When a seat has to be filled
Fractional and interim executives
A senior seat filled in weeks, without a search.
When it applies
Three situations, all of them urgent.
Sometimes a portfolio company does not need advice. It needs someone in the seat.
A departure at the wrong moment. A capability the team has never had and cannot yet justify hiring full time. A transition that needs an operator who has done it before and has no career stake in the outcome.
Configurations
Scoped to the gap, not to a job title.
- Chief Transformation Officer — the passage from technology to product-market fit to scale
- Commercial and go-to-market leadership — where the pipeline has to be built, not managed
- Capital and transaction leadership — raise preparation, structuring, M&A process
- Technical and project development leadership — first-of-a-kind deployment, project finance structuring
- Technology and commercial assessment — a standing read across the portfolio: what the companies are actually building, where the gaps are, and which positions are drifting from the thesis they were bought on
- ESG, carbon and data governance — reporting, controls, and a KPI architecture that survives an audit
How it works
Two shapes. The difference is whether the chair is occupied.
Two shapes, and the difference is not seniority. It is whether there is somebody in the chair.
Fractional is a senior operator part-time alongside the existing team, two to three days a week, in a capability the company cannot yet justify hiring full time. The team stays. The seat sits beside them. It runs to a cadence rather than to an end date, and it usually runs longer than planned because the need is structural.
Interim is the chair filled outright, four to five days a week, because it is empty or the person in it is leaving. Scoped against a defined outcome and a defined end date, with the handover to a permanent hire designed in from the start. It ends, and it is built to end.
An interim seat costs roughly twice a fractional one because it is roughly twice the week. Naming which one you need before the call is worth more than any other thing you can do in advance, and the router will name it in five questions.
We are not a search firm and we do not place people we have not worked with.
- Fractional
- Two to three days a week · three-month minimum · monthly retainer
- Interim
- Four to five days a week · to a defined end date · monthly retainer
- Both
- Scoped to an outcome, with the handover designed in
Not sure which
Five questions. Three minutes.
Sometimes a company does not need advice, it needs someone in the chair. The harder question is which chair, and it is answered wrong more often than it is answered late.
A team concludes it needs a commercial hire when the finding is that the founder never handed over the buyer relationships. A fund buys three months of facilitation when the seat is simply empty. The router names the seat — transformation, commercial, capital and transaction, technical delivery, or governance — and leaves fractional versus interim to a conversation, because that turns on notice periods and handover rather than on a checkbox.
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