Newly minted Charcoal Marketing President Mike Cyr is stepping into the role in the wake of a significant transformation for both the company and its wider industry.

Cyr said in an interview this week that the world of marketing has, in recent years, experienced a sea change from projects with defined time horizons being typical to a paradigm in which organizations often keep marketing houses on retainer.

Previously Charcoal’s chief operating officer, Cyr is also now its sole owner, having gradually bought out former president Mike Hayes. For his part, Hayes will stay on as Charcoal’s chief marketing officer while devoting more of his time to the startup where he has been a vice president since 2021, IntegraSEE.

“We’ve been able to pivot the business together and make a lot of strategic moves,” said Cyr. “And shift the business away from project-based work to more of a fractional marketing model.”

When he said “fractional marketing,” Cyr was alluding to the widespread practice of small- and medium-sized businesses outsourcing some leadership roles and operations to contractors. In the world of startup finance, for example, fractional CFOs are quite common.

“We act as kind of their bolt-on marketing department,” Cyr said of Charcoal’s clients, which tend to be small- and medium-sized businesses with revenues of somewhere around $1 million to $5 million.

“So over the years I’ve been here, I’ve been able to help … shift our service offerings and help build the team to better mold that (type of) offering.”

Cyr, who has worked at Charcoal for just over six years, described working with Hayes as a rare learning experience. As Hayes’s successor, Cyr will lead a team of around five people, though that figure can vary if he brings in more people to work on a specific project.

Meanwhile, Hayes is also VP of strategy at IntegraSEE. The company’s roots are in “bio-sensor” technology that involved using small numbers of shellfish as an early-warning system for algae blooms and now incorporates artificial intelligence to perform data analysis. Cyr is likewise a collaborator on the project, as its head of marketing.

And to round out his work, Cyr is the owner and operator of Nanuk VR technologies, which lets prospective real estate buyers or financiers strap on a virtual reality headset and view a digital model of a property long before ground is broken. Cyr originally founded the company with Diogo Farinho and Jake Moore in 2018, before later buying them out.

“The banks, even when they’re loaning money to developers, they need to see what (a) project is, what this multi-unit development is going to look like,” said Cyr. “It’s almost expected. So we’re seeing the effects of that, and we’re able to capitalize.”