Everyone tells you that hiring execs is some of the most consequential work you’ll do as an early-stage founder. And yet it’s frustratingly hard to find the time to do it well.
This might sound familiar: You desperately need a head of ops, but you have few spare hours in the day to find one. Even if you could carve out the time, you’d feel ill-equipped to assess candidates, and the hiring process would probably drag on for months. Then, of course, there’s the paralyzing fear of dropping a bad-fit leader into your single-digit team. You could promote a star player into the role, but you’d need to sink a ton of time and resources into training them.
But building or buying a new exec aren’t the only options. There’s a less risky alternative: renting.
After a decade of standing up new business units and corporate functions at PayPal as a strategy and BizOps leader, Amanda Schwartz Ramirez is now an exec “for rent” as a fractional COO and advisor. She helps founders zoom past a months-long search, skip the “90-day listening tour” and battle-test open leadership seats. As an “internal advisor,” she can help fill a founding team’s immediate needs — while also helping them prepare for a full-time search.
Schwartz Ramirez (who previously stopped by The Review to share her ops wisdom) is part of a wave of seasoned operators shifting into part-time and advisory work. Driving this boom of fractional executive talent, in her view, is a mixture of scar tissue from the pandemic and a desire for more ownership over their employment. “There’s a growing movement of mid-career, senior execs who want the freedom to work from anywhere, for anyone, on things they care about and on their own terms,” she says.
That was true in her case. “I started down this road a few years ago, after a founder friend pushed me to consider going fractional,” she says. With a stint at a hypergrowth startup and a decade-plus of experience building businesses in emerging industries under her belt, Schwartz Ramirez had to decide between going all in on a single company or staying broad in one domain and building a portfolio. She chose the latter, and Garden Labs, her fractional and advisory practice for early-stage startups, was born (she also teaches a Maven course for execs looking to make the same transition).
You’ve likely seen this legion of fractional CMOs, CTOs, CFOs — leaders in just about every function — pop up on LinkedIn. But on the startup side, this new crop of free-agent execs has created some confusion around what “fractional” really means.
In this exclusive interview, Schwartz Ramirez answers the FAQs she regularly fields from early-stage founders and their teams about working with fractional execs. She lays out how this type of leader fits into the product-market fit process and which functions they can slot into to drive the most impact at each level (spoiler: they won’t tell you what product to build, but they can offer the horsepower and expertise to help you climb over obstacles and move through the levels of PMF faster). She also shares pointers for finding and vetting the right fractional support.
Whether you’re actively hunting for a fractional leader or weighing alternatives to a full-time hire, this guide has you covered.
Common reasons for bringing on fractional executives
So how is a fractional exec different from a consultant or advisor? Schwartz Ramirez offers a simple definition of her own work to better paint the picture for founders: A fractional exec is a part-time leader, or an internal, hands-on advisor (or to extend the housing metaphor, a leader with a short-term lease).
She also advises startups, which has a typical hands-off dynamic. Founders will ping her for advice, and they’ll still make the call or execute the task themselves. But she finds that the startups she advises often reach a point where they need someone more experienced to actually do the work, whether that’s building the financial model, running the planning process or hiring the VP of Eng.
“I found my way into fractional work as an advisor. I’d be helping a founder with COO hiring, or digging in with a crypto startup on fintech partnerships. After some time they’d turn to me and ask, ‘Could you just do it?’” she says. “A fractional leader has the expertise of a senior exec, but lends it on a part-time basis. They bring with them the guidance and wisdom of an advisor, but also the horsepower and management muscle to execute. And unlike an outside consultant, they embed deeply within the team to move things forward.”
Across her tours of duty, her work has included:
- Helping a pre-PMF fintech startup navigate payment processing partnerships
- Standing up an initial HR function at a Series B startup
- Helping a growth-stage startup thoughtfully build out their management team (with both full-time and fractional leaders)
- Providing in-context, hands-on guidance to a recently promoted COO
“All fractional leaders bring a mix of functional, industry and stage-specific expertise,” Schwartz Ramirez says. “As a founder, your job is to figure out what unique mix you need right now.”
