FRACTIONAL VP OF market development | building products
Are you still your company's best salesperson?
That worked when there were four projects. It's the ceiling now.
I step in as your fractional VP of Market Development. Once a week I'm in the room, on the calls, or on the job site, building the commercial operation that wins specs, holds them through value engineering, and stops routing every wall-assembly question back to your phone or Slack.
Building product manufacturers. Twelve-month engagements. Three clients at a time.
Are any of these true for you?
Every technical question ends up on your phone, or Slack. On nights and weekends.
You hired a rep out of distribution. Six months in, he's quoting, not specifying.
You're working with an independent rep agency who is also repping multiple others, with traction being slower than hoped.
You get specified, then value-engineered out, and the team is helpless to do defend it, or understand how to prevent it on the next project.
Your pipeline is a spreadsheet of company names, not a map of live projects with dates and decision-makers.
Revenue is up but margin isn't, and you can't tell which accounts are doing that to you.
You're working so hard to close what you have that you've stopped growing the pipeline and intake.
You know you need a VP of Sales. You've priced one. You've also seen what happens when a manufacturer hires a great SaaS closer who has never read a submittal. Or simply aren't ready to hire one full time.
Projects are delayed and you can't count on your forecast and need ways to get cash faster to make up the difference.
If three of these are true, we should talk. If five are, we should talk this week.
What once a week actually buys
Not a diagnostic report or a deck you'll open twice.
An experienced operator in the room.
I sit in your leadership meetings, your pipeline reviews, your pricing arguments. We get real on forecasting, projects, ideal projects and typologies and strategize on the fastest paths to cash.
On the calls.
I join the strategic sales calls: the architect who's specifying, the GC who's substituting, the distributor who's holding your inventory hostage. Your team watches how it's done, then does it. I advise on sales scripts and make introductions to my network.
On the job site.
I go. I look at the details, the installer, the sequence, the punch list. Most of what's wrong with a building product's sales strategy is visible from a scaffold and invisible from a conference room.
Between calls and visits.
Your team texts me. Your closer calls me before the meeting, not after the loss. Value engineering huddle calls.
And when the conversation moves upstream with clients, be it pricing structure, budget, the P&L behind the pipeline, I'm in that conversation too. Commercial doesn't stop at the sales level.
What you can expect
The job is not to hand you a strategy and disappear, and it is not to run your sales team forever. It is to run it well enough, long enough, that the person you eventually hire inherits something that works. In other words: I'm building my own replacement, on purpose, out loud.
what this is not,,,
Marketing campaigns. Brand identity. Advertising. Websites. Social media. Comprehensive documentation nobody reads.
I work on the operational system underneath. How your product travels from your factory, to a specification, to a building, and to a reorder.
How the engagement runs
01
Phase One — 90 days
I learn the business the way I'd learn it if I owned it. Do field visits as appropriate, call reviews, pipeline teardown, channel math, a hard look at where specs are actually leaking and where competition is sparse - your blue ocean. You get a commercial diagnosis and a plan you can execute with the people you already have.
02
Phase Two — 12 months
Phase One converts into the ongoing engagement. With 60 days' notice, either direction, any time. No hostage clauses.
03
The hire-out clause
If at any point during our work together you find your full-time VP, good. That's the goal. The engagement converts to a reduced-fee wind-down while I hand off the system, the relationships, etc. You are never paying me to be hard to replace.
Why me
Eighteen years in building products. A decade of it on job sites, across 47 states.
I've stood at every link in the chain: mechanical engineer, product developer, overseas manufacturing, testing and certification, ASTM committee work, installer trainer, field support, carrying a bag, and finally VP running a business unit.
Business Unit Leader
I’ve spent more than 20 years across the building-product adoption chain as an engineer, product strategist, top-performing sales rep, operator, and VP.
At Sto, I put all of that experience to work leading U.S. market adoption for StoVentec, a direct-sold rainscreen system operating inside an EIFS distribution network. I built the team, pricing, sales process, CRM, training, marketing, and operating cadence taking the business from deeply negative margins to nearly 80% gross margin, 125% year-over-year growth, and profitability in under two years.
Now I help building-product founders reach profitability faster and scale with fewer expensive wrong turns. My hard-won lessons become your speed to cash.
Investment
A full-time VP of Market Development in building products runs $180K–$250K+ base, plus variable, plus benefits, plus the six months or more of ramp time (assuming you made the right hire).
This costs a fraction of that, starts in two weeks, and comes with someone who has already made the expensive mistakes on somebody else's payroll.
The number depends on your revenue, your team, and how much of the calendar you actually need. That's a ten-minute conversation, not a pricing table.
Let's network.
Even if you don't feel ready to hire a fractional, it's still great to connect and share stories - you never know where the right meeting could lead to that introduction, or that one idea that can move the needle and get us out of a rut. This is a great industry full of people doing amazing things - and I can't wait to hear your story. Whether we do or don't end up working together.