January 17, 2025

What exactly does “fractional” mean?

The fine folks over at the Fractional Executive Summit asked me to present a talk to their 2000+ attendees about how to price fractional services.

While painstorming for my talk, I discovered that lots of folks who are new to fractional consulting have a very unclear understanding of what the word “fractional” means in the context of professional services.

I haven’t worked with every kind of fractional executive, but I’ve worked with a lot of fractional CTOs. I even was one for several years.

Here’s what I learned...

The trick to building a successful practice as a fractional CTO (or whatever other CxO) is to clearly understand what FRACTIONAL means.

❌ A fractional CTO is NOT someone who has all the responsibilities of a full-time CTO, but who only responds to them on a part-time basis.

✅ A fractional CTO is someone who only has a fraction of the responsibilities of a full-time CTO.

Here’s the thing...

You cannot expect to handle all of the responsibilities of a full-time CTO on a part-time basis.

It’s simply impossible.

Heck, full-time CTOs probably can’t get all their responsibilities accomplished in a 40-hour work week so how the heck would you be able to do it in five?

So...

The key to having a profitable fractional executive engagement is to decide which subset of a CTO’s duties you want to be responsible for and stick to it.

Yours,

—J

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