Who Are The People That Work Fractionally?
Generally, C-level executives like CFOs, CMOs, CTOs, etc. love working fractionally. On the flip side, startups and scaleups show the most interest in hiring fractionally due to work and payment flexibility.
On a broader scale, we can categorize fractionally working professionals into two major classes — Strategic executives and Hands-on type executives.
#1. Strategic Executives
Strategic executives primarily help create effective strategies, hire candidates, and manage teams. Common reasons startups and scaleups hire strategic fractional executives are for optimizing operations for scalability, ongoing budgeting and spend planning, product marketing strategy, and as an alternative to a technical co-founder.
The ideal candidates for these roles have previously done exactly what’s needed at one or multiple companies in the past, and can do it way faster than a more junior person who is still working their way up the learning curve, with a much lower probability of mistakes.
#2. Hands-On Type Executives
Hands-on type executives are more like operator executives who do a lot of heavy lifting.
For example, an Operating CMO will be involved in crafting content and optimizing ads, not just managing a team. Meaning, they will be the one who will go into the nitty gritty details of the work that is being done, and oftentimes they are the only person in their department.
If you’re a pre-seed or seed stage startup, we’d suggest you hire a hands-on type executive. This is because, at the early stages, startups primarily need “get it done” types. At the same time, most hands-on type executives are also great at strategic planning.
Apart from executive roles, there are many other types of roles you can hire for on a fractional basis.
At Shiny, we have a fractional designer and fractional SDR. One of them wants to stay as a fractional employee by choice for family reasons, and the other will join us full time in the coming months when it makes sense for both us and the team member.
Similarly, you can also expect engineers, product managers, and many more people to start working fractionally.
