Three ways to work with us. One standard of delivery
how we engage
Every Cerebratum engagement — regardless of model — is principal-led, implementation-included, and built around your specific brief. We don’t have a standard package. We have a standard of work. What varies is the structure: how long we’re in, how deep we sit, and what accountability looks like. The three models below cover most of what our clients need. If none of them fits exactly, we’ll tell you that too.
Whatever the model, three things never change.
Principals do the work
The person you meet at the start is the person in every meeting, on every deliverable, accountable for every outcome. No handoffs. No juniors on your brief.
Implementation included
We do not stop at the recommendation. Every engagement includes the execution of what we design — the plan, the process, the measurement, and the correction when reality diverges from the model.
Capability left behind
The measure of a good Cerebratum engagement is that your organisation can do things after we leave that it could not do before we arrived. We build for independence, not dependency.
model 01
Fractional CXO
A senior leader — CMO, COO, Sales Head, CFO, CHRO, CTO, Product Head, or Chief Transformation Officer — embedded in your organisation for a defined number of days per week. They carry the same KRAs a full-time hire would. They attend the same meetings. They own the same outcomes. The only difference is the cost structure and the absence of hiring risk.
This model works best when you need CXO-grade thinking and leadership but the business isn’t ready — or doesn’t need — a full-time appointment. It’s also the right model when you’ve tried the full-time hire and found that what you actually needed was the experience level, not the headcount.
model 02
Integrated Business Function
When you need more than a leader — when you need the entire function run end-to-end, without the overhead of building it internally. Cerebratum runs the function in full: strategy, planning, execution, vendor and system management, and measurement. One senior principal accountable for all of it, across any of the seven pillars.
Marketing is where this model has run longest and proven itself most — one function, run continuously for over a decade in a single engagement, and part of a nineteen-year relationship in another. That depth of experience is real and worth knowing about. But the model itself isn’t marketing-specific. It’s the right structure whenever a function needs to run at full depth — sales operations, financial planning and reporting, HR and people systems, technology and data — without the business carrying a full internal team to do it.
model 03
Transformation Programmes
Time-bound, fixed-fee, defined-scope work. A rebrand. A turnaround plan. A GTM launch for a new product or market. An ESG roadmap. A financial restructuring. An ERP selection and rollout. A compensation and succession redesign. Each programme is part strategy, part execution — and always seen through to delivery.
Fixed-fee means you know the cost before we start. Defined scope means there’s a clear deliverable we’re both accountable to. And principal-led means the person who scoped the programme is the person who delivers it — not a project manager reading a brief they weren’t in the room for.