Blog

Everything published here, in one place. What each seat owns and costs, how a fractional hire compares with the other thing you were going to do, the sectors where the job is genuinely different, and the tax and status questions that stall an engagement after everyone has already agreed to it.

Written from running this market rather than from reading about it, and revised when the facts move rather than when a schedule says to.

Start here

If you read nothing else, read these four.

What a fractional executive actually isThe seat, the days, the money and the point at which it stops being the right answer.Fractional or interim, and how to tell which you needSame seniority, different shape. Choosing wrong costs a quarter and a salary.How hiring from the bench worksFrom browsing to a signed engagement, and who pays whom at each step.Questions, answeredCosts, contracts, verification and what happens when an engagement ends.

The seats

What each fractional seat owns, what it does not, and what good looks like in it.

Every fractional seat, in one placeWhat each seat owns, what each costs, and which one a company at your stage actually needs.The fractional CFOOwns the numbers, the runway, and what the business can actually afford.The fractional CMOOwns positioning, where the budget goes, and the pipeline number.The fractional CTOOwns architecture, hiring, and what it will really take to build.The fractional COOMakes the company run without the founder in every decision.The fractional Sales DirectorBuilds the sales function that lets the founder stop selling.The fractional Growth LeadOwns the whole funnel, tested rather than assumed.The fractional Product LeadDecides what gets built, and more importantly what does not.The fractional People LeadHiring, structure, and the conversations nobody else will have.The fractional CISOOwns security posture and the questionnaire blocking your enterprise deal.The fractional Data LeadMakes your numbers trustworthy, then makes them useful.The fractional General CounselCommercial legal judgement without a law firm's clock running.

What it costs

Rates, bands and the comparison against the same seat filled full-time.

Choosing between two options

Nobody decides between a fractional executive and nothing. They decide between one and the other thing they were going to do.

A fractional CFO or finance directorNeither does the bookkeeping. If the books are months behind, that is a bookkeeper or an outsourced accountant, and paying either of these to fix it is expensive.A fractional CFO or accountantNeither one runs a finance team. If the company needs both the judgement and a function managed daily, that is a full-time hire.A fractional CMO or marketing agencyNeither fixes a product nobody wants. Marketing amplifies what is there, and both will spend your money faithfully doing it.A fractional CTO or development agencyNeither decides what the product should be. That is the founder's job, and no amount of engineering makes up for the wrong answer.A fractional COO or operations managerNeither can fix a company where the founder will not let go. Both arrangements fail the same way, and it has nothing to do with the hire.A fractional CTO or technical co-founderNeither is an engineering team. A senior technology seat decides what to build and who builds it, and if there is nobody to do the building, the decisions have nowhere to land.A fractional General Counsel or law firmNeither replaces a compliance function in a regulated business. That is its own seat with its own reporting lines, and treating legal advice as compliance cover is how firms end up explaining themselves to a regulator.A fractional CFO or financial controllerNeither is a bookkeeper. If the books are behind, hiring either of these to catch them up is the most expensive way to do data entry that exists.A fractional COO or chief of staffNeither owns a function's numbers. If sales are not landing or the product is late, that is a sales or a product problem, and putting an operations seat over it hides the issue rather than fixing it.A fractional CMO or marketing directorNeither is a content team or a media buyer. A senior marketing seat decides the strategy and hires the execution, and a company with no execution capacity gets a strategy nobody runs.A fractional People Lead or HR consultantNeither is recruitment. Filling roles is its own function, and expecting a people seat to also run hiring at volume is how both jobs get done badly.A fractional Sales Director or outsourced sales agencyNeither fixes an offer nobody wants. If the product does not sell when you sell it yourself, more outbound simply finds out faster and more expensively.A fractional Data Lead or analytics agencyNeither makes the decisions the data is for. A dashboard nobody acts on is a cost, and that is a leadership problem rather than a data one.

Hiring one, seat by seat

The interview questions, the red flags and what should exist ninety days in. Written to be useful whether or not the hire comes from here.

By sector

Only the sectors where the seat is genuinely a different job. The rest are covered by the seat pages.

Where the sector changes the hireMost of the time it does not. These are the cases where it genuinely does.FCA-regulated firmsIn a regulated firm, the regulator decides when your new executive can start.PE and VC-backed companiesThe person writing the brief is often not the person you will be working for.Family officesDiscretion is the job specification, and it is rarely written down.Charities and non-profitsIn a charity the money is not yours to allocate, and the board is not paid to be there.Construction and propertyIn construction, profitable companies fail. The cause is almost always cash, not margin.Ecommerce and direct to consumerIn ecommerce the profit sits in stock, and the stock is where the cash goes to wait.Agencies and professional servicesWhen you sell time, the profit is decided before the invoice goes out.ManufacturingIn manufacturing the reported margin depends on how you valued the stock.

Going fractional yourself

What the move takes, what it pays, and how many clients it holds.

Tax, status and structure

The questions that stall an engagement after everybody has agreed to do it.

IR35 and fractional executivesWho decides status, what is actually tested, and the directorship point most people miss.1099 or W2 for a fractional executiveHow the same engagement gets classified in the US, and what rides on getting it wrong.What a US employee really costsPayroll taxes, benefits and the loading that turns a salary into a budget line.How fractional work is structured in the UAEFree zone, mainland and the practical routes an executive is engaged through.The rules the bench runs onFifteen of them, written down, including the ones that cost this site money.

Markets

Where these seats are filled, and what changes between one market and the next.

Fractional executives in LondonThe deepest market for these seats, and what it pays.A fractional CFO in the UAEHow the arrangement is structured with licences and visas, and what to check before engaging one.Hiring a permanent executive insteadWhat a full retained search costs on a real salary, how long it takes, and when fractional suits better.Hire a Full-Time Executive in the US: Cost and ProcessHiring a permanent executive in the United States, and what a full process costs.Hire a Full-Time Executive in the UAE: Cost and ProcessHiring a permanent executive in the UAE, and what a full process costs.

About this site

Who writes this, how it is researched, and what the business does and does not take.

What getoperators isThe bench, the search practice behind it, and who takes what from whom.How this is researchedWhere the numbers come from, what is cited to the regulator, and the six things that will not be published here.The rules the bench runs onFifteen of them, written down, including the ones that cost this site money.What listing on the bench costsNothing, and the reason that is a structure rather than an introductory offer.

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