Joseph (Joe) Frost is the Co-founder of yorCMO, a franchise-based company that provides fractional Chief Marketing Officers to help businesses achieve strategic growth through expert marketing leadership. Under Joe’s direction, yorCMO has helped dozens of companies scale, and his previous ventures include multiple EO-qualifying, million-dollar-plus businesses across the US and Canada. Joe is known for spotting emerging trends early, such as leveraging video marketing and launching community-driven networks for fractional professionals. He hosts The Fractional C‑Suite Retreat podcast, where he discusses leadership and the future of work.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [03:19] Joseph Frost shares why he quit his first job to start a business
- [09:23] How strategic marketing leaders drive real value for clients
- [13:46] Tips for managing multiple businesses and scaling successfully
- [15:37] How AI is revolutionizing marketing and strategic leadership
- [22:27] Joe talks about their innovative “marketing brain” AI tool for smarter strategies
In this episode…
Today’s entrepreneurs face unprecedented demands — technology, competition, and a constantly shifting market. How can business leaders leverage expert guidance without hiring full-time executives?
Drawing from his experience building multiple ventures, Joseph Frost believes the key lies in fractional professionals. He explains that giving companies access to top-tier executives on a flexible basis allows them to scale smarter and faster, like catching the next big wave without buying the entire surfboard. The result is strategic growth that’s nimble and sustainable in an unpredictable market.
Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews Joseph (Joe) Frost, Co-founder of yorCMO to discuss leveraging fractional professionals. They cover building fractional CMO teams, creating sellable firms, adapting to AI in marketing, and Joe also shares tips on expanding fractional networks internationally.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- John Corcoran on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Joseph Frost on LinkedIn
- yorCMO
- Winter is Coming: A Documentary Film about Surviving the Seasons of Entrepreneurship by Joseph Frost
Special Mention(s):
Quotable Moments:
- “If you’re not using fractional professionals, you should really think about it.”
- “I’ve always been on the leading edge of what’s next, and I do remember sitting in a room.”
- “We like to say we’re here for you if you want to go out on your own, but not alone.”
- “AI has got to exist in our world to support our CMOs in their core competencies.”
- “The marketing brain is client data, yorCMO infrastructure and IP, and the CMOs judgment.”
Action Steps:
- Leverage fractional professionals strategically: Bringing in experienced executives on a part-time basis enables rapid, scalable growth without full-time overhead.
- Focus on building sellable firms: Structuring your business for eventual transfer increases value and creates long-term strategic opportunities.
- Integrate AI to enhance core competencies: Applying AI thoughtfully supports decision-making and efficiency without replacing essential human expertise.
- Develop robust training for fractional leaders: Providing mentorship and infrastructure ensures that fractional executives succeed independently while maintaining consistent quality.
- Invest in international community building: Creating global networks expands opportunities, fosters collaboration, and strengthens market presence across borders.
Sponsor: Rise25
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Episode Transcript
John Corcoran: 00:00
Intro: 00:00
All right. Today we’re talking about how to leverage fractional professionals to grow your business. If you’re not using fractional professionals, you should really think about it. And my guest is going to tell you about how to do it. He’s also going to tell you about how to foresee changes in the future that are going to affect your business.
His name is Joe, Joseph Frost, and I’ll introduce you to him in a second. So stay tuned.
John Corcoran: 00:23
Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders, and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran: 00:40
All right. Welcome, everyone. John Corcoran, I am the host of this show. And every week we have smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs. And if you check out the archives, we’ve got Netflix, Grubhub, gusto, Kinko’s, Activision Blizzard, LendingTree, open table.
Lots of great episodes for you to check out. And of course, this episode brought to you by Rise25, where we help B2B businesses to get clients referrals and strategic partnerships with done for you podcast and content marketing. And you can look at our recently completely revamped with AI website at rise25.com. Or you can email our team at support@rise25.com. All right.
