Fractional and interim strategy leadership
A senior strategy function for companies that need one, without carrying a full-time executive to get it. Two to four days a month, a three-month minimum, and the same person who ran your diagnostic.
The decision is the easy part. Staying is what makes it hold.
The Drive phase, extended
This is not a separate business line. It is what happens when a company arrives at the end of a diagnostic with a decision made, and concludes that the constraint on execution is senior attention rather than a plan.
Most strategy work fails in the same place. Not at the diagnosis, and not at the decision. It fails in the eight weeks afterwards, when the roadmap meets the existing operating cadence and quietly loses. Nobody rejects the strategy. It simply stops being the thing anyone is measured on.
A fractional engagement exists to hold that line. The same advisor who found the constraint stays in the operating rhythm long enough for the decision to survive contact with the business: sitting in the weekly review, holding the kill criteria, writing the board material, and telling you when the plan is wrong rather than when it is late.
It is deliberately not a staffing arrangement. You are not renting capacity. You are keeping senior judgment in the room during the period when judgment is most likely to be quietly overruled by whatever was already on the calendar.
What the engagement covers
The operating cadence
A weekly or fortnightly review against the 90-day plan, with the metric set agreed at the outset. The purpose is not status reporting. It is catching the moment a leading indicator turns before the lagging one does.
Decision support between the big moments
Pricing calls, hiring sequencing, partner terms, whether to fund a channel for another quarter. The questions that do not justify their own engagement but compound badly when answered on instinct.
Board and investor material
The narrative, the metric set, and the honest version of the risk section. Written to the standard a sceptical board member applies, not the standard that gets through the meeting.
Kill criteria, held
Pre-agreed thresholds for stopping, and someone independent enough to invoke them. This is the part companies find hardest to do for themselves, because the person who proposed the initiative is rarely the person who can end it.
Capability transfer
The templates, the review structure and the decision log stay with your team. The engagement is designed to end. If your leadership team cannot run the cadence without me by the end of it, the work has failed on its own terms.
Interim cover
Where a strategy or transformation lead has left and a search is running, the same arrangement covers the gap without prejudicing the hire. Explicitly time-boxed to the search.
When this is the right call
It fits when a consequential decision has been made and the next two quarters determine whether it works. When your functional leaders are strong but nobody owns the cross-functional view. When a board has asked for a level of strategic rigour the team cannot currently produce. When a transformation is underway and the plan is drifting back toward the comfortable version.
It does not fit when what you actually need is a full-time executive with authority over a team. A fractional advisor has influence, not line management. If the honest answer is that the role needs a hire, that is what you will hear, and a two-day-a-month arrangement will not fix it.
It also does not fit as a first engagement. The fractional arrangement follows a diagnostic, because retained advice without a shared diagnosis is how retainers become expensive habits. If we have not established what is binding, there is nothing to hold the line on.
How it is structured
- CommitmentTwo to four days a month, agreed at the outset and fixed for the term.
- Minimum termThree months. Shorter than that is a project, and is better bought as one.
- FeeA fixed monthly retainer, set after the audit. A quarter falls inside the same $15K to $75K band as a defined engagement, because it is scoped the same way: against a question, not against hours.
- BillingFixed monthly. No hourly billing and no overage invoices.
- ConcurrencyA small number of fractional engagements at any time. This is a constraint on the model, not a scarcity tactic: the value is senior attention, and attention does not scale.
- ExitReviewed at the end of each quarter against the outcomes agreed at the start. Renewal is a decision, not a default.
Fees are confirmed after the complimentary audit, because a two-day-a-month advisory cadence and an interim transformation lead are not the same purchase.
Against the alternatives
On fractional engagements
Can I start with the fractional arrangement instead of a project?
Generally no, and the reason is not commercial. Retained advice without a shared diagnosis turns into a standing meeting that nobody can evaluate. The diagnostic establishes what is binding and what the engagement is accountable for. Without it, there is no basis for deciding at the end of the quarter whether the arrangement is working.
Is two to four days a month actually enough?
For holding a decision through execution, usually yes, because the work is judgment and cadence rather than production. For building something (a function, a system, a team) it is not, and that should be scoped as a project or filled with a hire. If the honest answer is that the role needs more than this, you will hear that rather than a proposal to stretch the arrangement.
Do you take an equity or success-fee structure?
No. Fees are fixed and paid in cash. A success fee changes what an advisor is willing to tell you, and the entire value of an independent view is that it is not positioned to protect its own upside.
What happens at the end of the term?
A review against the outcomes agreed at the start, and one of three decisions: the work is done and the cadence stays with your team, a new question has surfaced and is scoped as its own engagement, or the arrangement is not producing and should stop. Renewal is never automatic.
Will you sign an NDA and work inside our systems?
Yes to both. Work happens in your tooling, your data room and your review meetings, because advice delivered from outside the operating cadence is the failure mode this model exists to avoid.
Related
Start with the constraint, not the contract.
Bring the decision your leadership team has not resolved. If a fractional arrangement is the right shape, we will get there. If it is not, you will hear that instead.