Can’t afford a C-Suite executive? Here’s what to know about fractional leadership

Greg Plum, director/principal of Partner Ready North America, didn’t exactly plan to get into fractional leadership.

He’d heard about it in his network of senior-level executives like himself and thought it sounded like a great idea for C-Suite folks who have the time to contract with growing companies. He, at the time, had a full-time executive position.

And then, abruptly, he didn’t.

“One day I got a phone call on a Friday morning from my boss that I had never met in person and he had that news that nobody ever wants to hear,” Plum told Technically. “Essentially, that Friday, he said, okay, today’s your last day with the company. I was shocked, you know? Everything seemed to be going great, from a numbers perspective.”

Suddenly, he had time for fractional leadership

Fractional work — contracting a specialized senior-level employee out of a company’s price range for a certain number of hours a month — has been around for years, especially in the financial services industry.

Plum, a C-Suite-level tech executive who specializes in partnerships, started landing fractional contracts almost immediately after losing his job. It helped that he had those connections, including people in the Partner Ready ecosystem — the global fractional partnership leadership firm where Plum is now a director/principal for North America. Since becoming a bit of an expert on the topic, he’s now helping to expand this kind of high-end gig-working for senior professionals from large cities to smaller markets like Wilmington Delaware, where he lives.

Here’s what you should know about fractional leadership:

Fractional Leadership is not consulting

On the surface, fractional leadership sounds an awful lot like consulting, which is also done by experienced professionals. While a consultant works from the outside to help a business in a certain area, a fractional leader is a member of the team who happens to not work 40 hours a week.

“A contractor is always going to be on the outside,” Plum said. “But that’s not a bad thing. It’s just a different, it’s solving a different problem.”

Contracting a senior executive for a few hours per month saves a lot of money, but it’s not cheap

Because these are high-level executives, their full-time salary might exceed the payroll of a small team. Startups in need of strategic vision can weigh it like this: Should we pay a full-time salary for a new manager or director, or use that money to pay a C-Suite executive with a strong track record for a few hours a week? In some cases, the quality of fractional leadership is worth more than a full-time employee with less expertise.

“It’s a very leveraged approach,” Plum said.

There’s no entry level in fractional leadership

Working a few hours a week for one or two companies and earning more than what a lot of full-time employees make sounds like a dream job, but you can’t do it fresh out of college. To command those rates and become sought after, a fractional leader needs years of experience as an upper-level executive and a track record of making things happen. If you have that experience, you’re well positioned to do this kind of work, whether after a job loss, a move to semi-retirement or just a lifestyle change.

Fractional leaders can focus on their strength

Executives don’t usually get to focus on one single area they excel at and nothing else, but fractional leaders do.

“[My strength] happens to be partnerships. That is my focus,” Plum said. “That is what I’m best at, what I love to do. So that’s what I get to do. I don’t have to necessarily go and take a job as a full-time CMO with a company where you have to do all these other things that really are ancillary, but required. You don’t have to do that.”

No one has to know

If a company contracts a fractional CIO, that person is their CIO for the duration of the contract, period. A fractional CIO doesn’t have to introduce themself as a fractional employee, but just the CIO, which can be beneficial in networking situations — particularly since a major perk of having an experienced C-Suite executive is that they have deep and valuable connections.

“I was in Vegas a few weeks ago, at an event,” Plum said. “Nobody knew. Unless I told them that I was fractional, you wouldn’t know it, right? Because your job is to represent that brand to that audience.”

To learn more about fractional leadership, check out Plum discussing the topic on the Kennett Square-based podcast, “Looking Forward:”

Listen to “Looking Forward”