Hiring a fractional executive isn’t quite like hiring a full-time one.
More than anything, you’re hiring the person, not the role. As a founder, owner, or CEO, that should shape who you bring on as a fractional COO, CMO, or CFO, and why.
Companies with the scale and budget for a full-time C-suite build it around fixed scope. The COO runs operations. The CMO owns marketing. The CSO owns sales. The job description sets the boundary, and the person fills it. There’s healthy collaboration between peers, but each exec stays in their own lane.
But for smaller companies who don’t need, or can’t afford, a suite of full-time chief officers, a fractional executive is often the right answer to get the right amount of know-how and leadership they need.
The difference is, or should be, the criteria for hiring a fractional executive shouldn’t look like the criteria for hiring a full-time executive.
In fact, it might be easier to think of it as an inverted process. Instead of defining a role and finding the candidate with the best fit.
Hiring a fractional is about finding a great candidate and looking for the ways they can deliver value. The scope is set by what that person can actually see and do for your business, and that can expand and changes over time.
I’ve seen this play out in almost every engagement I’ve had. I was brought into one of my current clients to help with co-manufacturing operations. Within weeks, I was also setting direction on a rebrand and repositioning. About eight months later, I’m on a weekly cadence with their CFO.
My engagements, and I think most fractional consultants’ engagements, grow this way. We’re the ones who see when a decision needs a wider view, and we’re comfortable with the complexity of making it. In this case, I couldn’t lower costs without increasing order size. Increasing order size meant strengthening the promise the brand made to customers. But larger orders were limited by their working capital.
That’s the pattern with fractional leadership generally. The engagement rarely stays inside the box it started in, because the person you hired keeps finding the next thing that actually needs fixing.
When you’re evaluating a fractional executive, a list of deliverables tells you less than you think. The better question is who you’d trust to expand into whatever the business needs next.