So excited to have you here, Joe. So Joe is someone who I know through EO Entrepreneurs’ Organization, and he’s at a number of different companies and different spaces. Had a mortgage company, you’ve had media companies, you’ve had fractional professional companies, which is your current business, you’ve had CMO business, but it all starts with you said you sold Halloween candy at school to pay for your prom dinner. I gotta hear this story. Tell me how you did this.
Joseph Frost: 01:41
Well, I’m a modest, you know, family growing up and didn’t have a lot of extra cash to take my date to the prom dinner. So it just happened to be shortly after Halloween, and I thought I got all this candy, So I took it to the lunchroom and I started like peddling my Halloween candy for the entire week before prom. And I, you know, at the time, you know, whatever, I got 20 bucks and got rid of all my candy, avoided getting into too much trouble with the teachers and during lunch and went out to the local Genghis Sushi place and had a blast. My date was kind of a little bit proud and ashamed at the same time.
John Corcoran: 02:27
So she knew that.
Joseph Frost: 02:28
You’d like that today, for most of everything I do as well.
John Corcoran: 02:31
Yeah, I think that’s scrappy and brilliant. That’s amazing that you, you said, okay, what, what are my resources? I got this candy. I could sell it. And that’s great.
And I think probably half the guests I’ve had on this podcast have, excuse me, some version of a story around, you know, selling gum or something at school and getting busted for it, you know, so to my wife’s chagrin, I, I actually have encouraged that amongst my kids. Be like, go, go like sell gum at school. Get busted. I want to hear it, you know? Yeah.
And you also, you worked at a grocery store and you were two weeks in. They were saying you couldn’t wear tennis shoes. And apparently that was too much constraint. That was like a straitjacket to young Joseph. You’re like, forget that.
I’m out of here. And you went and started a lawn service instead.
Joseph Frost: 03:19
Yeah, I was really upset. My buddy was working with me and he had these like hiking boots on, and I showed up with tennis shoes, like high tops. Like you can’t wear those. Like he can wear his like, no, they’re different. They’re not different.
And they told me to go home and change my shoes and I didn’t come back. That was ridiculous. So I, that was what made me go out and want to be my own boss for the very first time after my very first job, after two weeks in it and I started a mortgage or mortgage. I started a lawn service called La lawn back in the day where LA law was such a big show. We called it La Lawn and the name alone made a big difference. People were attracted to it.
They asked us forever what LA stood for and finally we decided it was the last affordable lawn service that worked. That was two kids and a mower for a couple years. We built a nice little business right before college and I sold it to my buddy’s dad and it paid me two years of beer money in college. It was terrific.
John Corcoran: 04:13
That’s amazing. Well, I’m, I’m from LA and the joke’s on them because most of the lawns in LA such are they’re fake. So you know, it’s I don’t know that you want to aspire to that. So that’s, that’s a cool story. So you ended up eventually you start a mortgage company.
And I’ve had a bunch of guests on my podcast like this who had a mortgage company around this time period. So this was 2001 to 2008. Most of us know what the trajectory was there, lots of growth and then collapse because we had the national mortgage meltdown and, you know, kind of economic meltdown in the 2007, 2008 time frame. But talk to me about the early years. So you started the company and then was there a lot of growth in the early years?
Joseph Frost: 04:59
Oh yeah. I mean, it took me 12 months to become AEO qualifying in the early years of the mortgage company called Home Smarts. And that was just a rush. And we doubled every year for the next several years. And then it took about 12 days to ruin it all in the crash.
I mean, it was overnight. We went from 100 plus lenders down to like five. The only thing left was FHA. We didn’t have it, so we lost 100 loan officers overnight. It was just a mess.
Wow. So we shut that down. And then it took me 12 years to create my next million dollar business.
John Corcoran: 05:30
Wow.
Joseph Frost: 05:31
So that was a tale of 12. Man, it was rough.
