When to hire a fractional leader (and how to get it right)

Let’s play out a scenario. You’re running a rapidly scaling business. You’ve built it from the ground up but you start to realise that you’re at the centre of everything. You start to think maybe some things within the business are beyond your abilities. Your senior leadership team has been great, but the cracks are starting to show and there are functions within the company that are starting to hold you back.

Suddenly, an option opens up where you can get a chief financial officer or chief marketing officer with decades of experience in a large corporate within your sector to help you fix those issues. Not only do they bring a wealth of knowledge of tools, functions and systems, but they also come with a network of people within that same role that they can lean on to help take your business to the next level. And best of all, it won’t even break the bank. Welcome to the world of fractional leadership.

Sara Daw is a business owner, future of work expert, writer and pioneer in fractional leadership. A qualified chartered accountant with years of experience in the field, she did an MBA at London Business School after “realising there was more to life than spreadsheets”. She got married, started a family and got to a point where she didn’t know how to be a mother and have a fulfilling career.

Fractional leadership was yet to become part of our lexicon but an early iteration saw her take up a part-time financial director position. She had connected with Colin Mills who was in a similar stage in life but had set up the FD Centre to help people fill those roles. She joined Mills on his mission and recalls those days: “More and more CFOs gravitated towards us because more wanted to have freedom from corporate life, more variety, flexibility, control of their lives. And everywhere we went, there were entrepreneurs who needed this skillset.”