The biggest challenge I face every time I’m brought in as a fractional CMO or COO isn’t setting goals or hitting milestones. It’s getting the company’s team to trust me.
That’s hard for any new executive. It’s ten times harder for a fractional one.Trust is hard to build. It’s easy to destroy: one mistake, a piece of criticism, an unwanted
Fractional COO or CMO can be the best executive leadership value a growing company ever gets. It can also be a waste of money. Most founders never figure out which one they hired until the engagement is already over.Here’s the problem. The title looks the same on a LinkedIn profile whether the person spent fifteen years running functions inside real
Every PE-backed CPG, food-and-beverage, and consumer products deal I’ve seen this year has a pricing model built on last year’s sourcing costs. That’s normal. It’s also increasingly wrong, and the gap is showing up faster than most deal teams expected.Tariff volatility in 2026 isn’t a line item anymore. It’s a structural risk that most diligence processes still treat like a
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If there’s one thing I’ve learned about integration projects, it’s that every one eventually leads to the same predicament: to ERP or not to ERP, that is the question.
It starts focused. An inventory tracker. A marketing dashboard. Something specific and contained.
Then the requirements get mapped out and the scope grows. More data sources. More connections. More automation.
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The Fractional Executive Market Has a Problem
A fractional CMO or COO is a senior executive who works with a company part-time, typically on a retainer, providing C-suite thinking and leadership without the cost or commitment of a full-time hire. The model works because experience, not hours, is the scarce resource.
That premise is now under pressure.
As a fractional
Most founder/CEOs facing a major business problem think about hiring in one way: find a full-time executive to solve it.
That instinct makes sense. Big problem, dedicated person, full-time focus. But in practice, hiring a full-time COO or CMO is a long, expensive, slow process. By the time a new executive is making real impact, your business has been waiting
Two Founders Can Hire the Same Fractional Executive. One Gets Results. The Other Gets an Expensive Mistake.
I’ve sat on both sides of this story enough times to know it’s not about talent.
Same resume. Same hours per week. Same hourly rate. Wildly different outcomes.
In one engagement, I rebuilt an entire operations function in four months, getting the team
There are some business challenges that can’t be solved using the usual playbook
When running a business not every problem is hard because it’s complicated. Some are hard because of what kind of problem they are.
Here’s what I mean. Certain challenges have a specific profile. They might require someone to lead a team, not just advise one. The work
The leaders winning right now aren’t the ones who predicted every disruption.They’re the ones who accepted that disruption was the new normal and built systems and mindsets that can repeatedly identify, assess and mitigate them.What makes this moment genuinely difficult isn’t a single disruption. It’s that the underlying forces most businesses count on being stable, or at least slow-moving, are