Fractional Leadership: Landing Executive Talent You Thought Was Out of Reach

By Ben Wolf

Do you own a small or midsize business? Wish you could find (and afford) game-changing executive talent to take your business to the next level? Now, you can.

Fractional Leadership shows you step-by-step how to land the experienced, been-there-done-that executive talent you thought was out of reach. If you're ready to step up your game in marketing, sales, operations, finance, or technology but you can't justify hiring a top-dollar executive full-time, a fractional leader can help you bridge the gap.

Through personal stories and real-world examples, you'll learn exactly what fractional leaders are, how business owners use them to break through the ceilings they hit in their business growth, the kinds of problems that are perfect for them, and how to find the right fractional leader for maximum impact and performance.

Stop waiting until you can afford a full-time C-level suite. Engage experts who can break through those challenges and take your business to the next level today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781544523606

Book preview

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Fractional Leadership

Fractional Leadership

Landing

Executive Talent You Thought

Was Out Of Reach

Ben Wolf

Copyright © 2021 Benjamin Wolf

All rights reserved.

Fractional Leadership: Landing Executive Talent You Thought Was Out of Reach

Hardcover Isbn: 978-1-5445-2361-3

Paperback Isbn: 978-1-5445-2359-0

Ebook Isbn: 978-1-5445-2360-6

Audiobook Isbn: 978-1-5445-2358-3

Contents

Introduction

What the Heck Is Fractional Leadership?

Part I

What Fractional Leadership Does for Your Business and How It Works

1.

The Frustration of Hitting the Ceiling When You Haven’t Built a Business This Size Before

2.

How Experienced Fractional Leaders Break Through Your Biggest Challenges So You Can Enjoy What You’ve Built

3.

What Fractional Leadership Engagements Look Like So You Know Exactly What to Expect

4.

How to Figure Out Whether You’re a Candidate for Fractional Leadership

5.

How to Find the Right Fractional Leader for Maximum Impact

Part II

How the Major Types of Fractional Leadership Work to Break You through to the Next Level

6.

Marketing

7.

Sales

8.

Operations

9.

EOS® Operations

10.

Finance

11.

Technology

Part III

Bringing It All Together

12.

Wrap-Up

Conclusion

Resources

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Introduction

What the Heck Is Fractional Leadership?

What is this book about and what does fractional even mean?

You built your company from the ground up, perhaps with a small leadership team at the beginning. You started your business because you thought you could do what you’re great at better than other people, or maybe you were just sick of working for someone else and building a business for them. Since you entered the insane world of owning your own business, you sweated, toiled, pivoted 1,000 times, worked to the bone, and now you’re thankfully past that grueling startup phase.

It’s supposed to get easier now, right? Wrong.

You realized that when you got to ten, twenty, or fifty or more employees, you were in uncharted territory. You knew how to do whatever it is you’re great at, whether that’s developing apps, graphic design, HVAC installation, or financial services. But you didn’t know how to run a small or midsize business. You found out that’s a completely different skillset.

You started to feel you needed the help of someone who’s done this before. Whether your main issues were marketing, sales, operations, finance, or technology, you wanted someone with experience to take over the parts of the business you don’t like doing and aren’t great at.

It would be great to hire someone with ten or fifteen years’ experience to join your leadership team, but at this stage you just don’t have the $300,000 for salary, benefits, taxes, and insurance to spend on someone like that. Plus, you don’t need that kind of person full-time anyway.

Enter Fractional Leadership®. Fractional Leadership is simply a slightly fancy way of referring to bringing in an experienced, been-there-done-that executive. That means someone who’s already done exactly what you want your business to do—usually multiple times. But they do it without the cost, commitment, or ramp-up time involved in a full-time hire.

There are thousands of Fractional Leaders in the United States alone. They are former full-time CMOs, Chief Sales Officers, COOs, Integrators for companies running on EOS®, CFOs, CTOs, and CIOs who now work part-time for multiple businesses at once.

