Fractional executive, interim or full-time hire: which one you actually need

They get lumped together as "senior help", and they are three different tools for three different problems. Choose the wrong one and you either pay a full-time price for a part-time need, or a part-time person for a seat that is simply empty. Here is how they differ, what each costs, and a test that settles it in ten minutes.

Three tools

An interim is full-time and temporary. The seat is empty, or a piece of work is too big for the team, and somebody senior fills it for six to twelve months at a daily rate. Interims are usually engaged through their own limited companies, which is exactly where IR35 lives, and they cost the most month by month because you are buying every working day.

A fractional executive is part-time and ongoing. The seat is not empty; it does not exist yet, because the business has one or two days a week of genuinely executive work and three of work that somebody cheaper should be doing. A fraction gives you the judgement without the salary, productive in week one, on a monthly retainer with a short minimum term.

A hire is full-time and permanent. Right when the role is genuinely full-time, central to the business and not going away. Also the most expensive to get wrong: a recruiter's fee, six months to land, three more to be useful, and severance exposure if it does not work.

Side by side

Take a competent operations or technology director in the UK. Full-time, all in, somewhere between £150,000 and £250,000 a year, plus a fee of a quarter to a third of base to find them. An interim at the same calibre is that cost or more, compressed into the months you need it and gone when you do not. A fractional executive at a day a week is around £70,000 a year, and at two days around £135,000, with no fee, no notice beyond a month once the minimum term has passed, and nothing to unwind when the phase of work ends. My own prices are on the Fractional Executive card: two days a month from £2,800, a day a week from £5,900, two days a week from £11,200.

The interim looks expensive and the fraction looks cheap, and neither is the point. The question is what shape the need is.

The test

Write down what you would put in the job description. Then mark every line with one of three words: executive, manager, or gap. Executive means it needs somebody who has done the job at a scale you have not reached. Manager means it needs somebody competent and present. Gap means the line exists because a seat is empty and somebody has to sit in it until it is filled.

Now count. If most lines say gap, you need an interim, and a short one: the right use of the money is filling the seat properly, not renting it for a year. If most say manager, you do not need any of the three; you need a manager, and a fractional executive can help you specify and hire one in a month. If most say executive but not enough of them to fill a week, that is the fractional case, and it is the most common one in businesses under £20m. And if the page is full of executive lines and they are not going anywhere, hire. Properly, permanently, and with help interviewing if nobody on your side has hired at that level before.

Combinations that work

The tools are not exclusive, and the best answer is often two of them in sequence. A fractional executive now, who specifies the permanent role, hires it, and hands over: the fraction is the bridge and the hire is the destination. An interim to hold a seat for six months while a fraction works on the thing the interim has no time for. Or a fraction that stays at two days a month after the hire lands, as a sounding board for somebody doing the job for the first time. What does not work is a fraction asked to do an interim's job, which is five days of work in one, or an interim kept on for two years because nobody got round to recruiting.

The questions that settle it

Is the need full-time? Is it permanent? Is the seat empty today? Does the work have an end? Four questions, and the answers sort almost every case. Full-time and permanent: hire. Full-time and temporary: interim. Part-time and ongoing: fractional. Part-time with a defined end: a fixed-price project, which is a fourth tool and often the right one when the outcome can be written down before the work starts.

One last question, and it is the one to ask before signing for any of the three: what would make this person tell you they are no longer needed? A fractional executive worth having is working towards that day. If the honest answer is "nothing", you are being sold dependency, whichever of the three names is on the invoice.

Ian Sharpe

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? →