A digital leader in your executive team, one or two days a week
Not a consultant who visits, writes a document and leaves. A named member of the leadership team with the roadmap, the suppliers and the budget in their hands, for as long as that is useful, and with a handover written in from the start.
- Commitment
- One or two days a week
- Initial term
- Six months, reviewed at three
- Notice
- One month, either side
The decisions are being made. They are just not being made by anyone whose job this is
The finance director is holding the supplier contract because it arrived as a cost. The operations lead is arbitrating between two systems that were never designed to speak to each other. The chief executive is being asked for a position on AI by a board that has read something worrying in the trade press. None of these people is wrong, and none of them owns it.
The textbook answer is to hire a digital director. For an organisation of this size that is a six-figure commitment, a four-month recruitment process and a bet on one person you have met three times. The alternative most organisations reach for instead is advisory, which produces a document and leaves the deciding where it already was.
Fractional leadership sits in the gap that leaves. Someone senior enough to be listened to, present often enough to know what is actually happening, and accountable for the outcome rather than for the recommendation.
What the appointment is
A director-level digital and AI lead, in the business one or two days a week, on the executive team rather than alongside it. In the leadership meeting with a standing item. Named on the roadmap. Holding the supplier relationships and answerable for what they deliver.
The same person every week. No account manager, no bench, no juniors doing the work under a senior name. If you meet me in the scoping session, I am the person who turns up.
How this differs from the strategic advisory retainer
The retainer advises the leadership team
You bring a decision, I bring an outside view, you decide. I am not in the room when it is executed and I carry no accountability for it.
Fractional leadership joins the leadership team
I own the decision alongside you, I am in the room when it is executed, and I answer for it at the next board meeting.
If you are unsure which you need, the test is whether the problem is the quality of the thinking or the absence of an owner. Only one of those is fixed by advice.
The four options honestly compared
You are choosing between four ways of getting senior digital leadership. Fractional is not the right answer in every row, and the rows where it loses are set out as plainly as the ones where it wins.
| Consideration | Full-time director | Consultancy | Agency | Fractional leader |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Annual cost | £110k–£160k plus employment costs | £150k and up for an equivalent engagement | Bundled into project fees, rarely visible | £30k–£70k depending on days Strongest here |
| Time in your business | Five days a week Strongest here | Intense, then gone | Whatever the project needs | One or two days, every week |
| Depth of context | Complete, after six months Strongest here | Partial and time-boxed | Limited to their scope of work | Good, and it compounds |
| Independence from suppliers | Depends on the individual | Often has delivery revenue attached | Is the supplier | Nothing to sell you Strongest here |
| Speed to useful | Four to six months including recruitment | Two to four weeks Strongest here | Fast, within their remit | Two to three weeks |
| Accountability for outcomes | Contractual and personal Strongest here | Ends with the report | For deliverables, not results | Contractual and personal |
| Risk if it does not work | Redundancy, rehire, twelve months lost | Sunk fee, no change | Switching cost and rebuild | One month notice Strongest here |
| Capacity to deliver at scale | Can build and run a team Strongest here | Can field a team quickly | Substantial | Limited. Brings a team in, does not replace one |
If you need five days a week of leadership, or a team built and held for the next three years, employ someone. This arrangement is for organisations that genuinely cannot justify that yet and are currently getting nothing instead.
What a month actually looks like
Buyers of fractional leadership rarely know how the time is used. On a two-day-a-week arrangement, roughly eight days a month divide like this.
In the leadership meeting and around it
- Standing digital and AI item at the executive meeting
- Pre-reads written for whoever needs to make the decision
- The corridor conversations that stop bad decisions before they reach a paper
On the roadmap and the work in flight
- Owning the sequence: what is next, what is paused, what is stopped
- Reviewing what is being built against what was agreed
- Unblocking the internal team, in person where it matters
With suppliers and budget
- Holding agencies and platform suppliers to the contract
- Reviewing invoices and change requests before they are approved
- Renegotiation and, occasionally, ending arrangements
With the board and the wider team
- Board and trustee papers written in language that does not need translating
- Quarterly review against the measures agreed at scoping
- Coaching the people who will eventually not need me
What the role owns, and what it does not
The role owns
- The digital and AI roadmap and its sequence
- Supplier performance and contract decisions
- Digital spend within an agreed envelope
- The board-facing account of digital risk and progress
The role does not own
- Line management of your permanent staff
- Hiring and firing decisions, which stay with you
- Signing commitments above the agreed envelope
- Anything that would need me present to keep working
Capability development
The point at which you stop needing outside help
Most organisations do not have a skills problem. They have a dependency problem. Decisions wait for someone external, and the knowledge leaves when the invoice is paid. This is the work of making sure that stops.
