folder with 60+ notes. SEO, technical, analytical, ISO certifications, content base, daily log YYYY-MM-DD. When you work alone, you forget your own decisions within two weeks. The vault is the “second brain” where I grep what I had promised for Thursday. No Notion, no Confluence – local .md files next to the code.
4. BMAD methodology for one person. Brownfield Methodology for Agile Development. Six epics, 26 stories, 26 slash-commands for the editor. It is a tool designed for dev teams. Adapted solo, it becomes a framework that structures a person’s work: a PRD written once at the start of a mission, six epics, stories of 4 to 8 hours each. Every morning it is clear which story is in progress.
Pace and discipline
The format only works with a strict planning structure. Without it, we quickly slide into chaos “I don’t remember what to do today”.
Every Sunday evening: 30 minutes for the plan of the week in Obsidian. 5-6 large tasks related to open BMAD epics. Every morning: I open the vault, I look at the active story and the log from the day before. One task at a time, until closure. Jumping from “I’m trying SEO” to “no, more like SEA” is the quickest path to solo burnout.
The 50-day SEO cycle was running at this rate. 290 commits = 5-6 per day. Not at night, not on weekends. Blog publication rate: 2 to 3 articles per week. This setting sets a rhythm better than an alarm clock.
What I delegated to the tools
Half of the routine is automated. Without that, the format doesn’t last a week.
- Keyword research: Python script via public API, 388 sentences in 8-10 minutes.
- Sitemap: generated on each deployment with real lastmod via filemtime().
- URL recrawl: Search Console API + IndexNow, automatically for each approved comment on the blog.
- Validation schema: Rich Results Test via Playwright on a list of URLs after each release.
- Vulnerabilities: Snyk MCP scans the code in one click.
- Visuals: free stock photos for the majority of banners, Gemini API for single case covers.
- First article draft: AI as assistant, final proofreading still by hand.
Final fact-check, manager validation, publication – always by hand. I wouldn’t trust AI to publish business numbers.
When the format is NOT suitable
Honestly: there are contexts where soloing doesn’t hold up.
- E-commerce with thousands of SKUs and complex merchandising. Too much daily operations for one person.
- Media budgets of several hundred thousand euros per month. A dedicated performance team does better.
- Mass B2C with thousands of leads per day. Operational triage requires a team.
- Companies where marketing must validate daily with management in meetings. Solo loses time in alignment.
The format is suitable for B2B SMEs with a long sales cycle, a small number of large clients, and a manager who knows what he expects from marketing – without the ritual of daily committees.
What would be different with a team
With 4-5 people, I would deliver 2 to 2.5 times more. Not 4 times. Coordination eats up a significant portion of the effect. And there are still tasks that the solo closes faster than the team:
- A/B testing: no need to bring together the analyst. I look at the data, I draw the conclusion, I write the fix, deployment in 5 minutes.
- Re-packaging of offers for a new channel: I write myself, I check myself, I publish. From idea to launch – one day instead of a week.
- Technical fixes: no Jira, no call with the dev.
For B2B with a long cycle and a small number of large clients, this is often more important than “doing 4 times more”.
The format for France
I have seen several fractional CMO profiles on the French market – most positioned on strategic management only. What I propose goes further: piloting and technical execution in the same pair of hands. It’s rare because it requires an uncommon combination of skills: marketing + dev + analytics. But when the profile exists, it is the most profitable option for a growing B2B SME.
Soloing is not a posture. It’s a format that requires precise stacking, strict cadence discipline, and honesty about what it doesn’t cover. If you run a B2B SME and are looking for a model where a single person owns strategy and execution – take a closer look at this model.
