Chapter Five: Fractional Leadership is Good for Individuals

There are at least six advantages to working fractionally. Three are related to enhancing your performance and impact, two are financial, and one is all about risk mitigation in our current climate where tenures are often short while those perceived to be “job hoppers” are punished.

Advantage #1: Learning at a Faster Clock Speed

 Strong marketing leaders are voracious learners. They absolutely must be.

Talk to a top-performer and they’ll excitedly recount numerous new things they’re learning, books they’ve read, thought leaders they admire, podcasts they listen to, and much more too.

They also learn by doing, and a long time spent in one role can lead to a sort of myopia. 

Oftentimes you’ll meet a marketing leader who has honed every aspect of their craft as it relates to the specific market challenges and opportunities of their company at the expense of learning anything else.

They’re focusing so intently that they fail to step back, look up, and survey the world around them.

Perhaps they’ve built a high-velocity inbound machine and have become absolute experts on squeezing every last drop of efficiency from SEO, SEM, paid social, remarketing, and nurture cadences. What have they failed to learn as a result?

New mindsets, strategies, tactics and tools have been evolving quickly. Predictive modeling, intent data, deep personalization, account-based marketing, category design, influencer marketing, executive engagement... the list goes on and on.   

Are these things directly relevant to their current role? Perhaps not on the surface, but many critical innovations come from connecting dots and these myopic process optimizers tend to miss a lot of emerging dots.  

Working in a fractional leadership capacity with several companies at once presents an amazing opportunity to accelerate your learning, especially when those companies operate in different market contexts and require different approaches to growth.

Advantage #2: Cross-Pollinating those Learnings

All that enhanced and accelerated learning enables fractional marketing leaders to cross-pollinate success from one company to another in countless ways.

The amazing speed and agility with which you operate in a startup? How can you apply aspects of it to some of the things you do in a large enterprise?

The robust cross-functional support you can tap in a high-performing enterprise? What pieces of that should you build first in your startup?

The high-touch engagement you have with the best clients of your high-growth company? How can you replicate that sense of purpose and belonging in a subset of the clients of your legacy firm?

Strategies, metrics, tactics, tools, channels, team structures, new roles and functions... A good fractional leader, learning at a high clock speed in several organizations, can bring a wealth of fresh thinking to every company they work with.

Advantage #3: Work with More Great People

We learn from books, blogs, podcasts and all sort of other materials. We learn from doing. We also learn from those we work with.

Fractional marketing leaders reap the rewards of working with more great people than they ever would in a single role. 

More CEOs and senior executives. More salespeople and sales leaders. And, of course, more marketers of every stripe.

This accelerates our learning (as discussed in advantage #1 above), but the benefit doesn’t end there. Fractional leaders also develop a wide and deep network that opens a lot of doors for the future.

Building personal relationships with and making an impact on a lot of people in a lot of different companies and (often) in a variety of industries is an investment in your future. A great many new opportunities will present themselves over time as a result.

Advantage #4: Make More Money

We’ll explore a number of fractional leadership pricing models in a subsequent section, but suffice to say that a busy fractional marketing leader has the potential to be very well compensated. 

Total compensation from working with several companies at a time can significantly exceed the salary of a single commensurate role.

It’s not all upside. You likely won’t have benefits, equity participation and other advantages, but your monthly earnings – once you’ve established yourself in this capacity – ought to significantly exceed your single-role alternatives.

Advantage #5: Nobody Can Take It All Away

“Isn’t that risky?”

“I have a mortgage to pay and a family to feed. I couldn’t do that.”

I’ve had a lot of conversations with people who like the idea of fractional work, but they’re stuck on the notion that it’s inherently risky compared to a more conventional career path.

Sometimes, sadly, I talk to them a while later and they’re unemployed. Their “safe” job disappeared. 

Companies are acquired and once-secure roles become redundant. Organizations restructure and re-focus. Across the board cost cutting leads to downsizing. 

Those “safe” corporate jobs aren’t always as safe as they’re perceived to be.

And if you’re on the older side? And let’s face it, in tech “older” isn’t old at all.

Or if you’ve been in the same company for many years?

The other side of the punish-job-hoppers tendencies we’ve discussed in previous chapters is the frequent punishing of people seen as having spent “too long” at one company. They must be complacent, change-resistant, challenge-averse... 

Recruiters and hiring managers with 200 resumes on their desk are fickle creatures. They bring many conscious and unconscious biases to the task of quickly knocking that pile down to a more manageable dozen or so.

It’s a pretty great feeling to have several concurrent sources of income.

You’ll lose one here and there and you won’t sweat it. You’re still alright. More than alright perhaps, as now you have the opportunity to jump into another project you’ve had to backburner for lack of bandwidth.

For many people, in many situations, having several sources of income is safer than having one.

I love that nobody can pull the rug out from under me.

Advantage #6: Resume Optics

Fractional leaders don’t worry about the resume optics most people contend with.

Many people correctly worry that several short stints on their resume will paint them as undesirable.

Maybe they’re always chasing greener grass on the other side of the fence.

Maybe they interview well and perform poorly.

Maybe they’re hard to get along with.

Maybe they’re excellent performers who have been unfortunate victims of circumstances beyond their control.

Most recruiters and hiring managers won’t spend too much time pondering the “why”. They’ll just pass. They’ve got 200 other candidates and it’s just not practical for them to consider – much less investigate – your patchy past. 

Fractional leaders don’t worry about such things.

Clients and engagements come and go. It’s a feature not a bug.

Their story, and their ability to deliver, grows as they develop more experience in more companies solving an ever-growing number of challenges.

Subsequent Chapters

Upcoming chapters will explore:

-       How fractional marketing leaders find clients (several approaches)

-       How fractional marketing leaders price their work (several viable models)

-       How to get off on the right foot in a new engagement

And more too.