Fractional Leadership

What does fractional leadership look like at Detgaao?

Fractional means part-time on paper, full-stakes in practice. We step in as the operating head of marketing, revenue, or growth — usually two or three days a week, sometimes four, for a defined window that ends with a working handover.

The first two weeks are diagnostic. We read the systems already in place (the CRM data, the ad accounts, the brief history of what was tried), interview the team, and produce a written read on what's broken, what's working, and what's missing. The output isn't a deck. It's an aligned definition of the work we're going to do together.

The middle of the engagement is execution. We build or rebuild the systems the diagnostic identified: channel mix, attribution, lifecycle programs, brand operations, whatever the case needs. We work alongside your team, not around them. Anything we build gets documented in plain English so it survives our exit.

The last 30 days are handover. We train whoever inherits the work, write the standing operating doc, and reduce ourselves to advisory. If we did the job right, the team runs the system better than we do by the time we leave.

When should a company hire fractional instead of full-time?

Three situations make fractional the better call.

The cost math is wrong. A senior marketing leader at a growth-stage company runs $250–400K in base salary. Add benefits, equity, employer taxes, bonus, and 401(k) match and the all-in annual cost typically lands closer to $325–550K. Two years of that is a million dollars or more, and you may not actually need senior leadership all the time. You may need it now, then someone more junior to operate what they built. Fractional lets you pay for the senior thinking when you need it and stop paying for it when you don't.

The brief is unclear. If you can't write the job description for the full-time hire without it sounding like a wish list (brand and demand and lifecycle and ABM and content), the work isn't ready to be a single permanent role yet. A fractional engagement clarifies the shape of the work. Sometimes it ends in a permanent JD you couldn't have written six months earlier. Sometimes it ends in the realization that the company doesn't need that hire after all.

The market is too small or too specific. If the people who can actually do the work are 30 humans on the planet and four are takeable, the math on permanent recruiting is bad. Borrow the talent for the build, then run on systems you understand instead of dependency on a unicorn hire.

Won't a fractional operator be less committed than a full-time employee?

Fair concern, but mostly mis-framed. The reason contractors are less committed in the wild is that most contractor relationships are structured for output, not outcomes. Task-based scopes, hourly billing, no accountability for the result. That's the failure mode, not the contract type.

A fractional engagement is structured the other way. We sign for a result on a multi-month contract, with the metrics published at kickoff. We're in the company's tooling, in the team's meetings, in the room when senior decisions get made. When we're in, we're in.

Two practical anchors keep it that way: monthly retainers instead of hourly billing, and named accountability for the outcomes we promised at kickoff. The friction of "managing" us is roughly the same as managing any senior operator, because that's what the contract sets up.

How does this work week to week?

A typical week: a Monday standing meeting with the CEO or operating principal, two or three days of execution inside the company's tooling alongside the company's team, and async updates on a shared running doc the whole team reads.

We're not consultants in the sit-back-and-write sense. We're in the Slack, in the analytics, in the campaign reviews, in the hiring panels when a permanent operator is being considered. We carry decisions and we're accountable for them.

What we don't do: pretend to be the figurehead. The CEO is still the CEO, the team still owns the work. We're the senior operating voice in the room for the window we're contracted for, and then we go.

How do you measure success?

We agree on three to five metrics before the engagement starts and publish where they are now. Common ones: CAC by channel and how it's trending, LTV against a current cohort baseline, the share of revenue from systems we own versus one-off campaigns, pipeline-to-close ratio if there's sales coverage, the time it takes to run a meaningful experiment end to end.

We don't take an engagement we can't put a number on. If the brief is "improve the brand," we either translate that into something countable (unaided brand recall, share of voice, organic traffic from branded queries, sales-cycle compression on warm leads) or we walk.

The last metric, which we name out loud at kickoff: the engagement is successful if your team runs the system better than we do six months after we leave. Anything else is a vanity outcome.

Who is this not a fit for?

Three disqualifiers.

If the team doesn't actually want senior intervention. Fractional only works when the inside team treats the outside operator as part of the team, not an audit. We've taken engagements where the politics killed the work before it shipped. We won't do that again, and we screen for it on the first call.

If the company is hunting for a discount on full-time. The hourly rate on a fractional engagement can look high in isolation. The annual cost rarely is. $25–60K a month for two or three days a week of senior operating time is usually within range of a permanent CMO's all-in cost once benefits, equity, employer taxes, and bonus are loaded in. Often less. You're paying for fully embedded senior leadership during the months you actually need it, without the trailing cost when the urgent build is done. If the brief is "do everything a CMO does but pay 30% of the salary," that's not fractional, that's hoping for magic.

If the company can't define a 90-day "what would have to be true" outcome. We need to know what success looks like to commit. Vague engagements drift, and drift is expensive.

What happens when the engagement ends?

Three things land when we exit.

A standing operating doc — the rebuilt system written in plain English. Not a strategy deck. The kind of doc a new operator can read on day one and be useful by day three.

A trained inside team. Someone in your org owns each piece of what we built before we leave. We do the work in pairs for the last 30 days so the institutional knowledge transfers in real time, not in a final-week dump.

A short list of who should run the work next, if you don't have that person internally. Sometimes that list includes the recommendation that you don't need to hire for it and the current team has it covered.

We're available for advisory check-ins after we exit. Most engagements have one in month two and one in month six. Past that, you don't need us. That's the point.