Fractionals United Blog

With the current economic climate, many businesses are struggling to maintain their operations and stay afloat. For small businesses and startups, this is especially true as they often don’t have the resources or flexible workforce to quickly pivot to meet new challenges. However, there is an option that many companies may not be aware of—hiring fractional leaders. What is a Fractional Leader?  A fractional leader, also known as a “part-time C-suite executive” is an embedded senior leader who works part-time for your business on an open ended basis. A fractional leader can provide experienced guidance in times of difficulty and help you navigate through economic hard times better than ever before. Learn more about what defines a Fractional in our prior post ! Some of the most common Fractional Leaders include: Chief Marketing Officers Chief People and Talent Officers Chief Operations Officers Chief Finance Officers Chief Strategy Officers Chief Sales and Business Development Officers H

Now that "fractional" is more popular and in the news, it is important to understand what the difference between that and consulting is. I was recently part of an Operator's Guild panel on just this topic, and as part of our presentation deck, created the below table to highlight the differences between all the types of non-traditional leadership roles: To put it simply, there is no difference between a fractional CXO and their full-time counterpart except that the fractional will be part-time and therefore have other work, whether other fractional or consulting work. I personally do a combination of fractional COO work and workflow consulting. And fractional is always a leadership role, although not necessarily executive level, and needs to be synonymous with that.  Another way to look at the difference between fractionals and consultants is through two more lenses: what are they hired for and what their focus has to be. Consultants are hired for their skills; they may

Fractionals United turned a month old this past week, and broke 200 members that day.  And tomorrow we launch on Product Hunt , so please check us out and share. We also had our first meetup this past week and it was really great connecting with some of the members beyond slack. We realized collectively that we're actually pioneers revolutionizing the future of work since we strongly believe that fractional work is  the future. And here's why (or at least one of the many reasons why). I started reading Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter  by Liz Wiseman . If you haven't read it and you're a leader, I highly recommend it.  The premise of the book is that there are "leaders" who need to be the smartest in the room and diminish those around them, and there are others—the "multipliers"—who bring out the best in everyone they work with. (There's a lot more to it, but I'm summarizing and keeping it high level.) Multipliers are e

I was doing fractional COO work before it was called that, went full-time briefly with one of my previous fractional clients, and returned to a very different fractional market. On the one hand, it's now popular and in the news, and there are also many more fractional leaders out there. On the other hand, my previous major source of fractional leads was no longer viable, so I had to figure out how to do this in the new paradigm. So I went looking for a community.  I had discovered the benefits of online communities over the last several years and wanted to find one for fractionals, so that I could learn from others and perhaps collaborate with them. I found a few fractional-related organizations and programs, but not one that was a community first and foremost. As many other founders before me, I decided to build the thing I needed. I posted the idea in several communities to see if there was interest, and when I realized there was, quickly started a free slack and within a day, a