This Sydney team can't keep up with its orders

👋 This week's Shortlist has landed, welcome! On the desk today:

• Elley Nott on what to work out before you spend another $1,000 on marketing

• Six growth, sales and marketing operators on the Aussie Fractionals board

• A Sydney gifting startup hiring a Customer Success Manager because it can't keep up with orders

• Ten from the wider ecosystem, including Cadmus, Emesent, Archa and RecordPoint

• Three AU startups worth watching: RedOwl, Syncrowin and Cauldron

This week on the fractional board blog

Before You Spend Another $1,000 on Marketing, Do This

Elley Nott, a fractional CMO on the board and the founder of Brand Shop, reckons most businesses do not have a shortage of marketing ideas - there is always another channel someone says you should be on. Her argument is that the list of things you could do quietly becomes the strategy, and her piece has a simple exercise for working out which of them is actually worth your money.

Meet the fractional people on Aussie Fractionals that grow your business

Last week was Product and design. This week it's growth, sales and marketing, and six of the operators on the board are below.

Mike Babiy - Hands-on COO for companies past $1M in revenue, Melbourne
He wrote this week's other piece on the board, Myth: buying more leads fixes sales, on why buying leads is a treadmill when the pipeline underneath it is leaking. That is his day job too: he reckons for every $1M of revenue there is another 30 to 50% to recover, and he goes looking for it across sales, marketing, product, operations and leadership. He reports cutting pipeline reporting from a week to under an hour, and recovering 30% of a revenue leak worth close to $1M annualised.

Elley Nott - Fractional CMO, Sydney
Founder and Head of Strategy at Brand Shop, working with businesses on Google Ads, SEO and AI search, websites that are not converting, brand and content strategy, social, email automation and ecommerce conversion. She reports turning a transactional healthcare business into a recurring-revenue model and scaling its subscription revenue to $1M a year inside six months, and taking a tech startup from its first few customers to a $21M+ pipeline in four months. Her piece is this week's feature above.

Guenther Petelin - Fractional CMO for fintech, insurtech and legaltech, Sydney
More than a decade inside regulated finance at Societe Generale, BearingPoint and Raisin, where he built the investment business's marketing from scratch and reports taking it from zero to over 1.2 billion euros under management. He works with companies whose product is hard to explain, and he stays hands-on: he writes the strategy and then writes the newsletter, the press pitch and the website copy himself. Sydney-based, and works in English and German.

Aimee Coleman - Fractional Head of Brand & Marketing, Melbourne
Fifteen-plus years across brand, marketing and customer experience, including complex brand and communications projects for NAB, Australia Post and CHEP Brambles, now working directly with founders rather than from inside an agency. She turns positioning into the actual campaigns, customer journeys and lead-generation activity, and she runs a one-day intensive for founders who need positioning, target customers and value proposition settled quickly.

Marijn Kortekaas - Fractional GTM and growth advisor, Melbourne
Twenty-five years across healthtech, medtech, sportstech and consumer brands, including Nike, employee number one at Physitrack where he reports helping scale the business past 100,000 users across more than 100 countries ahead of its 2021 IPO, and growth, partnerships and global expansion at VALD. He works with founders on getting from "we think this is the market" to a clear ideal customer and a commercial wedge.

Ofek Assael - Fractional Revenue Operations and GTM leader, Sydney
Founder of SmoothScale, a Sydney revenue operations consultancy. Leaders call him in when the go-to-market strategy, the operational tech stack or the data governance is unclear. He reports finishing a 70-plus user HubSpot configuration and migration in three months, halving a Series A retail company's customer acquisition cost through focused automation, and building a revenue engine from scratch for a pre-seed hospitality business.

Reaching out costs you nothing. The operators pay to be listed, so there are no recruiter fees, no placement fees and nothing per introduction. Enquire straight from a profile, describe what you need and let the operators who fit come to you, or reply to this email and I'll make the introduction myself.

Jobs from our AFC Community:

🤝 Customer Success Manager @ Swag N Send - Sydney (Lidcombe)
Look after the customers behind a corporate gifting business that is adding to the team because it can't keep up with order volume.
💼 Loves gifting, well organised and great with customers | Full-time | Founder-led corporate gifting
💰️ $75,000-$90,000 base
👉️ Apply here: email Anthony at Swag N Send

Jobs from the wider ecosystem, continued below 👇️

Jobs from the wider Ecosystem:

🖥️ Principal Engineer @ Lexer - Melbourne, hybrid or remote
Set the architectural direction at a Melbourne customer data platform, hands-on across its AI layer and data contracts.
💼 Most senior individual-contributor engineering seat, reports to the CTO | Hybrid St Kilda or remote with AEST overlap | Customer data platform, Series B
👉️ Apply here: jobs.blackbird.vc - Principal Engineer

