I sat down this week with Mark Galauner of Fractional CX Consulting, and I want to be upfront, this is about as newborn as a business gets on this show. Six weeks old. We're talking about a company that's still finding its legs, and honestly, that made for one of the more interesting conversations we've had.

Learn

Mark's path into data-driven decision-making didn't start where you'd expect. He went to school for radio, wanted to be a DJ, and only backed into research methods through a communications master's program at Cleveland State that turned out to be unusually heavy on statistics. That's where the light bulb went on. From there it was business analytics for an insurance company, then a stint at Ernst & Young managing metrics and survey work, and eventually running customer satisfaction programs for banks, credit unions, and even a government client managing tribal lands for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Along the way he picked up a phrase I loved: "I can drive the statistical car, I'm just not necessarily the mechanic." He's not a math guy first, he's a translator. That's his edge.

Evaluate

Here's the problem Mark keeps running into with businesses: everyone's collecting data. Almost nobody's using it. Dashboards look great and sit there. So when he evaluates a client's pain points, it's usually one of two flavors, either customer defection nobody can explain (people just leave, and the exit interview never captures the real reason), or a total blind spot about their own audience, like the government client who didn't know their own tribal members didn't realize they had ancestral land rights until Mark's team went and knocked on doors. His sweet spot: mid-size companies with a lot of customers or members, run by a director or VP of marketing who's on the hook for numbers they can't fully explain.

Act

This is where the episode turns. Mark had been kicking around the idea of starting his own consultancy for ten years, and did nothing with it. Then, when a wave of DOGE-driven government contract cuts hit his employer, his company lost 25% of its revenue in a single day. Headcount followed. Mark found himself job hunting again, and instead of spraying resumes everywhere, he got selective, and finally acted on the idea he'd been sitting on. LLC, website, positioning: fractional CX consulting, an alternative to old-school consulting where you come in, fix what's broken, and hand it back to the team already in place instead of trying to sell them new systems.

Protect the Dream

Mark's five-year vision isn't about scale for scale's sake. It's a handful of clients he genuinely enjoys working with, doing work he believes actually matters, because he's spent enough of his career doing work that got filed away and never looked at again. The honest tension he's sitting with right now: fractional consulting is still an unfamiliar model to a lot of business owners, and part of his job over the next few years is simply teaching the market what it is. As he put it, he's either on the ground floor of something that's about to take off, or knocking on a door nobody's ready to open yet. We'll find out, and I intend to check back in.

Find Mark at fractionalcxconsulting.com or connect with him on LinkedIn.