Fractional means that the executive is only with you a portion of the time. They spend a fraction of their time with you so that you can get the benefit of their leadership for a fraction of the tremendous cost of a full-time experienced executive.

This book is the first comprehensive guide to Fractional Leadership. It explains who retains Fractional Leaders, the problems they solve, how the engagements work, how to find the right one for you, how to set up an engagement for success, and how the five major categories of Fractional Leadership work.

I’ve distilled my own experience and everything I’ve learned about Fractional Leadership into this book so you can learn what Fractional Leadership is, whether it’s what you need to break through the ceilings you’ve been slamming your head against in your business, and how to the get the maximum benefit for your business if you do decide to engage with a Fractional Leader®.

Whom Is This Book For?

You’re in the right place if you’re the founder, owner, or an executive on the leadership team of a small or midsize business. You have 5–250 people in your company, and you’re extremely frustrated because you’re hitting the ceiling with the business generally or perhaps in some specific part of it.

Your main blockage may be in your marketing. You’ve stopped getting the results you used to. You’ve used up most of your low-hanging-fruit prospects and now you’re paying more for worse results.

Perhaps you’re frustrated with sales. You’re half-managing the sales team yourself and either they or the rest of your company are suffering from neglect. Maybe you hired an underperforming sales manager instead of someone with robust experience to save money, or you elevated your top salesperson to become head of sales. Now you have a bad sales manager and you’ve lost your top salesperson—the worst of both worlds.

If your challenges are more all-pervasive, it could be an operations issue. You may have underperforming team members, but you don’t know what to do about them because you love them as people. You might have too much turnover or your operations can’t keep pace with sales. Customers or clients get upset and you have no clear, efficient processes for people to follow to get consistent results. You may lack good data and find yourself always making decisions based on gut instinct and intuition rather than objective facts.

Perhaps your challenge is with finance. Your company grew up with the same person doing your bookkeeping, payroll, A/R, and A/P. But they don’t have any previous CFO experience and are now managing your multimillion-dollar revenue. They’re great, but they’re out of their depth. Or perhaps you’re going through a cash crisis or financial transaction like a merger, acquisition, or audit, and you know you need deeper experience and financial leadership.

Your biggest pain point might be technology. The main product you sell to your customers is a proprietary system you developed. But you’re relying on a patchwork of freelance developers, an MSP, a VoIP provider, and consultants to keep the operation afloat. But you can’t keep your product up to speed on your own anymore. You’re one outage or bug away from disaster. Perhaps you use out-of-the-box products but rely on them so thoroughly in the services you provide your clients that you know you need more internal, ongoing expertise to own that part of the business and take it off your hands so you can sleep at night.

Regardless of which part of your business needs the most help, you know you need experienced executive leadership. But you either can’t afford it full-time or you aren’t ready to hire some of that caliber because of the heavy commitment and long ramp-up time.

Those considering Fractional Leadership typically feel consultants aren’t the answer either. Neither you nor anyone on your team has the bandwidth to oversee and fully implement long-term their recommendations. So you don’t want to spend the time or significant money involved in retaining a consultant (or another consultant).

This book will explain what Fractional Leaders do for you, how they typically structure their engagements, whether Fractional Leadership is the right fit for you, and how to find the right Fractional Leader for your unique business.

Who Am I and Why Am I Writing about Fractional Leadership?

As a Fractional Leader, I know how I’ve helped clients overcome challenges and blockages they’d suffered from for years and almost come to accept, thinking that they were inevitable. I have also searched for and retained multiple Fractional Leaders on behalf of clients. I’ve met and interviewed countless other Fractional Leaders through the podcast I host, Win Win—An Entrepreneurial Community,¹ and I’ve learned from and spoken to many others through a lot of networking and connection-building in the entrepreneurial world.

Finally, I learn more and more all the time about Fractional Leadership from both business owners and Fractional Leaders through the matchmaking service I provide through www.FractionalLeadership.io. Through this platform, business owners fill out a short profile, and within three days, they receive up to three vetted Fractional Leaders who fit what they’re looking for and have availability.

