Senior leadership your business needs — without hiring full-time.

A consultant produces a deliverable — a report, a roadmap, a set of recommendations — and leaves the implementation to your team. A fractional executive joins your team for a defined slice of time, operates inside your business with P&L accountability for the area they lead, and is measured on outcomes rather than deliverables. The work is operational, not advisory. We sit in your operating cadence, attend leadership meetings, make decisions within agreed-upon scope, and own the result.

Most often: fractional COO, fractional VP of Operations, fractional VP of Quality, and fractional Chief of Staff. We also serve in domain-specific roles where the principal consultants have deep operating experience — quality and compliance leadership, manufacturing operations, supply chain, growth operations, and post-acquisition integration. The specific role title is shaped by what your business actually needs, not by a fixed menu.

Typical clients have product-market fit, generate roughly $1M to $30M in revenue, and have hit a stage where a missing senior executive is constraining growth — but a full-time C-level or VP hire is either premature, financially heavy, or hard to recruit. Fractional engagements close that gap with executive-level operating experience at a fraction of full-time cost. We also work with companies post-acquisition, in turnaround, or scaling through a specific transition where senior temporary leadership is the right structural answer.

An interim executive is a full-time temporary placement, typically for 3 to 12 months, filling a vacancy until a permanent hire is made. Fractional is part-time and ongoing — typically 8 to 30 hours per month for 6 months to multiple years, depending on need. Interim executives are commonly recruited through retained search; fractional executives are engaged through direct partnership with proven operators. The economic and structural fit is very different. We do fractional, not interim.

Most engagements range from 8 to 30 hours per month, structured as a monthly retainer with defined scope. The right cadence depends on what you need: lighter-touch oversight (8-15 hours) for clients with strong existing leadership who need senior judgment on key decisions; deeper involvement (20-30 hours) for clients where the fractional executive is the de facto leader of a function. We calibrate during the scope call.

Often, yes — and it's one of our strongest engagement patterns. A fractional VP of Quality role naturally includes ISO management-system ownership: management review, internal audit program, surveillance audit preparation, and ongoing system maintenance. For clients pursuing or maintaining certification while building out their quality function, fractional VP of Quality eliminates the need to either hire a full-time executive or stitch together separate ISO consultants — one senior operator owns the function end to end.

Engagement length varies with purpose. Some are tied to specific transitions (post-acquisition integration, leadership succession, specific growth initiatives) and run 6 to 12 months. Others are ongoing strategic partnerships running multiple years, scaled up or down as the business evolves. Either is fine. We agree on initial scope and review the partnership every 6 months.

Tailored per engagement — depends on time commitment, scope, and complexity. Typically structured as a monthly retainer with defined hours and overage rates, plus annual prepay incentives. Materially less than the all-in cost of a full-time executive at the same experience level (research suggests 40 to 70 percent cost savings is typical across the fractional market), without severance exposure or equity dilution. We don't publish rate cards because tailored scope is the entire point. Reach out and we'll walk through honest scope.