Where the sector changes the hire
Most of the time it does not. A fractional CMO for a marketplace and one for a logistics company read the same brief and do the same job, and a page claiming otherwise would be padding. These eight are the cases where that stops being true, and in the first one it stops being true before anybody has discussed money.
In a regulated firm, the regulator decides when your new executive can start.
The person writing the brief is often not the person you will be working for.
Discretion is the job specification, and it is rarely written down.
In a charity the money is not yours to allocate, and the board is not paid to be there.
In construction, profitable companies fail. The cause is almost always cash, not margin.
In ecommerce the profit sits in stock, and the stock is where the cash goes to wait.
When you sell time, the profit is decided before the invoice goes out.
In manufacturing the reported margin depends on how you valued the stock.
Why eight and not twenty-five
The bench carries 25 sectors, and it would be easy to write a page for each one. It would also be obvious, to exactly the people this site is for, that the pages existed to catch searches rather than to tell anybody anything. The test each of these had to pass was one question: could a reader get this from the seat page? For B2B SaaS the answer is yes, so there is no page. For a regulated firm the answer is no, because the regulator has to approve the person before they start.
If your sector is not here, that is the reason, and the seat pages genuinely do cover it. You can still filter the bench by any of the 25.
Three things that are true in all of them
The seat is the same; the conditions are not. A CFO is a CFO. What changes is who approves the hire, who the reporting is really for, and what a mistake costs. None of that shows up in a job description.
The sector narrows the pool faster than the seniority does. There are plenty of strong fractional CFOs. There are far fewer who have held an approved function at a regulated firm, and that is the constraint that decides the timeline.
Rates sit at the top of the band, not the middle. The published day rates hold, but regulated and investor-backed work lands at the higher end of each seat’s range, and it is worth budgeting for that rather than discovering it.
Filter by sector, book direct
Every operator checked by hand against their LinkedIn and CV before they appear, booked direct at the rate on the profile. Start from what each seat covers, one seat inside one sector, or hire full-time instead.