The smartest hire most founders have never made
You need a CFO. You need a COO. You need a VP of Sales. But you're not ready to pay $250K a year for each of them. That's the gap fractional leadership was built to fill — and most founders are sleeping on it.
Fractional leadership means bringing in a senior executive — a CFO, COO, CMO, CRO, or other C-suite role — on a part-time or project basis. They work for you, but not exclusively. You get their expertise, their network, and their judgment at a fraction of the cost of a full-time hire.
This isn't a consultant who delivers a report and disappears. A fractional leader is embedded in your business. They attend your leadership meetings, they know your team, they make decisions. They're just not there five days a week.
For businesses in the $3M-$30M range, fractional leadership is often the highest-ROI hire you can make. You get senior-level capability without the senior-level overhead.
You need fractional leadership when you've outgrown your current team's capability but aren't ready to make a full-time executive hire. Common triggers: you're hitting a growth ceiling and can't figure out why; your finances are a mess and you need a real CFO; your operations are chaotic and you need someone who's built systems before.
You also need it when you're preparing for a major transition — a fundraise, an acquisition, a new market entry. These moments require expertise you probably don't have in-house, and a fractional leader can bridge that gap without the long-term commitment.
The question isn't whether you can afford fractional leadership. It's whether you can afford not to have it. The cost of operating without senior-level guidance — in bad decisions, missed opportunities, and preventable mistakes — almost always exceeds the cost of the fractional engagement.
Be clear about what you need. Fractional leaders are most effective when they have a specific mandate — not 'help us grow' but 'build our financial reporting infrastructure' or 'rebuild our sales process.' Clarity of scope is everything.
Give them real access. The biggest mistake founders make with fractional leaders is treating them like external consultants — keeping them at arm's length, filtering information, limiting their access to the team. That kills the engagement. Treat them like a full-time executive, just with a different schedule.
Measure outcomes, not hours. A fractional CFO who works 10 hours a week and transforms your financial reporting is worth more than a full-time hire who keeps the lights on. Focus on what they're building, not how much time they're spending.
Fractional leadership is one of the most underutilized tools in the founder's toolkit. If you're in the $3M-$30M range and you're missing senior-level capability in any critical function, a fractional leader is probably your fastest path to the next level.
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