Senior leadership for businesses that have outgrown the founder.
You built it, and it pays the bills. What it lacks is the senior judgement a business your size cannot yet carry on the payroll.
Why a permanent hire is premature
A permanent CFO or COO feels like the grown-up move. For many owner-led businesses the sums do not add up:
You pay for five days and use two
The real senior work in a business your size fills two or three days a week, not a full diary.
The market is picking over the same people
Good executives are approached constantly. A smaller employer rarely wins them, and rarely keeps them.
A senior mishire is slow to unwind
Parting with a permanent senior employee takes time and goodwill, and a small business feels every week of it. Our engagements are company to company, on our standard one month's notice.
You need breadth, not a department
One person who can read the numbers, the people and the customers beats three functions you cannot yet afford.
A fractional executive is a proven operator, part-time in your business and answerable for the result in their domain, not an adviser who files a report and moves on. Where experienced people are expensive and hard to keep, this is how a company your size gets one.
Who this is for, and who it is not
Best for
- Founders carrying a C-suite function themselves with no time left to lead
- Businesses that need senior capability two or three days a week, not five
- A specific gap in finance, operations, marketing, technology or people that is holding growth back
- Teams that cannot yet justify, or afford, a full-time executive salary
- Owners who want an operator accountable for outcomes, not a consultant with a deck
Not for
- A junior or purely execution role a full-time manager should own
- A one-off project an agency could deliver and hand back
- Businesses wanting a figurehead rather than someone who does the work
- A pre-revenue idea with no function yet to lead
Why owners work with us
You get a senior operator for the days the business needs, and we stay involved for as long as the engagement runs.
An owner's view of the engagement
We meet you at agreed intervals to look at the engagement as an owner would, and if it is heading off course we rework the brief with you.
More than one person's experience
Your executive can call on our collective of 800+, so a finance question that turns out to be a people question still reaches the right answer.
The owner keeps the thread
No spare executive waits in the wings. What we keep is your brief and our notes, so if a change is ever needed the next search starts well informed.
Fit before CV
We match on stage, sector and temperament. An owner-led business notices a poor fit within a week.
What an engagement looks like
From first call to an embedded operator in weeks, not months.
Discovery
We spend time understanding your business: challenges, goals, team dynamics, and what 'success' looks like in 90 days.
Match
We introduce the right fractional executive from our vetted collective. You meet them, ask hard questions, and confirm the fit.
Scoped engagement begins
The engagement launches with a defined scope, clear deliverables, and a structured cadence. Your fractional is embedded, not advisory.
Adapt and evolve
As your business changes, the engagement changes with it. Add hours, shift focus, introduce a second specialist, all without restructuring.
Which executive do you need first?
You do not need to know the answer before you call. Match the problem you feel most to the operator who owns it.
Each fractional role maps to a different SME challenge
Start with the gap that is costing you most, and the roles below show which leader owns it.
Backed by executives who have led at
