What a fractional C-level is
An executive who fills a board-level seat part of the time. They decide, they answer for what they decided and they account for it — for as long as the seat needs filling, and no longer.
What it is not
Not a consultant.
A consultant recommends and leaves. The mandate ends with the decision made and in place — or it has not ended.
Not a mentor.
A mentor has a view on someone else's decision. Here the decision is theirs, and so is the responsibility.
Not staff on loan.
You are not buying hours to carry out a task someone else defined. The seat is genuinely filled.
Not half an executive.
It is a whole executive, for the time contracted. The fraction is of the time, never of the seniority or the responsibility.
When it fits
- There is a decision on the table and nobody in the company has made one like it — replacing the ERP, preparing a raise, choosing between building and buying, integrating two operations after an acquisition.
- The seat is empty, or the hire has stalled, and the operation runs with nobody in it while a C-level search takes months.
- A piece of work has come up that does not repeat, and nobody builds judgement on what happens once.
- The company depends on that function to operate, but has no reason to carry a full-time director all year.
When it does not
The model has a limit, and knowing where it sits saves everyone the conversation.
- When the load is large and continuous. The seat needs someone full-time, and that is what we will say.
- When what is missing is execution, not decision. What the company needs is a team.
- When the seat calls for daily presence and hour-by-hour decisions.
- When the company can and wants to carry a permanent executive, and the hire is moving.
What it costs
Less than a permanent executive in the same seat — that is why the model exists. You pay for the fraction of time you take, and the cost of carrying someone full-time stays out of it: no full salary, no employer contributions on it, no bonus, no severance.
How much exactly depends on the seat, the fraction and the term, and that is the kind of thing settled by talking about your situation rather than tabled on a website. What is settled in advance is everything else: no minimum term, no exit penalty, and the first hours of understanding inside the mandate rather than on a separate invoice.
What is already happening elsewhere
The model is not our invention, and it is not new. Harvard Business Review has covered it since 2024, in an article and a podcast with Tomoko Yokoi, of IMD Business School, and Amy Bonsall, who worked as a fractional chief product officer.
From two thousand to over a hundred thousand in two years.
Around 2,000 people described themselves as fractional leaders on LinkedIn in 2022. By 2024 it was more than 110,000, according to Harvard Business Review.
It took hold first where the seat does not fit the budget.
Startups and mid-sized companies, and also business units, nonprofits and venture capital funds. Large companies use it mainly for new seats — AI, innovation, data management — where nobody holds the chair yet.
It starts with the work, not the title.
HBR's recommendation is to define what needs doing before defining the title of whoever will do it. It is the same reason so many director-level vacancies are, in truth, an eight-month project dressed as a job.
The model's three problems, and what we do about them
The same coverage that shows the model growing points at where it fails. There are three, and none of them is news to us.
The executive applies another client's playbook.
This is the most cited failure: serving several clients ends in treating them all alike. Which is why no recommendation comes before reading the situation, and why a mandate is measured in months rather than sprints — anyone who comes and goes with each project never gets to know the company.
Scope grows without being agreed.
When the month demands more, the extra capacity is authorised by you before it is used. And what went unused in one month stays available the next: nobody pays twice for capacity they did not take.
The founder doubts someone with several clients.
The doubt is fair, and the answer is not secrecy: while your mandate runs, and for six months after, whoever fills your seat does not fill a direct competitor's. Who counts as your competitor is yours to say, and the list goes in the contract.
Tell us your situation
If after reading this you think yours is one of these cases, the first conversation is with the executive who would fill the seat — and it is there to say plainly whether a mandate is the answer, including when it is not.