TD:LR

A fractional team or a fractional role is one where an organisation gets access to experienced professionals who are hired on a part time or as needed basis.

Fractional professionals typically work across multiple organisations at the same time, providing their expertise where and when it is needed most.

This fractional pattern allows organisations to get access to skills and capabilities that they cannot find, or afford to hire as permanent members of their team.

As an example one organisation we worked with was looking to grow their market share and hired in 4 fractional roles to assist:

• Chief Revenue Officer

• Chief Marketing Officer

• Chief Product Officer

• Chief Data Officer

This fractional team worked together on a part time basis to understand where the organisation was currently at, what it could do to achieve its growth aspirations and to define the strategy and actions that should be taken to achieve that growth.

The Fractional’s were then given the accountability to make those actions happen, all while still working part time. This accountability for delivering the action and the outcome is key, Fractional’s make things happen and achieve outcomes, rather than just provide “advice”.

Another example is closer to home for us.

We have built a product called AgileData Disco. It allows large organisations to document their current data environments in minutes, not months. It removes the need for an organisation’s data team or a team of Business Analysts to waste months trying to reverse engineer the legacy data platform and data to understand it.

We have successfully delivered this outcome for our first customer and now we need to scale sales of this product by finding more customers for it.

We know our target buyer is the Head of Data who has been tasked with migrating their organisation to a new data platform.

But scaling direct sales into a new market is not a skill Nigel or I have.

So we hired Peter.

Peter is a very experienced sales person, he has worked for some of the largest software vendors in the world and with some of the largest enterprises.

But we could never afford to hire Peter full time, the salary and commission he demanded (and deserved) from those global companies were well out of our current bootstrapping funding bucket.

Luckily for us Peter is happy to work as a Fractional.

He is working with us part time (and some other companies at the same time) as our Global Head of Sales. He is helping us build out our direct sales patterns, but he is also doing the direct sales effort to get us started. We are learning by watching him do.

Our ultimate goal for having Peter on the team as a Fractional is to end up with both a way of working for direct sales and to have more paying customers for our AgileData Disco product.

What problems does a fractional pattern solve for an organisation?

The first thing is the fractional role, like any role, should be there to help deliver business benefits. It should be a role that you would hire a full time person for if you could.

We would hire Peter full time if we could, but we can’t.

A Fractional then solves a few common organisational problems:

1) Fractional’s provide cost effective access to expertise.

By working part time Fractional’s can still charge a high hourly rate (or fixed monthly fee) for the valuable expertise they provide, but an organisation does not have to pay that cost based on the typical 1,816 working hours in a year. Organisations pay a fraction of that cost.

2) Fractional’s provide Time to Value

As organisations are hiring a Fractional on a contract basis, they do not need to go through the same lengthy process they would need to do to hire an employee into the same role. Organisations get access to the expertise they need in a fraction of the time.

3) Fractional’s reduce risk

If an organisation hires the wrong employee it will take a lot of time and effort to help them exit the organisation. With a Fractional, if they are not delivering the value you need then you don’t continue to use their services. Organisations can experiment with new roles with a fraction of the risk.

4) Prove an organisation is ready for the role

Often an organisation is not ready for a senior role, but they don’t know it. For example they will hire a senior person into a Head of Sales role, when the organisation has yet to find Product to Market fit. Most experienced sales people will expect the organisation to already know what it is selling and to whom. Bringing in a Fractional can test if an organisations is ready for that role to be filled.

5) Flexibility to change

As an organisation’s business changes they can scale up or down the number of Fractional roles or the time people spend in those roles. They can also change the mix of roles they need as they discover what gaps they need to fill.

Why would somebody be a fractional worker?

Most Fractional’s I know have had an illustrious career in their chosen domain and are now looking for a change of lifestyle.

They are looking for a better work-life balance where they can choose when they work and when they don’t. They want to be more selective on who they work with and who they don’t.

