You have specialists. What you don't have is anyone who owns the whole system.

A fractional executive is an experienced executive who leads a company function part-time, typically one to three days a week, instead of being hired full-time. The company gets senior ownership of strategy and execution at a fraction of a full-time salary. Common versions include fractional CMO, fractional COO and fractional CTO.

What makes this practice different is scope. I don't sit inside one title, because the problems that cost founder-led companies the most money don't sit inside one department either.

A consultant analyses a problem and recommends a solution. A fractional executive owns the problem: sets the priorities, leads the team, builds the systems, and stays accountable for the result. Consultants are measured on the quality of the recommendation. I'm measured on whether the business actually changed.

Practical test: a consultant leaves you a document. I leave you a working system, a trained owner and the documentation to run it. The full comparison is here.

Defined builds are published at fixed prices, from $2,000 for a funnel optimisation to $5,000 per hire for recruitment and onboarding. Ongoing fractional leadership is a monthly retainer starting at $3,000. It opens with a $5,000 onboarding month, where I learn the business model and audit everything, because that is where most of the momentum comes from. Larger cross-functional engagements are scoped in that month.

You'll notice most of the prices are on this page. That's deliberate, every engagement and its price is published so you can decide whether the conversation is worth having before you have it.

Because at your size the hire is high-cost and high-regret. A full-time CMO or COO runs $200k–$350k+ all-in, takes three to six months to find and another six to ramp, and most founders at this stage can't yet write the job description accurately, because the function they're hiring for doesn't exist yet.

Build the function first. Then hire the person to run it, with a real job description and a system to inherit. Several engagements have ended exactly that way.

Both, with a stated boundary. I build the systems (dashboards, funnels, CRM, automations, SOPs), and I lead the people who run them. What I don't do is become the permanent doer. If a role needs a full-time human, we define and hire it rather than pretending I can be it three days a week.

Often, yes, and that is part of what you are paying for. I build CRM pipelines and automations, landing pages and dashboards, write copy, map processes and run hiring myself, and when there is no media buyer yet I set up and run a baseline ad account. I won't engineer a complete web application without a development team: I write the spec, hire the developers and oversee the build. The value isn't that I do all of it. It is knowing which work matters, doing what I am best placed to do, and bringing in a specialist when volume, depth or regulation calls for one, then making sure their work fits the plan.

Yes and no, and both halves matter. I won't engineer a complete web application without a development team; I'll write the spec, hire the developers and oversee the build. I can launch and manage an ad account, and do when there is no media buyer yet and the budget doesn't justify one, but that is a baseline until a specialist is worth hiring. What the breadth buys is the view across: the ad problem that is really a CRM problem, the sales problem that is really an offer problem. A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.

For a defined task, you should. A good freelancer will often do it faster and cheaper than I would. What buying more tasks doesn't give you is someone deciding which tasks matter, in what order, and whether the finished pieces work together. If that is already you and you have the hours, you may not need me, and I will say so on the call.

Judgment as much as hours. Diagnosing what is actually broken, deciding what to build and what not to, building a good share of it myself, coordinating the rest, and being accountable for how it all fits within the agreed scope. The deliverables matter. The decisions about which deliverables are worth making matter more.

No, and be wary of anyone who guarantees results that depend on things they don't control. What I commit to is a written diagnosis, a ranked plan, systems that get built and documented, numbers you can read every week, and honest reporting on what is and isn't working. Revenue still depends on your offer, your market and the decisions we make together.

The chaos is gone, and the ceiling moves. By day 91 the systems are documented, the owners are trained, and the business runs a normal week without decisions queueing behind you. That is not the end of the engagement. It is the point at which it gets interesting.

From there the work changes shape: which market next, what the second offer should be, where the margin actually is. What changes on day 91 is set out here.

Yes. That's the mechanism, not a concession. I lead the people you already have. Where there's a genuine gap, I define the role, run the hiring, and manage the first 90 days of KPIs so the new person lands in a system instead of a shrug.

Fixed-scope builds run 15 to 90 days. Ongoing fractional leadership typically runs six to twelve months. The 90-day arc is the unit either way: recon, ascent, altitude. Anything longer is a new engagement with a new scope, agreed deliberately rather than by default.

Yes. The practice is remote by default and has run with clients across the US, Europe, Malaysia and the Gulf. Weekly leadership happens live in overlapping hours; the build and documentation work doesn't need to.

You'll know inside the first two weeks, and so will I. Recon is deliberately the first phase and deliberately produces a written diagnosis. It's the cheapest possible way to find out whether the working relationship holds before anything expensive gets built on top of it.