About Nick Bottai — Fractional CMO, CCO and CGO

$Nick Bottai, fractional Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Commercial Officer$

In short: Nick Bottai is a fractional Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Commercial Officer and Chief Growth Officer working with B2B SaaS, FinTech and platform businesses in the UK and EU. Previously EU Marketing Director at IBM with a €55M P&L and a 160-person organisation across more than twenty European markets, VP Marketing at Foodhub across five international markets, and Marketing Director at eBay Italy. FCIM. Bilingual English and Italian.

I started in marketing when the job still meant campaigns. It stopped meaning that for me fairly early, at the point I was handed a P&L and discovered that the interesting problems were never in the creative. They were in the structure underneath it — who owned what, what counted as a customer, and why nobody could agree on either.

That is still what I do. The work is almost never a marketing problem in the way people describe it when they first call. It is a definitions problem, an alignment problem, or a positioning problem, and it is producing a marketing symptom.

The record

Role	Scope	Outcome
EU Marketing Director IBM	€55M P&L · 160 people · 12 direct reports · 30+ markets	€220M net new pipeline · +23% YoY revenue · SMB platform to €30M ARR
VP Marketing Foodhub	First senior hire, reporting to the CRO · 5 international markets	ROI −18% to +22% · EBITDA £1M to £5.2M · £7.32M incremental revenue
Marketing Director eBay Italy	€15M P&L · 40-person team · 7 direct reports	MAU 1M to 2.2M · €18M incremental GMV · 500+ brand partnerships
Head of Performance Marketing, Europe Kodak	European performance function · 10 direct reports	Performance marketing rebuilt across the European region
Marketing & Sales Director Timco Wood Trading	UK distributor network	Network 27 to 72 branches · revenue 2.5× over two years

Alongside those, a fractional practice across FinTech, B2B SaaS and D2C — including RoxPay, DepotMaster, Cocoon, ShadowFoam and Montresori — and earlier work in wealth management delivering €4.1B in new assets under management within a year by segmenting the Italian market by regional economy rather than by demographic.

What the record is actually for

Not credentials. Pattern recognition. Twenty markets at IBM and five at Foodhub produced the same failure — local teams quietly redefining the metrics — at completely different scales. Having seen a failure mode enough times is what makes a two-week diagnosis possible rather than a two-quarter one.

How I operate

Ten principles, borrowed from Sergio Marchionne and tested against my own experience of what actually works when a business needs to change quickly.

Results come before excuses. In business the numbers count, not the justifications.
Take total responsibility. If you lead, you cannot hide behind anyone.
Simplicity is power. Complex structures slow everything down. Clear decisions win.
Change is not negotiable. You evolve or you disappear. There is no middle ground.
Time is the most valuable resource. Whoever delays, loses. Whoever decides, wins.
Surround yourself with people better than you. Real talent needs trust, not supervision.
Humility beats arrogance. Yesterday's success guarantees nothing about tomorrow.
Facts count more than words. Promises do not build companies. Actions do.
Courage is a competence. Difficult decisions are what separate leaders from managers.
Build an organisation stronger than yourself. Real success is building something that survives your absence.

The tenth one is the reason I work fractionally rather than permanently. An engagement that leaves a business dependent on me has failed, however good the numbers looked while I was there.

What I am not

I am not an agency and I do not want to be your agency's replacement. I do not execute strategies that have already been decided — if the decision is made and you need hands, you need a different kind of help and I will say so on the first call.

I am also not the cheapest option, and I take a small number of clients at a time so that each one gets an executive rather than a fraction of one.

Credentials

FCIM — Fellow, Chartered Institute of Marketing
University of Cambridge — Strategic Thinking for CXO
Speaker — CMO Summit, Growth Summit, APS Berlin
Author — The Secrets to Master a Customer-Centric Strategy
Languages — Native English and Italian
Working rights — UK and EU, as an Italian national

Common questions

Questions about background and fit

What experience should a fractional CMO actually have?

Direct P&L accountability and responsibility for a revenue number, not just channel management. The distinction matters because a fractional executive is hired to make commercial decisions rather than to run campaigns.

Ask what they owned, what the number was, and what happened to it. Someone who has only ever reported into a commercial owner has not made the decisions the role requires.

Does industry experience matter when hiring a fractional CMO?

Less than most founders assume. Commercial failure modes are consistent across sectors — broken attribution, misaligned definitions, positioning that has not landed.

What matters more is whether the person has operated at your business model and stage. Two-sided marketplaces, enterprise B2B and product-led SaaS each behave differently regardless of the industry label attached to them.

Do you work in Italian as well as English?

Yes. I am a native Italian speaker and an Italian national with full EU working rights, and I have run commercial functions in both languages — including eBay Italy and wealth-management work segmented by Italian regional economies rather than by demographic.

For businesses entering Italy or southern Europe, that removes a translation layer that usually costs a quarter.

Which of the five failure modes do you have?

Book a free thirty-minute revenue audit. I will identify the single biggest commercial constraint in your business and give you three things to act on — whether we work together or not.

Book your free audit

30 minutes · No pitch · Actionable regardless of outcome