I realized the only information available about Fractional Leadership was on a patchwork of hundreds, if not thousands, of individual Fractional Leader websites spread throughout the internet. I saw how manual, ad hoc, and time-consuming it was to search for information about Fractional Leadership. There were no comprehensive books for business owners and leaders explaining what Fractional Leadership is, how it works, whom it’s good for, whom it’s not good for, and how to find the right Fractional Leader while avoiding the pitfalls and mistakes that cause some engagements to end in failure.

So I decided to write this book to serve as the first book of its type in the history of planet Earth (to my knowledge).

What You’re Going to Learn

I found the most useful way to give you the background you need to understand Fractional Leadership, the tools to know whether it’s for you, and how to find the best Fractional Leader (FL) for your business was to divide the book into three sections.

Part I (Chapters 1–5) explains what Fractional Leadership is, how it works, how to determine whether it’s for you, what kind of FL you need, and how to find the right person.

To give you the context necessary to understand where using an FL might fit into your business, in Chapter 1 I tell the story of what I saw in the business I built without someone who’d done this before on our team. I explain the growth trajectory of Fractional Leadership and how and why it’s become so much more popular now, especially after COVID and the associated lockdowns. Finally, I paint a picture of the kind of changes business owners and leadership teams see when using an FL.

Next, in Chapter 2, I explain, at a high level, the theory and experience behind why Fractional Leadership works and what kind of help they give their clients. Hint: the main benefit is usually not simply being a highly skilled worker or an extra set of hands. It’s more about leadership and driving execution. It means bringing in someone who’s already done exactly what you need who can take responsibility for driving execution on fulfilling your greatest need so you don’t have to.

What exactly do FLs do and how do their engagements work? I explain the answer to this question in Chapter 3 so you can get a clear, concrete picture of what Fractional Leadership is. This will help you determine whether Fractional Leadership is something you should explore for your own business.

Fractional Leadership is not the right solution for everyone. Even if you’re facing the kind of frustrations and challenges an FL solves, your personality, the nature of your company, or your budget may mean you’re not an ideal candidate. Chapter 4 teaches you five questions to help you determine whether Fractional Leadership is right for you. If it’s not, I offer several alternatives you should consider to help you address the underlying reason you investigated Fractional Leadership to begin with.

Finding the right FL can be a daunting prospect. You must clearly answer several questions before searching for someone so that you can find the kind of person you need. Chapter 5 explains how to determine what kind of FL you need, where to find prospective candidates, and what to ask them so you have the information you need to make the right decision.

In Part II (Chapters 6–11), I explain at a high level how each of the five major types of Fractional Leadership work. In each chapter in this section, I explain what things look like in your business before retaining an FL of each category, what their engagements look like, and some questions to consider asking prospective candidates before making a decision.

I cover Fractional Chief Marketing Officers (FCMOs) in Chapter 6, Chief Sales Officers (FCSOs) in Chapter 7, Chief Operating Officers (FCOOs) in Chapter 8, Fractional Integrators (FIs) in Chapter 9, Chief Financial Officers (FCFOs) in Chapter 10, and Chief Technology Officers (FCTOs) and Chief Information Officers (FCIOs) in Chapter 11.

I bring it all together in Part III where I exhibit my crystal-ball-reading skills in Chapter 12 with a prediction of the future of Fractional Leadership.

Finally, in Chapter 13, I consolidate all the questions and resources mentioned throughout this book into one chapter. This includes several brief checklists and questionnaires you can use to determine whether you’re a good candidate for Fractional Leadership, what kind of FL you need, how to find the right FL for you, resources for where to find the right FL for you, how to set up the engagement with your chosen FL for success, and a sample Fractional Leadership agreement.

Now that you know what’s in store for you, let’s get to it.

Part I

What Fractional Leadership Does for Your Business and How It Works

1.

The Frustration of Hitting the Ceiling When You Haven’t Built a Business This Size Before

I was building my first entrepreneurial