Fractional’s often enjoy the chase of taking an organisation from 0 to 1 or from 1 to 10.

They often enjoy the feeling of sharing their knowledge and experience with the new generation in their field.

Working across multiple organisations diversifies their risk compared to working with just one organisation.

Working with multiple smaller organisations gives them the same level of complexity they enjoyed when they worked for large organisations, organisations which would require them to take a full time role.

What are the risks of hiring a Fractional?

There are a few things you should worry about when you start your journey working with Fractional’s.

If the Fractional has too many customers at one time, they will waste a lot of time and effort context switching between each customer, reducing their effectiveness. Ideally a Fractional will be working with 2 to 4 customers at any one time, unless they have managed to automate some of the work their role will normally do in a way that helps scale their expertise but not their effort.

Keep in mind there is more effort required for the Fractional at the beginning of the engagement as they get up to speed on your organisation and its current ways of working. A Fractional might want to stagger the contract so there is more compensation upfront for this additional effort.

A Fractional should be accountable for actions and outcomes, not just providing advice. But by the very nature of the part-time role, they cannot spend the time a full time person would spend executing the required actions if nobody else in the organisation does. Your organisation will need to ensure it has people available to do these tasks.

Your Fractional may not be an expert in your organisation’s domain. So as well as learning your organisation’s way of working, they will also need to learn your organisation’s domain and the market it operates in. Ideally hire a Fractional that is both an expert in the role and in your organisation’s business model.

If your organisation has a culture of too many meetings and those meetings are wasteful, a Fractional will spend a large portion of time attending those meetings, not driving actions and outcomes. Based on their experience and the desire for a change in lifestyle they will typically point this waste out at the earliest possible time, listen to them when they do and decide how valuable those meetings really are.

A Fractional will not stay with your organisation forever, and you will lose that experience and knowledge. But then again a full time employee won’t either. Discuss succession planning with the Fractional at the beginning of the engagement, ideally you want them to help get your organisation to the stage where hiring a full time employee into that role just makes sense.

When the market has a downturn and organisations let people go, those people will often resort to Fractional working to pay the bills until a full time role reappears. This may not be a bad thing, your organisation may get a person with great experience, who would normally not be available to you. Or they may not have the level of experience you need. Check their experience and expertise before you engage them (which is no different to hiring the wrong person into a full time role) and potentially keep the initial contract short so you can both work together for a short time to decide if you both fit each other.

Some consulting companies pretend to operate as a Fractional company and then do the old “bait and switch”. It’s the same anti-pattern as when you engage a senior partner in a large consulting company and then they are replaced with a bunch of graddies who do the work. With a Fractional model you are hiring a person with the experience and expertise you need (have a read about the 5e’s https://agiledata.io/blog/5es/) to help you, so they are the person that should be doing the Fractional work for you.

What are the risks as a Fractional worker?

Quitting your full time role and entering the world of Fractional’s is a tempting change, the ability to have more control on when you work and when you don’t is compelling, but there are a few things to keep in mind before you make the big leap.

Your income will become very inconsistent, very quickly. If you decide to make the move to become a contractor, you will typically be looking for an engagement where you are paid for your effort and that naturally looks like 40 hours a week for a period of time. So while you will get some gaps in your income, when you do earn you will tend to earn consistently. When you are a Fractional there is a larger amount of variability in when and how much you earn, it is much “lumpier” so take that into consideration.

On that note if you have a large mortgage I would always recommend you leave all your income in your personal company and pay yourself a fixed income each month from the company, bank managers love consistency. You can always pay yourself any additional money left in the company each year as a “bonus”.

If you find an awesome customer you may be tempted to make it your only customer. Remember the goal of being a Fractional is to be part-time, and as a result you need to spread your risk, you need more to be working with than one customer. Often you will end up with a pattern where you will be tailing off from one customer, working deeply with a second, onboarding a third and starting to look for a fourth.