These are three of the most common signals that tell Schwartz Ramirez that a startup could benefit from the steady hand of a fractional exec, versus just an advisor or a consultant:
- You’re preparing for or navigating an inflection point or milestone. There might be extra demands on your business from market pull, a regulatory push or an unexpected leadership exit. You could benefit from some internal leadership muscle, fast, without long-term strings attached.
- Exec roles have sat open for awhile. Maybe you’re not on the same page internally about what you need for these roles, or the talent pool is slim pickings. You can learn more from a fractional leader about what you’ll eventually need out of a full-time hire while relieving immediate friction.
- You feel ongoing pain in a particular function. You may not be ready to hire a full-time exec, but you know you could benefit from some new thinking and best practices.
She sums up the potential upside of going the fractional route like this: Fractional execs can jump in and drive impact on a tight timeline — without the pressure (and cost) of long-term commitment.
Here are a few use cases she sees most often for startups that bring on a fractional exec:
- Bring in an expert you couldn’t afford full-time. Maybe it’s the ex-CRO with the exact background you’re looking for, or a CFO who tends to work with companies more flush with later-stage funding — you can “rent” senior talent that you otherwise may not be able to hire full-time, for a fraction of their time and cost.
- Add management muscle. Bring in someone who’s done their reps with the gnarlier parts of company-building: leading a team through a rough patch, giving tough feedback, hiring and firing.
- Coach an A-player. A seasoned fractional exec can mentor a high-performer toward or following a stretch promotion.
- Kick the tires on new functions. Figure out who and what you’ll need to seed a new function or team before making the mistake of over- or under-investing.
Fractional execs give startups an opportunity to borrow some big guns to get you to your next horizon.
Tripwires of opening up a full-time seat or white-knuckling internally
Say you’ve been missing sales targets and struggling to fortify your pipeline — it’s just the founders and a handful of junior account executives. So you opened up a search for a full-time head of sales, but so far, no dice. Should you trudge on with your search, give your star account executive a shot at leading the team or pause and look for fractional help?
“As an advisor, I regularly help founders weigh their options. Fractional is one route, but there are others,” says Schwartz Ramirez.
Before going with a fractional hire, she recommends thoroughly assessing your alternatives, which are typically:
- Promote someone on the existing team into the role
- Find and onboard a new full-time exec hire
- Keep tacking the scope on to new team members and hope it sticks (as Schwartz Ramirez calls it, “white-knuckling it” as a team)
Thorns can crop up on many of these paths. Shifting an existing teammate into the open exec seat is a gamble. That person succeeding in the expanded role is the best-case scenario, but you’re betting on whether they have the resources and capability to grow into that role, while covering their current responsibilities — and without burning out.
“If you load up somebody inside of the business who doesn't have outside expertise, you just hope that they learn it fast,” she says. “It's a bet on the existing team, which likely requires reprioritization of efforts underway and some degree of support. I’ve seen this work well when a high degree of internal knowledge is required, but sometimes, you need industry expertise and networks, and those take time to build.”
Finding the right full-time person to fill the seat is another type of time-consuming bet. This person needs to complement your company’s needs, and as an early-stage startup, those change often. They need to mesh well with your culture — and set the tone for the team as it grows, but this isn’t always obvious upfront. And they need to have the right skills and pedigree, but it takes careful discretion to determine what kind of background makes sense. At the center of this Venn diagram is the “slam dunk hire,” as Schwartz Ramirez puts it, which is both hard to find and likely in short supply.
“I see this often with HR, finance and even product and engineering. Even if you have enough conviction around a need for functional leadership, the profile is still unclear,” she says.
Winding up with a costly mishire has real ramifications. “Once you lock in a full-time exec, there are incentives at play to keep them around for at least a year,” she says. "This lock-in impacts not just your small team’s velocity, but its morale as well — so tread carefully.”
Finding the perfect executive is like trying to throw darts at a moving dartboard and hit a bullseye. A fractional leader can help you understand what you need while you're figuring out what it is you're building.
Your budget will also likely inform the route you choose. “Sometimes, outsourcing is the most effective way to staff a problem, and once you reach your next company milestone, you internalize the function. In this case, slotting in a fractional exec could be a way to ensure strong oversight and connectivity without breaking the bank,” she says.
