As scale-ups struggle to afford top executives and burnt-out corporate leaders search for purpose, fractional leadership is quietly rewriting what it means to sit in the C-suite
Fractional leadership has been quietly reshaping the way growing companies access top talent for decades. For Sara Daw, CEO of The CFO Centre, it is anything but a fad, the world is just finally catching up.
At its core, fractional leadership is about giving ambitious but resource-constrained businesses access to heavyweight C-suite experience without the cost or rigidity of a full-time hire. Instead of recruiting a permanent CFO, CMO or CHRO, an entrepreneurial, owner-managed company brings in an experienced executive for a “fraction” of their time. That leader then builds a portfolio of such businesses, working with several at once, often across different sectors and stages of growth.
These are not early-stage experiments still trying to prove they have a viable idea. Daw talks about the “scale-up” layer of the economy that sits between startups and large corporates: companies that have made it past the precarious early days, have a proven business model and are now growing fast. In the UK, she noted, this group receives surprisingly little attention, despite being critical to future economic growth. It is also the band of the market least able to afford – or even justify – full-time senior executives, yet most in need of that calibre of thinking.
Under the fractional model, a single leader might support anywhere between three and ten such organisations. One might take a day a week, another a day a month, a third perhaps two days a month. The exact mix ebbs and flows over time. From the executive’s perspective, it is usually a deliberate career choice rather than a fallback. Many have opted out of corporate life to become self-employed and assemble these portfolios, attracted by greater control over their time, a variety of challenges and the chance to stay firmly in their professional “swim lane” while escaping big-company bureaucracy.
For the businesses, the headline advantage is affordability. A growth-stage firm turning over a few million or tens of millions in revenue is unlikely to be able to fund a full-time CFO or CMO drawn from a large corporate. Even if it could, Daw argued, it rarely needs that level of capacity five days a week. The work simply is not there. Nor would many of those executives want to be tied full-time to a smaller business whose demands spike and fall rather than run at a constant intensity.
The number of fractional leaders is steadily growing. One study revealed that on LinkedIn, there were 2,000 profiles mentioning fractional leadership in 2022. This grew to 110,000 in 2024, a 400% increase.
Another study claimed Australia is 5-10 years behind the US, which has embraced fractional leadership. It found that 35% of US companies have fractional leaders, with an expected rise to 40% in 2026.
On the other hand, the same study claimed that as of early 2025, less than 1% of Australian compoanies had implemented fractional leadership.
How fractional leaders make the model work
When discussing fractional leadership, the question that often follows is one of availability: if an executive only “belongs” to a company a couple of days a month, what happens when something goes wrong on a Wednesday night, or when two clients want them at the same time? According to Daw, this is where the myths about fractional work diverge from the reality of a well-run model.
She insisted the relationship does not look like a consultant who is reachable only in a fixed window. In her organisation, fractional leaders are effectively on call across the week, and often at weekends too. A CFO might be physically sitting in one client’s office when another rings with an urgent problem. They will take the call, listen, triage the issue and then schedule the work, if it cannot be done immediately. In most cases, Daw said, being heard quickly and knowing that someone experienced has grasped the issue is what matters most to the business in that moment.
Different leaders manage this in different ways. Some choose to be always available and then carefully structure their workload around the demands that come in. Others set clearer boundaries, reserving particular days for particular clients and committing to check and respond to messages at specific times of the day. What unites the approaches, she says, is rigorous communication upfront. Every client needs to understand exactly how their fractional leader operates, how they can reach them and what to expect in return. Once those ground rules are set and applied consistently, the model tends to work.
Behind the scenes, capacity management becomes as important as technical skill. Daw is wary of overfilling anyone’s diary. She deliberately avoids packing people to full utilisation. That slack is there for a reason: to absorb inevitable spikes in workload, to give room for context switching between very different businesses, and to protect the quality of thinking that is supposed to be the main value-add. It is not just about hours, she points out, but about headspace.
If the supply side of the equation is maturing, demand is accelerating for its own reasons. Daw traced much of the recent momentum back to the pandemic and its aftermath. COVID-19 forced a global re-evaluation of work and lifestyle. For many senior executives, it exposed a stark mismatch between the personal cost of corporate roles and the meaning they were getting from them. She described a wave of leaders emerging from big organisations feeling overworked, undervalued and permanently on a plane, often far away from their families. Many of them still wanted to use their skills, but on different terms.
At the same time, the operating environment for businesses has become more complex. The pace of technological change has accelerated. Geopolitical volatility has grown. Global trends shift faster and with more force. Businesses are under pressure to be more agile and adaptable, often with leaner internal teams. Those conditions increase the premium on highly skilled, battle-tested people who can help organisations navigate uncertainty. Yet the very same conditions make it harder to pin down those individuals into conventional, long-term, full-time roles.
The result is a convergence of two trends: companies needing more sophisticated leadership, and leaders seeking more flexible, purpose-driven ways to work. That intersection is where fractional leadership has taken off. Daw talked about an “unbundling” of roles into tasks or component parts, driven partly by technology and partly by a broader cultural demand for personalisation. Rather than asking, “What full-time role do we need?” businesses are starting to ask, “What do we need to get done?” and then assembling the right mix of people around those outcomes. Fractional delivery slots neatly into that logic.
As with any fast-growing market, not everyone entering it looks the same. Daw has one clear warning for employers: be careful who you are actually hiring. She has seen a noticeable influx of consultants rebranding themselves as fractional C-suite leaders. There is nothing inherently wrong with that kind of work, she concedes, but it is not the same thing. A consultant will typically arrive, diagnose, produce a slide deck and leave implementation to someone else. A true fractional CFO or CMO, in her view, is someone who has held that title fully, more than once, and is prepared to take ownership inside the business rather than standing at arm’s length.
It has been descibed as "a veteran's game", with one study revealing 72.8% of fractional professionals have 15 plus years of experience, 30.4% have 26 plus years of experience, and just 6.4% have less than 10 years of experience.
Another evolution is happening further up the corporate ladder, where fractional leaders are not replacing full-time executives but standing alongside them. Daw calls this “fractional twinning”. In large groups, she has observed, C-suite tenures are shortening, often to three or four years, as executives burn out under the weight of expectations and complexity. One way to extend that lifespan is to give those leaders a twin: someone who has done the job before and can quietly take on major projects or strands of responsibility without needing to be trained or heavily overseen.
In those arrangements, the internal group CFO or CMO keeps the aspects of the role they enjoy and excel at and hands off the rest to their fractional counterpart. The business, in turn, gains extra bandwidth and specialist capacity without reshaping its org chart. For the fractional leader, it is another way to apply deep experience without stepping back into a full-time, all-consuming post.
What emerges from Daw’s account is not just a new label for part-time consulting, but a different way of thinking about senior leadership in modern organisations. For fast-growing, owner-managed companies, fractional leadership offers a route to capabilities they would otherwise never be able to touch. For large corporates, it offers a safety valve and a flexible way to match talent to projects. And for executives themselves, it redraws the boundaries of a career path that has long been defined by bigger titles, bigger pay packets and bigger compromises.
For years, people looked at fractional leaders with suspicion, assuming they were simply executives who could not get “proper” jobs. That perception, Daw believes, has now flipped. As work is unbundled and careers are reimagined, the idea of a high-calibre, portfolio C-suite is moving from the margins into the mainstream, one scale-up and one burned-out corporate veteran at a time.
