Stephen Tisch is the owner of Fractional Marketing, a Twin Cities company that offers marketing leadership and daily coordination for growing small businesses.
Born in St. Paul, Tisch briefly lived in Wisconsin before spending most of his childhood in Mustang, Oklahoma.
“I’m a southern boy,” Tisch says with a modest laugh.
“The bulk of my childhood was spent in the south where everything was red dirt.”
Tisch may have grown up primarily in the Bible Belt, but for high school his family moved back to Minnesota, settling in Delano.
“And now Minnesota feels like home,” Tisch says.
After high school, the athletic Tisch attended Crown College, a private Christian institution in rural St. Bonifacius, where he played golf and football.
“I was a field goal kicker,” Tisch notes.
“I wasn’t a very good one, but at least I could say I was on the team.”
His future football prospects unlikely to ever yield gridiron glory, Tisch left Crown and transferred to the University of Minnesota to finish his degree.
From there, it’s been all media and digital marketing for the cerebral yet humble Tisch.
“It’s the only space I’ve ever been in,” Tisch says.
Nearing two decades of experience in the sector, Tisch has experimented and clawed his way to industry relevance.
It’s a tale as common as entrepreneurship itself:
A gutsy nobody grinding to prove their competence to clients yearning for strategic branding and steady lead generation, and to earn his bona fides, Tisch built a graphic design company, a content creation business, plus started and sold an air duct business.
This path ultimately led him to start Fractional Marketing in 2017.
“I’m entrepreneurial,” Tisch says, reaffirming the obvious before delving into what exactly makes Fractional different from the bevy of other marketing companies currently operating in the oversaturated space.
“We’re more of an outsourced marketing leadership team than a marketing agency that focuses on one core tactic.”
Adds Tisch:
“The entire goal with Fractional is for it to become my incubator for launching ideas, and/or acquiring other businesses.”
At present, there is a lot changing in the marketing landscape.
The recent introduction of AI, combined with online teaching tools like YouTube, has removed some of the mystique from marketing, and allowed marginal talent to escape the fringes of the industry and land more high-profile clients.
“The gap between an entry-level marketer and a strategic agency is not as wide as it used to be with all the tools and resources that are out there now,” Tisch explains.
”People who are good enough can do sufficient work, whereas before you had to be excellent to make things work.”
For his part, Tisch is not perturbed by the shift that marketing is undergoing, not only because he has no control over how things unfold, but also because he is constantly refining his value proposition to ensure Fractional is innovating and not going through the proverbial marketing motions.
“Everything we do now is examined through the lens of `would this work if it was my company,’ and the reason we do that is because if it wouldn’t work for my business, why would I do it for a client’s business?” Tisch outlines.
It helps that Tisch has partnerships with other experts like Malley Design, a Minneapolis-based design studio that serves as an extension of Fractional’s team.
“Malley’s design team essentially has become another employee for us, as we’re constantly using them to help our clients with design,” Tisch says.
“We decided not to build out as much in-house infrastructure because Malley has great designers that we have access to. Also, if I was to go out and hire just one designer, I would be limiting the amount of talent that could assist my business and positively impact my clients.”
In that sense, Fractional is a small firm with a vast network, but they’re also anchored by a leader who is an expert strategist equally capable of executing the daily tasks that are required for brands to stay relevant in 2024.
“In marketing, you often have companies who excel at strategy and long-term vision, and then you have companies who are really good at carrying out marketing tasks,” Tisch explains.
“But you often don’t have companies who can bridge the gap between those two and be all-encompassing. That’s where Fractional strives to be different.”
Adds Tisch:
“By working with Fractional, you get a strategic visionary leader who is working with you on an ongoing basis to help you make key decisions, while also integrating a backend that is aligned with that vision.”
This approach eliminates the time companies waste trying to synchronize vision with application, and for businesses who can’t afford to retain in-house employees, they reap the benefits that come with Fractional’s completely integrative services.
“Again, we fill both roles. We do the strategy work and the implementation work, but more importantly, we help clients understand what they need to know so they can make the right decisions along the way,” Tisch says.
One way Fractional cultivates clarity and jumpstarts cash flow is right away they find untapped sources of revenue for clients who may be overlooking certain aspects of their customer base.
“In most industries, there are opportunities that are available every day to generate income, but a lot of companies either choose to ignore that or they miss it because they’re focused on bigger goals,” Tisch says.
“Therefore, when we come in, we often can offer a perspective that will lead to short-term wins, and theoretically, long-term wins as well.”
For context, Fractional typically works with 7-8 figure businesses.
“Our best clients are in that $5-20 million range because at that point they have enough money coming in that they’re ready to scale, but they’re still small enough where my team and I would have direct access to the owners and decision-makers, and therefore be able to collaborate and push the business in the direction they want and need to go,” Tisch says.
Among those 7-8 figure businesses, Fractional has not niched down into any specific industry.
Their current client list includes manufacturing companies, executive coaches, HVAC businesses, and investment groups.
“It’s cool because what we have discovered is that we can take insights that we gather from certain industries and apply them to different sectors,” Tisch says.
“On paper, an HVAC company and an executive coach don’t intersect, but with what we do, we’re able to spot trends and slightly tweak the strategies from one of those businesses and have it directly impact the other.”
That methodology is exactly what Tisch is hoping to replicate and expand upon in the coming years, a tactic that if successfully executed, will allow Fractional to help more companies. QS
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