No, they do not. Sit with most senior leaders for a week and a fair chunk of it is not leadership. It is meetings that could have been emails, politics, and admin a decent system should have killed off. Which raises an awkward question for a growing business: if you are paying full-time for a senior marketer, how much of that salary buys actual leadership, and how much buys presence.
That gap is the whole reason fractional exists.
Let me strip the gloss off the word first. Fractional is a fancy term for a part-time, contracted senior leader. The experts behind Harvard Business Review's work on this call it "a fantastic marketing word", and they are right. It has done more for part-time executive work than the phrase part-time ever could. In marketing it usually means a director-level operator giving you one to three days a week, for a fraction of the cost of an experienced marketing director on £160k plus benefits. You get the seniority and the judgement. You do not carry the full salary, the pension or the holiday.
It is not a fringe idea any more. The number of people on LinkedIn describing themselves as fractional leaders jumped from around 2,000 in 2022 to more than 110,000 by 2024, according to research featured by Harvard Business Review. COVID did a lot of that. It reset what senior people wanted from work and normalised running several engagements remotely. But the demand side matters more: plenty of growing businesses need senior marketing leadership and cannot, or should not, buy it full-time.
Here is the distinction that actually matters, and the one most buyers miss. A consultant is transactional. They diagnose, hand you a deck, and leave you to run it. A fractional leader embeds. They join the team, own a mandate, and stay accountable for the outcome. HBR put it well: done right, the company should barely notice you are part-time, because you are there in the moments that count.
The failure mode is the opposite. HBR's researchers describe a business owner who hired a fractional marketer and felt it never worked, because the person kept applying a template from other clients and never switched into her actual problem. It felt, in her words, transactional. That is the bad version of fractional, a consultant wearing a better word. The good version connects with the brief and becomes a real extension of the team. That difference is everything, and it is the part I care most about in my own work.
So what makes a good fractional CMO
So what makes a good fractional CMO. A few things.
Razor focus on the mandate. A full-time hire is asked to cover everything. A fractional leader is hired to move two or three things that matter. The job is depth, not breadth. You are not there to be busy, you are there to shift the number you were brought in to shift.
Work without the bureaucracy. Strip out the politics and the layers and results tend to come faster. That is not a personality trait, it is structural. Fewer days force ruthless prioritisation, which is usually what a stuck marketing function needs anyway.
The right background. The best fractional marketers grew up in marketing, so they can be the strategic partner in the boardroom and the operator who rolls up their sleeves on the work. HBR makes the same point: you want someone equally at home setting strategy and getting into the detail.
And the one I would add: bridging the gap. In most growing businesses there is a hole between the board or senior team, who talk in revenue and margin, and the marketing team, who talk in campaigns and channels. A good fractional CMO stands in that gap and translates both ways. Strategy turned into marketing the team can run, and marketing turned into commercial terms the board will back.
The way I think of it, a real fractional is a part-time Mary Poppins. They arrive when things are not quite working, fix what needs fixing, leave the team stronger than they found it, and they are not trying to live in your house forever. Note the word real. The market has filled up with people who are between jobs, or cannot find one, using fractional as a holding label. That is not the same thing. A fractional leader chooses this model, and is good enough to be wanted by more than one business at a time.
Which brings me back to the question. A growing business rarely needs more marketing leadership in the building. It needs the right leadership, for the right number of days, pointed at the right outcome, with nothing on the invoice that is not that. Fractional, done properly, is just leadership with the waste taken out.
Sources
- HBR IdeaCast, The Growing Trend of Part-Time Executives, 12 November 2024 (LinkedIn fractional leaders up from around 2,000 in 2022 to more than 110,000 in 2024, "a fantastic marketing word", the transactional failure case, the grew-up-in-marketing point).
- Tomoko Yokoi and Amy Bonsall, How Part-Time Senior Leaders Can Help Your Business, Harvard Business Review, July 2024.
- Stated basis, not a cited figure: the £160k plus benefits cost of an experienced marketing director is used as a working benchmark, not a sourced statistic.
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