A fractional CTO for a growing business: what one does, and the five signs you need one
Most businesses between £1m and £20m have a chief technology officer. They just have not appointed one. The job is being done by default: by the founder in the gaps, by the managed service provider who sells the answer, or by whoever last shouted about the CRM. A fractional CTO is the decision to do it on purpose, for the one or two days a week the job actually needs.
Five signs you need one
Your supplier is your strategy. The IT provider decides what you buy, the software vendor decides when you upgrade, and nobody on your side is asking whether either is right. Suppliers are not villains, but they are not your board either.
The founder is the CTO by accident. Every tool choice, every integration and every outage crosses your desk, and you did not start the business to be its help desk. This is the technology version of the founder bottleneck, and it has the same cure: decision rights written down and given away.
Something is coming that will look under the bonnet. A funding round, an acquisition, a big customer's security questionnaire, a regulator. Due diligence finds what you have not looked at, and it finds it at the worst possible moment.
The AI question has arrived and nobody owns it. Half the team is pasting customer data into whatever tool they found, the other half is refusing to touch any of it, and the board wants a view. That is a judgement question before it is a technology one, and it needs somebody who has watched larger organisations get it wrong.
You are about to hire your first real technical lead and do not know how to interview one. The most expensive technology mistake a growing business makes is the first senior technical hire, because nobody in the room could tell a good answer from a fluent one.
What a fractional CTO does with a day a week
Less building than you might expect, and more deciding. A roadmap that says what gets built, bought or left alone in the next twelve months, and in what order. The build-or-buy calls, made once and written down, rather than reopened every time a vendor visits. The architecture decisions that are cheap now and ruinous in three years: one customer database or four, a platform or a pile of point solutions, what talks to what. Security posture set at a level your customers will accept and your team can actually run. Supplier contracts read by somebody who has negotiated the other side of them. And translation, in both directions: what the technology means to the board in the board's language, and what the board wants to the people building it.
What a fractional CTO does not do is write your code, run your help desk or attend every stand-up. If that is what the business needs, it needs an engineer or a manager, and paying executive rates for either is the wrong deal.
What it costs
The same as any fractional executive, because the calibre is the same and the day is the same. Two days a month from £2,800, one day a week from £5,900, two days a week from £11,200, all monthly, all starting with a three-month term and then rolling with thirty days' notice. Set that against a full-time CTO at £150,000 to £250,000 a year all in, a recruiter's fee on top, and six to nine months before they are productive. The pricing guide sets out what the number should include and the questions to ask before you sign.
How to choose one
Three tests. First, have they done it at the scale you are trying to reach, not just the scale you are at? A CTO whose largest system served forty people will make forty-person decisions for you. Second, do they write things down? The value of a fractional executive lives in the documents they leave behind: the roadmap, the decision log, the supplier terms, the security policy. Ask to see one, anonymised. Third, are they trying to make themselves unnecessary? A good fractional CTO leaves a business that can make technology decisions without them, which is capability rather than dependency, and a bad one leaves a business that cannot change a password without a phone call.
Where I have seen it matter
A global law firm's security team, firefighting daily and known internally as the department that says no. The instinct was to buy better tooling; the fix was duller, and it worked: who decides what, and what the team is actually for, written down, after which the roadmap almost designed itself. A software business whose customers had started asking to buy by subscription instead of by licence, where leadership needed help identifying half the questions before anybody could answer them. Different sectors, different sizes, the same shape of problem: the technology was never the hard part. It rarely is.
Not sure whether you need one?
A Diagnostic Day will tell you in writing within 48 hours, including whether the honest answer is a manager, an engineer or nobody at all.
Or send me a note if you'd rather start by typing.
Fractional executive and portfolio consultant. Two decades inside global enterprises, now working with owner-managed businesses by the day, the month or the project. The person you meet is the person who does the work. Who am I? →