John Corcoran: 05:34
Wow. Wow. Well, it took me 11 years to get to a million originally. So I feel like when you’re in the middle of your career, whether it’s the beginning of your career, if you’ve had that, you know, period of time, it, you know, it humbles you and you realize that? You know, you don’t take these things for granted.
So what did you do? How did you pick up the pieces after that?
Joseph Frost: 05:59
It was hard. I remember I talked about this in a documentary I made called The Four Seasons of Entrepreneurship. And the winter season is when you lose your business or you leave your business. And I was literally on the edge of a bridge at a moment in time, not planning to jump, but understanding this is when people think about it and get real. I was really depressed because I lost my business.
I lost my tribe. I lost my sense of worth as an entrepreneur. And at that moment, it all came back to me that what’s really important in life is my family. So I went home, spent time with my family, and then just reimagined what I wanted to do. And I went to work for about six months for a bank that almost killed me.
And my wife came to me and she said, Joe, you’re miserable. I’m going to go back to work so you can start a new business. And so she did. She went back to teaching, gave me a little, and gave us some freedom. We had four kids.
It was hard starting any business any time, let alone with a mortgage and four kids. Yeah. And that’s when I started the video production business or the social media business that converted into the video production business. But it took 12 years to get it to a point where I could qualify for EO, which was always another shining light for me. Like, how do I get back into EO?
Not because I want to be like in this group of people and around it and get notoriety because that was my tribe. And that was what motivated me to build and build and build and keep building.
John Corcoran: 07:29
So what led you to choose new media, marketing, video and social media? Was it just the timing right?
Joseph Frost: 07:39
Yeah, I think I’ve always been on the leading edge of, you know, what’s next. And I do remember sitting in a room with a group of entrepreneurs. And I was in this stage. I was just shutting the business down, trying to figure out what was next in my life and trying some different ideas, different things in this entrepreneur next to me. Owned a $15 million surf surf shop in San Francisco.
You might know him. I can’t remember his name. We were just at dinner and he said after he heard my story, he goes, dude, you need to find the next wave. That’s all he said. And to me, it was so profound.
I thought, what’s the next wave? Well, in 2008, the next wave was social media. I could see it coming. And it was obviously coming. I had ridden the social, the mortgage wave.
Can I go ride that wave? And that’s what got me into the social media space.
John Corcoran: 08:30
Yeah, yeah. I mean, obviously today it’s AI, you know, that’s transforming. You know, we’ll get to that. But it’s definitely transforming businesses and it’s definitely a big wave. So you, you start this company, you run it for a number of years and eventually this evolves into yorCMO.
Is that right?
Joseph Frost: 08:49
Yeah. I actually started yorCMO because I wanted to sell more videos. I was frustrated with my clients, small business owners, midsize business owners that didn’t have strategic marketers on their team. They didn’t really know how to use video. Like I’d go try to say, hey, John, you need to, you know, create a sequence of videos and tell your story and get out there.
And it’s the best way to communicate on the web. And you’d be like, I don’t think so. And if they had a market.
John Corcoran: 09:14
This was in, you’re telling them to do a video in 2008, which was a couple years into YouTube. So it’s still like, how do we even get video on the web? Do we even need it?
Joseph Frost: 09:23
Absolutely. And it just was a constant source of frustration. And at one point in time, this was about eight years ago. You know, it culminated to, well, if I could just give them a strategic marketing leader, that person would buy more videos from me. So I looked at the different models out there, and the fractional CFO model looked really interesting.
I said, what if we did that for CMOs? And then we launched the fractional CMO business to help me sell more videos. It became very clear very soon that the value wasn’t in the videos. It was in providing that strategic marketing leadership for business owners. And so I brought someone in to take over my video business.
And I focused since then full on fractional CMO work.
John Corcoran: 10:07
And tell me, how do you what’s like the value proposition or what’s the pitch to other CMOs to join up with the, yorCMO like for you to like place them out? Like, how does that work? How does that kind of business model work?