From Busted Bikes to Go-to-Market Plans

Tom Gaydos didn’t always plan to become a founder. But looking back, the signs were there early—and often. Growing up in Frankford, Philadelphia, Tom figured out quickly that if you could create something useful (or even just cool), you could probably sell it. Whether it was selling framed colored-pencil drawings in his front yard, flipping bikes from scrap parts, or trading baseball cards like a Wall Street shark, he was always testing the market, and always had the personality of a founder—even if he didn’t know it yet.

“I realized early on that making your own money meant having independence,” he says. “And when you gave someone something they needed, and they smiled? That was everything.”

That instinct never really left. It just evolved.

Today, Tom is the founder of On-Call CMO, a fractional marketing agency for early-stage startups that can’t yet afford a full-time executive, but still need high-level guidance. He works primarily with tech and SaaS companies—especially those in the AI space—and gives them something most startups don’t get until much later: strategic marketing leadership that actually moves the needle.

But the path to launching On-Call CMO wasn’t linear. And it definitely wasn’t fast.

Learning on the Job—and in the Fire

After college, Tom landed at ATX Communications, a telecom company with a scrappy internal web development group. He was supposed to be a junior developer. Instead, within two years, he was leading a team- managing engineers twice his age, scoping complex projects, and translating vague client needs into real deliverables.

“I was 24 and had people in their forties reporting to me,” he says. “But we were winning, so no one cared how old I was.”

Tom credits that season with shaping his leadership style: transparent, adaptive, and relentlessly focused on execution. “When projects go sideways—and they always do—you just keep showing up in good faith. That builds trust.”

He eventually followed that same leadership team to a new venture: Evolve IP, a cloud communications company founded by the execs he’d worked with at ATX. At the time, the word “cloud” barely existed in tech circles, let alone marketing. Tom helped shape the narrative from scratch.

“We didn’t have a name for what we were doing,” he says. “We had to educate the market as we built the product.”

Over six years, the company raised $24 million, secured more than $100 million in contracted revenue, and grew into a major force in the communications space. And Tom was there for all of it.

A Marketer Who Speaks Engineer

What made Tom valuable then—and still makes him valuable now—is his hybrid skill set. He started as a programmer. He can write code. Build web pages. Design campaigns. Edit video. Write strategy. Architect a tech stack. And pull all of it together into a single go-to-market plan.

“I didn’t realize it was rare to have both the hands-on skills and the strategy chops,” he says. “But now I lean into that.”

After Evolve IP, he spent time in enterprise consulting at Blue Wolf (acquired by IBM), then became the CMO at McFadyen Digital—a commerce agency with clients like Louis Vuitton, Sony, and 3M. That’s where he really sharpened the edge.

“They were in trouble when I joined,” Tom says. “Oracle pulled the rug out from their entire ecosystem. So we pivoted—hard. New positioning. New focus. Thought leadership. Everything.”

By the time he left, revenue had nearly tripled.

Choosing His Own Clients

Tom launched On-Call CMO in early 2025 with a simple premise: great startups deserve great marketing—but not every startup can afford a full-time CMO. He saw too many founders stuck trying to duct tape strategy together with freelancers, junior hires, or agency bloat.

“They need someone to own the strategy. Not just hand them a to-do list,” he says.

So that’s what he offers. Most of his clients are in seed or Series A stages. Some are AI-focused. Some are just scrappy as hell (the best founders usually are). All of them need help translating vision into traction.

He’s also building an event company with five other Philly-based founders, focused on connecting early-stage entrepreneurs with capital. No membership dues. No posturing. Just real conversations, real relationships, and a real shot at growing something meaningful.

“I’m doing this so I can choose my own adventure,” he says. “The people I work with, the projects I take on, the problems I get to solve—I want all of that to be intentional.”

A New Kind of CMO

What sets Tom apart isn’t just his technical fluency or marketing experience. It’s his clarity. He doesn’t pitch frameworks or chase trends. He gets in the weeds, figures out what’s broken, and fixes it.

“Startups need help with everything,” he says. “But they don’t need everything at once. They need focus. A clear narrative. A path to revenue. That’s what I bring.”

He’s not building a massive agency. He doesn’t want to “scale.” He wants to keep the work close to the ground—where it stays sharp, relevant, and real.

The result? Startups that actually grow the right way.

“I’m not here to build vanity metrics,” Tom says. “I’m here to build momentum. Period.”

And he’s just getting started.

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