Context switching is a silent killer, you will lose hours if not days to this, so find a cadence that works for you and lets you focus on each customer. You may block out certain days for certain customers, or certain hours in the day. But remember customers expect you to be there when they need you, so you will need to be flexible and manage that context switching problem at your end not theirs.

Not being there full time means you will miss things. There will be conversations and meetings that happen when you are not there. You need to find ways to be kept in the loop asynchronously and you need to form relationships in the organisation that will keep you up to date when you have missed something important.

Just like contracting, none of the extra employment benefits like annual leave and sick leave apply to Fractionals, so make sure the amount you charge adequately covers all these things.

And just like contracting you will not have a “tribe” in the organisation you are working with, you will feel even more isolated than you would as a contractor. As Fractionals are part time and typically there for a good time not a long time, it is harder to forge a sense of belonging and long lasting relationships.

You will be bringing your years of experience and expertise to the organisations you work with, you will bring your personal Intellectual Property so to speak. Be clear that you own this IP, and be clear what you will leave behind and what you won’t. Especially if you have a set of tools and templates that you have created and iterated over your entire career. Will you leave those behind so your customer can keep using them, or not? A “yes I will” or a “no I won’t” is ok, the key is being clear and upfront with your potential customer on this, before you start working with them.

How is a fractional role different to hiring a consulting company?

One thing I always suggest a customer does is understand the business model of the people and the organisations they work with.

A consulting company’s business model is to charge you for hours worked and to have as many people as possible working for you, charging those hours.

A Fractional has a natural constraint in the number of hours they can charge, so their business model is to maximise the value they get for those hours.

Consulting companies work based on volume, Fractional’s work based on quality.

A Fractional is ideal when an organisation requires ongoing expertise but cannot justify a full-time hire. They function as an embedded team member, contributing regularly to operations and decision-making. This model works well for long-term but flexible needs, such as part-time leadership roles or execution-focused tasks, where having someone consistently engaged ensures continuity and deep organisational understanding without the overhead of a full-time employee.

On the other hand, a consulting company is best suited for specific, well-defined projects with a clear start and end. These companies should bring external insights, industry benchmarking, and specialised knowledge across multiple disciplines. If an organisation needs an independent perspective, strategic guidance, or expertise in areas beyond your internal capabilities, a consulting company provides targeted solutions without long-term commitments.

How is a fractional role different to hiring a contractor?

Same answer as above, what is the business model for a contractor?

Typically it is to charge an organisation for 40 hours or more a week for as many years as possible. If that is what you need delivered, hire a contractor and not a Fractional. By its very nature the term Fractional means less than 40 hours a week.

Does this part time pattern feel weirdly familiar?

Part time sharing of expensive things is not a new pattern.

In the early days of computing, mainframes were prohibitively expensive, and organisations could not afford to own one outright. Instead, they used time-sharing, where multiple users and organisations accessed computing power on demand, paying only for what they used. Fractional roles and teams work the same way, giving organisations access to expertise only when they need it without the full-time cost.

Today, we see this same fractional approach in cloud computing. Instead of buying, maintaining, and upgrading costly physical infrastructure, businesses now use cloud-based services, where they only pay for the storage, processing power, and tools they use. Cloud computing is essentially fractional IT infrastructure, scalable, cost-effective, and available on demand. This fractional model allows companies to shift from rigid, capital-intensive investments to a more flexible, operational model.

Fractional ways of working is not for everybody.

For some organisations it solves the problem of lack of budget to hire the best, or lack of availability of the skills and experience your organisation needs at a certain point in time.

For Fractional’s it provides a life-style that is hard to achieve with other ways of working patterns.

But like most things it’s a trade-off. So as always, choose the patterns that work for you and craft your own Way of Working.

If you’re not having fun, you are either doing the wrong thing, or doing the thing wrong.

Either way you need to make a change, perhaps Fractional working could be the change that works for you or for your organisation.

Keep making data simply magical