How do I find fractional clients?
The same way you find any B2B consulting client. This is the useful news and the boring news at the same time.
A fractional engagement is a B2B consulting sale: a five- or six-figure commitment, signed by someone who needs several real conversations and a proposal before they say yes, inside an organization with a budget cycle and other stakeholders. Everything true of the consulting sale is true here. It takes three to 18 months. Not every client signs, and not every client signs when you think they will. Strangers in an inbox don't produce those conversations, and people who've followed your thinking for months do.
So the answer for consulting is the same answer for fractional work: pick one or two channels where the people who can hire you already spend attention, show up consistently with a real point of view, reconnect warmly with the people who already know your work, and run a real sales process when the conversation comes.
If you were hoping that fractional work was easier to get than consulting work, I'd rather tell you now. There's no separate channel, no fractional job board that replaces business development, and no shortcut in the title.
Is "fractional" going to help me get clients?
It depends.
Fractional is trendy right now, and more consultants are branding themselves as fractionals. A lot of them reach for it when they don't know how to talk about what they do. The thinking goes: calling myself a fractional CMO will be easier for the client to understand than explaining my value from scratch. And of course you'd reach for that. It's a real title, it signals seniority, and explaining your value is hard work that nobody ever taught you.
Here's the cost. The label tells a client what chair you'd sit in. It says nothing about what changes for them. They're not buying a fraction of an executive, they're buying a problem they're tired of having. When the title does the talking, the value conversation never happens, and the price conversation gets much harder without it.
There's a second cost, and this is the dirty little secret of the whole trend: a lot of people wearing these titles are punching above their weight. You did a function, you came out of corporate, and you attached the senior version of that function to your name. For example, clients have started noticing that not every fractional CMO has been a CMO or anywhere close.
So be honest with yourself, because your clients are about to be. If you're calling yourself a fractional CMO:
- Have you run an entire marketing team?
- Have you been a VP or an SVP?
- Have you overseen all the channels?
- Do you understand and have overseen all of the elements of a complete marketing plan?
You can ask similar questions if you're looking to position yourself as a fractional COO, fractional CHRO, or any other fractional role.
And that's just a bit of what someone operating at that level would have. If the answers are yes, wear the title with confidence. If they're mostly no, the shoe doesn't fit, and the fix isn't a better bio. It's learning to describe the real, valuable thing you do.
How do I keep a fractional engagement from turning into a job?
Boundaries, set before you start, and this is the part I'd want you to read twice.
More than consulting or any other way of working, fractional work is an extremely slippery slope to being treated like an employee. Even when the contract says a quarter time or half time, you're so involved in the day-to-day that holding a line becomes very hard. There's no such thing as a fractional firefighter. When you're in the firehouse and you're on, whatever it takes, you do it.
That slope is steepest for women consultants, and not for a mysterious reason. One of the hardest parts of running any consulting business is standing in your own value and not being deferential, operating as a peer rather than an order taker. That takes practice, and no woman I know grew up with a culture that encouraged her to draw and hold boundaries. The conditioning ran the other way. As a result, many women over-deliver, over-give, and find it painful to disappoint a client, and then they sell a service where the promise is "you have all of me."
Bad boundaries, over-delivering, being overworked, and being treated like staff. That's a tinderbox waiting to alight. Most of the consultants I know who ended up going back in house went back because they were fractional and got too involved to tell the difference anymore.
What holds the line:
- Scope the outcome, never the hours. "Two days a week" invites an employment relationship. A defined result with defined deliverables keeps you a vendor.
- Name what's out of scope in writing, at the start, when it's easy.
- Keep one channel, and keep it asynchronous by default. Being in their Slack all day is how a consultant becomes staff.
- Put a real end date on it. Open-ended is where scope creep lives.
- Keep marketing the whole time. A fractional engagement that fills your calendar is also the thing that stops you filling your pipeline, and it ends eventually.
How should I scope and price fractional work?
Start by separating the two decisions the label combines: what level of service you offer, and what you call it.
Having varying levels of service is a good idea, and most consultants need it whether or not "fractional" is ever involved. A lot of the women who come to me offer one thing, and the thing is essentially "you get all of me." All my help, all my thinking, whenever. When that's the whole service:
- It's very hard to take on more clients.
- It's very hard to charge more.
- Scope creep is constant.
And they're stuck, because there's nowhere to go in either direction. They don't know how to scope something smaller, meaning more clearly defined rather than simply cheaper. And they don't know how to scope something bigger and higher value, because there's nothing above "all of me."
So build the levels. A tightly defined smaller engagement that solves one thing completely. A larger one that delivers more value, which is a different thing from more hours. Price each one against the value it delivers, never against the calendar. If you price a fractional engagement by dividing an executive salary, you've agreed to be a cheaper employee, and you've handed away the only advantage of being outside the org chart.
Leah's take
I'll be honest with you, because I'd rather you hear this from me than learn it in year two of an engagement that's eating you alive.
In some respects, fractional introduces a new way to work. For consultants who know how to describe what they do, who know how to set boundaries, and who have the chops, it can be a useful type of service, a way to mix things up. But from my perch, the Venn diagram of people who meet all of those characteristics is a very, very small slice.
If you're in that slice, wonderful. Go sell it like the B2B engagement it is, price it on value, and hold your boundaries like your business depends on it, because it does.
And if you're not sure you're in that slice, that isn't a failure. It's useful information, and you got it early. The underlying skill is the same either way: being able to say what you do, for whom, and what it's worth, without a borrowed title carrying the weight. Build that, and you'll be able to call yourself whatever you like. Skip it, and the title will keep writing checks your positioning has to cover.
If you want help describing your value and scoping engagements that pay you properly, that's what I teach in The Academy.