🤝 Account Manager @ Archa - Melbourne
Own the relationships, retention and growth of the biggest accounts at a Melbourne business-credit fintech.
💼 Account plans, business reviews and net revenue retention | Full-time | Business credit cards and spend management
👉️ Apply here: archa.com.au - Account Manager
Want to see more from Archa? Three more Melbourne roles on their careers page

🖥️ Director of Cybersecurity @ Emesent - Brisbane, on-site
Set the security posture at the Brisbane CSIRO spin-out whose autonomous drones map underground mines, and lead its certification work.
💼 Security leadership and certification readiness, explicitly not a SOC role | Full-time, Brisbane | Mining and defence robotics, $15M equity raise Jul 2026
👉️ Apply here: jobs.lever.co - Director of Cybersecurity
Want to see more from Emesent? A Brisbane full-stack seat too

🖥️ ML Platform / DevOps Engineer @ Metacognition AI - Australia, remote
Build and secure the cloud infrastructure behind large-scale AI training and inference at an Adelaide robotics-OS startup.
💼 Cloud infrastructure and automation for ML workloads | Remote, Australia | AI and robotics, $10M round Sep 2026
👉️ Apply here: jobs.ashbyhq.com - ML Platform / DevOps Engineer
Want to see more from Metacognition AI? Four more remote Australian roles on their board

🎯 Brand & Community Manager @ Cadmus - Melbourne, hybrid
Own the events, content and community of a Melbourne edtech that sells to universities, and help shape what its US launch looks like.
💼 Events programme, content and social, reporting to the CRO | Hybrid Melbourne | Assessment and academic integrity for universities, seed
👉️ Apply here: apply.workable.com - Brand & Community Manager
Want to see more from Cadmus? Two more Melbourne roles on their board

🎯 Director of Editorial & Social Strategy @ Roller - Melbourne
Decide which audiences and topics a Melbourne venue-management company talks to, and own its organic social and editorial engine.
💼 Editorial strategy, content pillars and organic social ownership | Melbourne | Venue management SaaS, Series C
👉️ Apply here: job-boards.greenhouse.io - Director of Editorial & Social Strategy
Want to see more from Roller? Two more Melbourne roles on their board

🎯 Senior Growth & Performance Marketer @ Coursebox AI - Perth or Adelaide, hybrid
Run the paid and organic growth channels at an AI course-building startup, measured on CAC, LTV and funnel conversion.
💼 Growth experiments across paid and organic | Three days a week in office | AI course creation, seed
👉️ Apply here: coursebox.ai/careers
Want to see more from Coursebox AI? Thirteen more roles on the same page

🖥️ Technical Consultant @ RecordPoint - Sydney or Melbourne, hybrid
Take new customers from kickoff to first value, deploying the connectors that link their data sources into RecordPoint.
💼 Customer onboarding and connector deployment | Australian citizenship required | Data governance
💰️ $140,000-$160,000
👉️ Apply here: jobs.lever.co - Technical Consultant
Want to see more from RecordPoint? Three more Sydney and Melbourne roles

🧑‍💼 Head of Finance @ Ignition - Sydney or Melbourne, hybrid
Lead the finance function at a Series C accounting-software company and build out the team across accounting, FP&A, billing and treasury.
💼 Budgeting, forecasting and close under US GAAP and IFRS | Full Australian work rights | Accounting SaaS, Series C, equity from day one
👉️ Apply here: jobs.ashbyhq.com - Head of Finance

🎯 Product Marketing Manager @ Q-CTRL - Sydney, hybrid
Build the product marketing roadmap and launch strategy at a Sydney quantum-control company, on a 12-month contract.
💼 Positioning, narrative, collateral and campaigns | 12-month fixed term | Quantum and deep tech, Series B
👉️ Apply here: jobs.lever.co - Product Marketing Manager
Want to see more from Q-CTRL? Three more Sydney roles on their board

Want us to scrape your job board? We're doing a wide scrape across startup job boards right now, getting open roles in front of a community of founders, operators, and startup talent. Want yours in the mix? Send us an email and we'll add your board to the rotation.

And the companies that should be on your radar!

The AU startups worth watching:

RedOwl - a Melbourne fintech whose software checks supplier invoices, customer billing and card payments against contracts and policy before the money moves.
Syncrowin - a Melbourne industrial intelligence platform that connects the systems running heavy-industry and energy sites.
Cauldron - a regional NSW company taking precision fermentation from the lab towards commercial production, from a 30,000-litre demonstration plant in Orange.

🌱 Founders: want your roles in the digest automatically? Tell us whether we should pull from your ATS or your newsletter list - just hit reply with your career page URL!

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That's a wrap for this week - see you in Slack in the meantime.

Catch you Thursday!

Megan 🚀

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