Perhaps the most significant challenge for any CEO is organizing your C-Suite for success. Assembling your dream team of visionaries, top-notch leaders, and subject matter experts is no easy feat.
Leadership decisions should take time and contemplation. How do you even begin to hand over the reins of your operations, financials, and marketing in ways that promote your growth and impact? Plus, it may be a budgetary stretch to fill those roles with full-time personnel.
Enter the Fractional C-Suite trend, that we believe is here for the long term. Stay with us as we highlight how these part-time experts can help you grow and excel in your industry. Spoiler alert: you CAN afford for the leadership you need most.
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Fractional leadership
In our ever-evolving gig-economy, expert leadership is now up for grabs in smaller, laser-focused chunks. It’s about time, too. Gig-based experts can help small and mid-size businesses run with the big dogs in terms of innovation, efficiency, and vision.
Why shouldn’t every business, no matter their size, gain the insight and experience required from different experts to grow their impact and relevance? Why shouldn’t that leadership be available at every budget?
Learning to organize your C-Suite with the experts who can help you most can now become exciting and filled with possibilities, not dread and anxiety. (“Can I afford this person? Do I have enough work for them to justify the salary I offered?” “This better work!”)
Organize your C-Suite for any project or goal
You can now find and hire Fractional COOs, CFOs, CIOs, CMOs, and more for the projects and business goals you need, and ONLY those projects.
If you have a seasonal sales push, a software upgrade, an operations issue, or another pressing challenge, you can hire suite members–just in time. These senior executives
utilize their various skillsets for a variety of clients at any given time.
Rather than hiring a full-time senior executive, you can take advantage of a high-level leader’s unique talents and experience to help you achieve the next efficiency benchmark, sales goal, or day to day audience growth.
Here’s how to maximize your dollars to get precisely the leadership skills and innovation you need, when you need it, to grow your bottom line.
Describe your business goals
Set out your business and leadership priorities for the next year. We’re sure you have a few targets you don’t want to miss in the next 12 months. Then prioritize them however you like.
You’ll use this list to determine which suite executives need to come on board first, second, and third. If you must improve your production efficiency or research new equipment for your manufacturing process, a Fractional Chief Operations Officer could be the leader you require.
Perhaps audience growth, social media presence, and engagement is your most significant concern this year. A Fractional Chief Marketing Officer can help you update your buyer personas, strategize new branding initiatives, and expand your reach.
Once you’re clear about what you’d like to accomplish, selecting the specialists you need to get there will be easier.
Choose your success metrics
Of course, goals are useless without metrics. You must be able to determine what success looks like when hiring a fractional team. Your desired results can help you outline the projects, length of time, and processes for which you’ll require extra help.
For example, you may want a Fractional COO to get you through the busy holiday shopping season. This leader can help you ensure end-to-end customer satisfaction and on-time delivery and logistics optimization.
In a software upgrade, a Fractional Chief Information Officer can coordinate and implement a seamless go-live strategy and troubleshoot external and internal challenges during the transition.
This suite member can also be “on-call” for several months after the roll-out to ensure all stakeholders communicate effectively and bugs get worked out as they come up. They can also anticipate future challenges and help you and your team create a methodology to overcome roadblocks to software functionality.
A Fractional CFO can walk with you through audit or budgeting season. They can also help you set and achieve financial goals as outlined in your budget through strategic purchases or personnel and hiring decisions.
Set your C-Suite budget
A big advantage of organizing your C-Suite with fractional professionals is cost management. Full-time salaries for these experts are steep for start-up, small, and mid-size businesses. Plus, you may not have the workload to justify several full-time executive roles.
Take a look again at your goals list and success metrics. Estimate the time required of the expert you want. Then, take your list to several Fractional Executive candidates. They’ll give you quotes for their services and you can compare them to discover which expert will best meet your needs.
Some executives will compile their services by project, and some may give a per-hour fee. Most experts will work with you to come up with a service strategy that works for all parties.
Do plan to invest as much as you can in your Fractional Team. Paying your experts well means securing relationships upon which you can rely beyond the scope of the project. Plus, you’ll grow your reputation as a premier place to work.
Join Romain Berg and grow your influence and impact
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We also engage with our members to share their genius and innovation with our community. Everyone benefits when we share our challenges, learning, and success!
Join as a member today and start amping up your leadership, impact, and influence.