Where fractional executives fit into the product-market fit process
Don’t rush to assemble a Frankenstein-like org chart of fractional talent for an early-stage startup. Schwartz Ramirez offers a word of warning for founders in the earliest rungs of the PMF ladder: “I don't think that fractional is the answer for every function, especially as you build out the core product, design and engineering engine,” she says. “The question you should be asking is: Are there any industry or functional gaps that we can close to help us move faster?”
She advises starting with the areas of the business where you’re feeling the most friction or have a lack of experience or intuition. Fractional leaders can layer into your PMF process to help you avoid detours and take a straighter path.
She shares an example of how she supported a startup while they hunted for PMF. “I dropped in as a fractional head of business development, and I helped the founding team clarify their value proposition and pitch for several customer groups and then go out and test each. This was all before they had a product,” she says. “So while I was an input in the PMF process, I wasn’t driving it.”
To steer clear of diluting the core product discovery process, she recommends asking these questions upfront before hiring a fractional exec:
- Are you clear on why this person is here, and what perspective you’re hoping they will bring that informs your PMF process?
- Are there specific bottlenecks that you’re looking for an experienced leader to clear? Specific types of functional or industry expertise you’re lacking?
- Can you establish a part-time working relationship that ensures your fractional leader gets the context they need without falling out of sync every 48 hours?
Below, she breaks down the role of a fractional leader throughout each level of PMF and which areas of the business make the most sense for them to tap into.
Nascent PMF: Accelerate toward your thesis
The primary goal of bringing on fractional execs at this stage — likely around pre-seed or seed-stage funding — is to build out functional and industry knowledge where the founding team has gaps. “You can grab a fraction of an industry insider to help you accelerate your learning,” says Schwartz Ramirez.
She sketches out several examples of how a fractional leader can slot into make-or-break functions in this first leg of the PMF journey:
- Sales: A fractional CRO with extensive connections in your industry can give the team more at-bats with qualified leads. They can help you test product assumptions to close your next handful of customers.
- Technology: A fractional CTO can complement a non-technical founder and manage tech teams (onshore or offshore) and advise on overall architecture and strategy.
- Product or design: A fractional CPO or design lead can add rigor to the product discovery process along with customer or industry insight to guide product iteration.
- Compliance: A fractional CCO can make sure your initial product clears regulatory hurdles and set up compliance guardrails as you iterate.
“In all of these cases, the founding team still owns the core PMF engine. Fractional folks are there to move things along faster and prevent costly mistakes,” she says.
Developing PMF: Dial up your efficiency
As you start to tick through some of the classic early PMF milestones, like clearing your first few million in ARR or closing a double-digit number of customers, fractional leaders can jump in to fill new leadership seats that are outside of the founding team’s domain. “Hiring fractional folks at this stage can also help you preserve your budget and invest smartly — rather than over- or under-investing,” Schwartz Ramirez points out.
Here’s where fractional leaders can plant the seeds for new functions:
- Marketing: A fractional CMO can help manage external resources, like agencies or freelancers, while connecting sales insights with marketing messaging. They can also help you crisp up your company’s positioning.
- HR: A fractional CHRO can put up the scaffolding for the employee lifecycle process and smooth out hiring, onboarding, performance reviews and exits. They can help document culture norms before you hire more people in the future.
- Finance: A fractional CFO can help build and tune your financial model and keep an eye on your burn rate as ARR grows.
- Operations: A fractional COO can help diagnose functional needs, like marketing and HR, and help you start to build them out in a way that makes sense for your budget and stage.
Strong PMF: Put out fires as you scale
Once the gears are cranking on your PMF engine, the next challenge becomes scaling sustainably — and stamping out all kinds of new risks. “At this stage, you’re growing quickly and there are fires everywhere. In the frenzy, you know you need leaders now, but you can’t risk a leadership mishire,” says Schwartz Ramirez.
It might feel too risky to commit to a full-time exec in a brand-new function. “While board members and advisors can help you decide what ‘good’ looks like for those new hires, you’re worried about organ rejection,” she says. “Instead, you can drop in a credible fractional exec, relieve initial pain and proceed from there.”
Schwartz Ramirez lays out a few scenarios where fractional execs can help you de-risk your scaling machine:
- Operations: As the team grows along with the business, the needs of the day-to-day management of the org might move beyond the founder’s skillset and interest. A fractional COO can lighten up the management load so you can stay focused on the product vision. They can also help you figure out what you want out of new leaders.
