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Every purchase is a trust purchase. That single idea is the throughline of this Unscripted conversation with Joshua Altman, Managing Director of Beltway Media and a fractional Chief Communications Officer — and it reframes almost everything small businesses are told to chase. Below are three of the biggest takeaways, pulled straight from the interview.
From the Interview: What a Fractional CCO Actually Is
“Fractional” means contractual and part-time, but fully integrated into your team. Instead of a 40-hour-a-week communications chief, you get a senior leader for a quarter of that — sometimes as little as five to ten hours a month. The role pulls every communications function under one leader whose whole job is to shape perception and build and maintain trust.
Joshua’s pitch for why it makes sense even for a one-person shop is disarmingly simple:
“You’re the expert in home remodeling. We’re the expert in communicating a home remodeling business. You want to be doing home remodeling — you don’t want to be managing your social media feeds. That’s not your expertise. It becomes your job by default, and we all know that.”
It scales from that solopreneur all the way up to 100–250-person companies that grew their engineering and finance teams but never thought about communications.
From the Interview: Why Your Metrics Are Lying to You
The old “7 to 14 touchpoints to a purchase” rule is gone. Joshua puts the real number north of 30 — and most of it is invisible.
“That conversation you had with your spouse about it — that was an important part of that buyer journey. But we can’t measure that. Looking for that cause and effect and making decisions based on it frequently leads to the opposite of the results people want.”
The fix isn’t “ignore the numbers.” It’s correlation plus judgment, tested deliberately — drop everything but one channel for a short window and watch what happens to leads and mentions.
His historical gut-check lands every time: businesses grew and made money for most of modern history without device IDs and scroll depth. Sears sent catalogs and tracked by ZIP code, and it worked.
From the Interview: AI as a Tool, Not a Voice
Beltway uses AI openly — but with hard boundaries. It never ships final brand content without human editing. Where it earns its keep is repetitive research and machine-readable structure.
“If you need to fill a new page with all the keywords and metadata and schema so it surfaces correctly for the bot, we have a bot that does it — and then of course we check it, because we all know it hallucinates.”
Two audiences, he says — human and machine. Let a machine handle the machine-readable layer; keep people on the brand and the bigger ecosystem. And when a 20-city market study needed running, Beltway restricted the AI to official government sources, forced city-and-state disambiguation, and required citations — then verified everything by hand.
Get the full Trust, Not Clicks playbook
The complete field guide from this episode — the fractional CCO model, the Four Languages, the attribution reality, and the AI workflow — as a designed eBook and a ready-to-present slide deck.
📖 Download the eBook (PDF) 📊 Get the Slide Deck (PPTX)Connect with Joshua
Beltway.media · free tools & quizzes · LinkedIn · JAltman@Beltway.media.
Heard on the Unscripted podcast, hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Subscribe for more conversations with the people building and marketing small businesses.