What it addresses
- A leadership team that cannot interrogate a digital or AI proposal without help
- One internal person who has become the single point of failure
- Suppliers who are trusted because nobody internally can check them
- Decisions deferred because nobody feels qualified to make them
How it runs
- Working sessions with the people who actually decide, not classroom training
- Built on your live decisions and your own documents, never generic case studies
- Between two and six sessions, spaced to let practice happen in between
- A short written record after each one, so the knowledge outlives the session
The measure is not satisfaction scores. It is whether the next digital decision gets made internally, on time, without me in the room.
Scoped by how many people need to be able to do this and how contested the decisions are. Usually the smallest engagement in the business.
Two things the appointment absorbs
Programme oversight
Where a significant programme is already running and the concern is whether it is being told the truth about itself. I take the oversight role: reviewing progress against the original case, testing the reporting, and raising the things that internal reporting lines find difficult to raise. This is part of the appointment rather than a separate purchase, because oversight without authority is just another opinion.
Supplier leadership
Most organisations of this size have between three and eight digital suppliers and no single person holding all of those relationships. I hold them. That means one accountable point for performance, contract renewals, escalations and the awkward conversation about value for money. Frequently it pays for a meaningful part of the arrangement in the first year.
What you get
- A named leader on the executive team, with the authority to decide within the agreed envelope
- A roadmap that is owned rather than published: sequenced, costed and reviewed monthly
- One accountable point for every supplier, rather than relationships spread across three directors
- Board and trustee reporting written for the people who have to approve it
- Quarterly review against measures agreed at scoping, including where the arrangement is not earning its fee
- A named handover point, written into the engagement from the start
How this is scoped
Priced monthly, agreed at scoping, invoiced flat. No day rates, no time recording, no line item for a phone call.
Days per week
One day suits an organisation with a competent internal team and no senior owner. Two suits one where the roadmap and the suppliers both need holding.
Scope of accountability
Roadmap only, or roadmap plus suppliers plus programme oversight. The third is materially more work and is priced as such.
Stabilise or build
Repairing a stalled programme is more intensive in the first quarter than building from a clean start, and usually shorter overall.
Initial term six months, reviewed at three. One month notice either side. There is no tie-in and no notice trap.
Who this is for, and who it is not for
This is for you if
- You are between roughly 20 and 400 people, with real digital dependency and no senior digital owner
- The leadership team has concluded a full-time director is not justifiable yet
- The board or the trustees need someone accountable rather than another report
- A programme has stalled and there is no internal authority to reset it
This is not for you if
- You need five days a week. Employ someone, and I will help you write the brief
- You are looking for a delivery team. This is leadership, not build capacity
- The real problem is that the leadership team does not agree there is a problem
- You want a name on a slide for credibility. The role is operational or it is nothing
What the arrangement protects
No software to sell
The roadmap is not quietly shaped by what I would earn from it. There is nothing I would earn from it.
A named exit
Every engagement has a handover point written into it. The aim is an organisation that no longer needs the arrangement.
One person, no bench
No juniors, no subcontractors, no account manager. The person in the meeting is the person doing the work.
Evidence
Where this arrangement has held up.
Case study · housebuilder
A multi-year digital programme sequenced so it could be stopped at any point
Operating model and technology moved together, with each stage defensible on its own.
Housebuilder digital transformation »Case study · agency
A strategic review carried out from inside the leadership team
Written for the people who had to act on it, not for the people who commissioned it.
Agency strategic review »Track record
More than forty years in business and technology, more than thirty of them in digital
Executive board membership in a £140 million travel business, programme leadership up to £2.5 million, and current service as a trustee on a risk and audit committee.
About »What happens next
Book a 30-minute conversationRelated services
Capability development
Usually runs alongside this rather than instead of it. The part that makes the handover real.
Capability development »Strategic advisory retainer
If what you need is a senior outside view on specific decisions rather than an owner inside the team.
Strategic advisory retainer »AI strategy and governance
If the immediate pressure is a board asking for an AI position and an oversight framework.
AI strategy and governance »Not sure where to start?
Most clients begin with a conversation. No pitch, no hard sell.
Just a straightforward discussion about where you are and whether I can help.
Book a free 30-minute call