- Engineering: A technical co-founder might find themselves swamped with new people management duties they don’t feel equipped for. A fractional VP of Eng can introduce management muscle in your engineering org and build out things like ladders and performance reviews so that you can focus on architecture and strategy.
- Product or sales for a new market: You’ve found an adjacent market that you’d like to tackle with your product, but the founding team doesn’t have any experience or contacts in that area, and it’s too soon to tell if you’ll stick with it. A fractional product or sales leader with that specific industry experience can help you suss out if this new bet is worth making.
Extreme PMF: Build out the corporate side of the house
With a PMF flywheel in place, building your company becomes just as important as building your product. You’ll likely need to stand up new “corporate” functions like business operations sometime soon.
“When it does come time to introduce new corporate functions, you're faced with a choice: Build the team now, or wait,” says Schwartz Ramirez. “I often hear from startups that think they may need a BizOps team — but they’re not sure how early they want to start building it out. So they’ll bring me in, and I’ll help diagnose the need and help the team figure out when and what they’ll need to stand up the function.”
Fractional help at this stage can help you "internalize" new or outside capabilities to get up to speed with new functions. Here’s where fractional leaders can layer in to help you climb toward the next phase of scale:
- BizOps: You’d like to tune your operational chops to allow for more aggressive scaling with the next round of funding. You have a longtime ops lead in the business, but you know they could use some mentorship and perspective to grow their BizOps capabilities. A fractional BizOps leader can help nurture this new internal capability and mentor the existing team as they build it.
- Strategy and insights: You're not sure how, but you know you'd like to stand up a stronger research and insights capability to help your teams scout new market opportunities. A fractional strategy or insights lead can help your team test this new capability.
- Communications: A fractional communications leader can help nurture thought leadership, advocacy and community-building in your market. You'd eventually want this capability to be on your leadership team, but you’re not ready for a full-time hire.
“With a fractional communications leader, for example, you're taking a step toward staffing the function internally, but not going all in yet. It’s a bridge,” says Schwartz Ramirez. “Your teams are getting the added benefit of being able to — and knowing when to — pull this new function or person in, and you're getting high-impact and well-integrated work that would be hard to get from a new outside agency.”
How founders can land the right leader and set them up for success
Once you’ve sorted out what fractional support you’re looking for and which problems they’ll solve, these are Schwartz Ramirez’s suggestions for sourcing the best talent, making sure they’re a good fit for your team and clearing a path so they can hit the ground running.
Tap your network
The fractional talent market works by and large as a referral business. Folks who’ve made the transition into fractional work are generally deep into their careers and have a Rolodex of connections within their field. If you can’t find the right fractional leader in your network, a board member, advisor, fellow founder or investor might be able to connect you with one.
“My fractional work tends to come from referrals from people I’ve worked with before, or people they know,” says Schwartz Ramirez. Her advice here is to put out a call to folks who have worked with great fractional leaders, or might know people who have.
If they do have recommendations, be sure to do your due diligence. “Reference calls matter. Talk to other folks who they've worked with in this specific capacity to understand what impact they drove in their fractional role. And ask what conditions were established for them to be successful,” she says. “You may end up with clues about what you’ll need to offer in terms of context and collaboration.”
That said, if your network runs dry, Schwartz Ramirez says this fractional talent marketplace is a good place to get paired with great fractional leaders.
Skip the interviews and take a test drive
Schwartz Ramirez’ recommendation for the fractional hiring process is that once you’ve found a solid contender, try working together as soon as possible.
“The evaluation process should be much more trial-based than interview-based,” she says. After all, bypassing a lengthy interview process is one of the advantages of hiring a fractional exec.
Her order of operations typically starts with two calls with the founding team. “First, I do a 30-minute call with the founder. It’s very consultative. They’ll tell me what they’re seeing, and we’ll trade notes: ‘Okay, I’ve seen something like that, and here’s where it may head, ’” she says. “If the first call is productive, we’ll do a follow-up call. On this call, the founder might bring on someone else I should be working closely with, like the co-founder who’s overseeing product or an early employee. I’ll play back what I’ve heard, dig in further and then pitch a few goals or outcomes we might iterate toward. If we all agree, we'll go straight into structuring a trial.”
