Top 4 Ways to Grow Your Company with Fractional Experts

Often, people can’t hire the most senior people they’d like to in all the roles they would like to have them. It’s expensive and a growing company can’t afford that, so they settle for subpar employees instead. The problem is, if you want your company to grow, you can’t settle.

If you can’t find the best people to hire, or if you can’t afford to hire a complete, full-time, A-level team, there are other ways to get the job done. If you can’t hire them full-time, what if you could hire them part-time, very part-time?

Part-time, fractional experts can swoop in, or work remotely via video conference with you, to only focus on the most important things you need them to do specifically.

Here are the top four areas in which every company should consider using a fractional expert.

Financial

Most companies can’t afford a real CFO – Chief Financial Officer. They may have controllers or bookkeepers with titles like VP Finance or even CFO, but in reality, they don’t have CFO skills at all.

On top of that, most entrepreneurs don’t have the financial skills to run and grow their company correctly and they end up relying on unskilled advice.

To solve this problem, hire a variety of fractional experts. You can get a vast amount of knowledge at a better cost. For example, you could have a team of 18 fractional CFOs, each with a variety of experience from tons of different industries. For 2-4 hours a month, they could look over your financial statements in detail for you. Then they will come back to you with coaching opportunities or areas for you to look into or have your finance team clean up. It’s way less expensive than you’d think too. Typically, something like this is only about 1-2k a month.

Executive Search/Recruiting

It’s common for companies not to be able to afford to hire a full-time recruiter. If they can, they often can’t provide a whole team for them. That’s the first hurdle. The second is, in all honesty, most recruiters suck. The best ones fly under the radar and help you recruit or poach A players.

The thing to remember with recruiting is that most amazing employees aren’t unemployed and looking for jobs. They already have jobs and have no intention of leaving. You have to know where they are to poach them.

Finding fractional experts to focus on individual roles helps you recruit the best people you can in those specific areas that’ll help you grow your company. Some roles to get different fractional experts of companies to search for include:

• C-level roles: Total compensation needs to be $400k+
• Mid-level managers and executives: $75k-$300k roles. Retained and contingency rates. 
• Salespeople, sales managers, sales executives. Only sales roles.

SEM/SEO/PPC/Remarketing/Social Media Campaigns

If you’re spending money on any of these areas, hiring fractional experts is more than worth it. For a long time, CEOs have complained about how terrible all sorts of companies are in regards to things like SEM/SEO/PPC, remarketing, and social media campaigns. Hiring a fractional expert or company who solely works on digital marketing will benefit your company immensely.

As people who do that and only that for a living, they know digital marketing better than anyone. They will grow your company far better than the 24-year-old you hired in hopes that they’d be able to figure out all that stuff alone.

Marketing

Most companies have an $80 000 Director of Marketing who is a jack of all trades, yet a master of none. If they don’t have that, they probably have a small marketing team of 3-4 people. Not a lot can afford a Chief Marketing Officer.

Everyone would love to have the former Chief Marketing Officer of a significant brand helping them with strategy, direction, coaching, etc, but the $350 000 salary they require is far too much.

Instead, great companies have a database of dozens of former Chief Marketing Officers who will do all of that for only a few thousand dollars a month. They can work with you and your team on strategy, budgets, calendar, tactics, implementation, etc. They can also coach your Director of Marketing for you in person or via video call. This is what you get by hiring fractional experts for specific tasks rather than hiring someone expensive and full-time.

Growing your company isn’t as hard as it seems. People just make it difficult for themselves when they have to expect tremendous results from junior employees. Imagine having experts in each of these areas in your back pocket. That’s exactly what fractional experts are for!

Have you ever hired a fractional expert? Do you like it? Let us know in the comments below!

If you have questions or would like more information, I’d be happy to help. Please send us an email, and someone from my team will get in touch with you!

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in January 2018 and has been edited for accuracy and comprehensiveness.