The job is genuinely five days a week
Some seats are full. A company doing a carve-out, running a live transaction, or rebuilding an entire function from nothing needs somebody there every day, and compressing that into one or two is not a saving, it is a delay with a fee attached.
What to do instead: an interim executive, close to full-time, for a fixed stretch. Same seniority, different shape.
The work is execution, not judgement
A fractional executive is expensive per day because you are buying decisions. If what you actually need is somebody to run payroll, chase invoices, build decks or manage a channel, a senior person at a senior rate is the wrong tool and will be bored within a month.
What to do instead: hire the doer, and if you need judgement over the top of them, a fractional seat at half the days will work far better once there is somebody to execute.
Somebody needs to be on site every day
Manufacturing, hospitality, construction sites and businesses in real difficulty often need the person physically present far more than one day a week. Fractional can work in these sectors, but not where daily presence is the point.
The company cannot yet say what it wants
A fractional executive holds a seat. If the leadership team cannot agree what the seat owns, the engagement becomes a slow negotiation about scope, paid by the day, and it usually ends badly for everyone.
What to do instead: spend a fortnight writing down what the seat is accountable for before anybody is contacted. If that is genuinely impossible, a short piece of consulting to define it is the honest first step.
The budget only stretches to half a day a week
Below about one day a week, nobody can hold a function. They can advise on it, and advice is a real service, but it is not the thing that gets sold as fractional and it should not be priced as though it were.
What to do instead: buy fewer days of a better operator rather than more days of a cheaper one, or wait a quarter. Both beat paying for a seat nobody is actually sitting in.
You want one throat to choke
On a direct engagement the contract is between the company and the operator, which is what keeps the cost down and the relationship clean. It also means there is no firm standing behind it to escalate to.
If the continuity risk genuinely matters to you, say for a board that will not accept a single point of failure, a practice that carries cover is worth its margin. That is a real advantage of that model and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
The two questions that settle it
- If this person could only make decisions and never do the work, would the job still get done? If no, you need a doer first.
- Could you write down, today, the three things this seat is accountable for in ninety days? If no, you are not ready to hire one yet, whoever you hire them from.
Questions
- Is a fractional executive ever a false economy?
- Yes, in two cases. When the job is genuinely full-time, because you pay a premium day rate for a fraction of what is needed and the gap does not close. And when the work is execution rather than judgement, because you are paying executive rates for something a capable manager would do better.
- What is the minimum sensible engagement?
- One day a week. Below that a senior person cannot hold accountability for a function, and what you are buying is advice. Advice is legitimate and useful, but it should be described and priced as advice rather than as a seat.
- What should a company do if it is not ready yet?
- Write down what the seat owns and what it is accountable for in ninety days. If that can be written, you are ready. If it cannot, no hire of any kind will go well, and the fortnight spent writing it is the cheapest part of the whole process.