She sets up a work trial just like the full engagement, with a standard independent contractor agreement and the same hourly rate. Some fractional execs charge on an hourly basis, but many bill on a monthly retainer. Because the nature of most fractional contracts is fixed-term, you’ll know how much the engagement will cost upfront. “I'll typically start with something pretty tightly scoped and pretty short-term in nature, and give the founder some examples of the work I can do. And if that works, and everybody's happy, we’ll keep working together,” she says.
Beyond vetting skills and leadership chops, Schwartz Ramirez says good chemistry is critical. The feeling should be mutual, and you can really only test this by working side by side. She shares an example from a fractional friend who learned only during a work trial that she and a founder just didn’t jibe. “The founder told her that he really loved the work she did, but she couldn’t get into a flow state with him or collaborate effectively. And that’s important to know before you start working together for real,” she says.
The accelerated work trial helps establish trust between the founder and the fractional leader from the outset of the engagement. “If there's already good chemistry and a real belief in my expertise before I start, I can hit the ground running and ramp faster, ” she says.
After a work trial, the ramp-up period should be speedy. “Give a fractional exec around two weeks to gather context, and then they should be able to start steering conversations in the right direction and checking off to-dos.”
Calibrate your expectations
Even though the stakes of bringing on a fractional leader are lower by design, Schwartz Ramirez says that founders must still be extremely intentional about setting appropriate expectations for this person — both your own and your teammates’.
On the fractional exec side, Schwartz Ramirez has seen mismatched expectations play out disastrously. She says a typical anti-pattern for founders is treating fractional folks like full-time exec hires. “Sometimes a founder will pull a fractional exec into every meeting that a full-time exec would sit in on. Before you know it, they’re in all weekly syncs, presenting at all-hands meetings and keeping up in all-company Slack channels,” she says. “Suddenly the fractional exec has no hours left in the week to drive impact — they’re all spent gathering context.”
A seasoned fractional exec will know the right ratio of getting context to doing the work, but a founder needs to recognize the balance as well. It’s the founder’s job to set the tone for how visible a fractional exec will be across a company. “In all fractional engagements, no matter the role or how incredible the fractional leader is, you’re eventually going to bump up against the fact that the person is part-time,” she says. “I’ve been in fractional roles where nobody was ever told that I was part-time, and that led to a whole slew of expectations in my day-to-day that didn’t match what I was brought on to do.”
A fractional leader is only going to be as successful as the clarity of the goal that they come into.
Wrapping up: Fractional execs will work themselves out of a job
You’ve found a great fractional exec to work with your team for anywhere from a few months to two years. But if there isn’t a fixed time horizon, how do you know when it’s time to bring on someone full-time?
One common signal, she says, is when your fractional exec spends their time “chasing work.” “If a fractional leader is spending half their time just getting context, and the other half driving impact, you’ve probably put them in a situation where what they’re working on is too dynamic, and you need somebody dedicated full-time,” she says. “If the source of truth evolves faster than what could be put on paper or talked about in a five-minute meeting, it’s time for a full-time person.”
Hitting growth goals — which is good news, of course — also means you’ll likely graduate into needing someone full-time. “When you’re defining a product, going to market and growing a customer base, ultimately what you’re hoping is that the needs of the business outweigh what a founder should be shouldering personally. When that happens, maybe you’re complementing a founder with a fractional leader, and then graduating from fractional to a full-time head of marketing. A strong fractional CMO can help you hire and onboard your full-time CMO,” she says.
Schwartz Ramirez has also experienced the less desirable flip side, where a startup fails to raise the next round or runs up a high burn rate and can’t afford a full-time exec. In these scenarios, a fractional leader can help the team course-correct. “As a fractional COO, I’ve helped a startup restructure back down after scaling too quickly. In this case, the core team absorbed essential responsibilities, we plugged gaps with part-time support, and then I zoomed out and supported the founders as an advisor,” she says.
Ultimately, the best fractional execs will come into a startup with the goal of working themselves out of a job — they’ll solve the problems they were tasked with solving and set the full-time team up to muscle through the next slate of problems themselves.
The right fractional exec will have the foresight and the maturity to help a startup fill their needs long-term, even if it's not with them.