A roundtable with Ken Acer (Fractional CMO), Stacy Kamigaki (Fractional CMO), Robert Lock (Fractional CRO), Sam Aarons (Fractional COO) and Randy Emelo (Fractional Business Advisor) on why the C-suite is quietly being rebuilt and what SMB owners need to understand before their next big hire.

There is a quiet math problem sitting in most small and mid-sized businesses, and most founders don’t realize they’re working it backwards. 

It looks like this: top-line revenue is solid, but the bottom line is mush. Growth has stalled at the same revenue band three years running. The CEO is the bottleneck of every meaningful decision. And the standard playbook, write a job description, post the role, sift 100 resumes, interview ten, hope the offer sticks, takes anywhere from 36 to 42 days on average and costs nearly $36,000 per executive hire before salary even starts (SHRM Benchmarking Report). 

That’s the upside scenario. The downside is worse. 

Roughly 40 to 46 percent of newly hired executives are gone within 18 months, and Harvard Business Review research suggests a failed executive hire can cost an organization 10 to 15 times that executive’s annual salary once severance, lost momentum, and culture damage are accounted for (Hunt Scanlon Media). 

A growing number of CEOs are looking at that math and choosing a different door.

The fractional executive market has roughly doubled in two years, from around 60,000 professionals in 2022 to 120,000 in 2024 , and analysts now project that by the end of 2025, 35 percent of U.S. companies will have at least one fractional executive on their org chart (Fractionus). The broader market is north of $5.7 billion and growing at 14 percent annually. 

To understand why, five fractional executives, a COO, a CRO, a Business Advisor and two CMOs, sat down to unpack what CEOs are getting wrong, and what they’re starting to get right. 

The biggest misunderstanding: Fractional is not “part-time” 

Ask any of these leaders what business owners misread about the model, and the same answer surfaces almost immediately. 

 “There is this perception that fractional just means part-time,” said Sam Aarons, a fractional COO who works primarily with distressed and high-growth small businesses.

“I would hazard a guess that every fractional in this session, if a client has a big issue or they’re doing a big lift, you’re not just thinking about that client for those five to nine hours a week you’re contracted. The back of your brain is chewing on whatever that is all the time. This isn’t part-time for part-time results. This is fractional time for maximum results.” 

That distinction matters because the cognitive overhead of a senior operator does not switch off when the calendar block ends. It also matters because of how value gets created on day one. 

“Fractional executives can be effective on day one,” said Ken Acer, who organizes Fractionals In Action and has watched dozens of these engagements unfold.

“If you’re going to make a permanent hire, you might be six months away from someone in the seat and a year away if they don’t work out. The risk level is a lot lower for a CEO who wants immediate results.” 

Stacy Kamigaki, a fractional CMO, pushed the point further: fractional doesn’t mean external advisor, either. 

“Not just part-time, but also they think you’re a consultant or you’re outside the organization,” Stacy said. “A good fractional leader, you’re not sitting outside just providing recommendations. You are embedded in the business. You are part of that leadership team. And you are accountable for the results.” 

That accountability piece is the one most CEOs don’t expect, and it’s the one that changes the relationship entirely. You are not buying time. You are buying outcomes. 

Randy Emelo , a former software CEO who spent 20 years in that seat before becoming a strategic fractional advisor , frames the contract this way:  

“There’s a misunderstanding that they’re paying for my time, which isn’t necessarily true. They’re paying for an outcome, and we agree on the outcome. This isn’t about me coming in as a consulting expert and telling them how to do it. Today, I’m a process facilitator. I make suggestions; they make decisions.” 

That subtle reframe is hard for founders who are used to “owning resources.” But it’s also why fractional engagements work in companies where a full-time hire would stall. The CEO doesn’t transfer the problem to the new hire and walk away. The fractional surfaces the issue, builds the system, and hands the wheel back stronger. 

Robert Lock, a fractional sales leader who works with founder-led, privately-held companies, sees the scheduling expectation as the close cousin of that confusion.  

“What happens if something happens on Thursday?” Robert said, naming the question every founder asks. “Business is messy and doesn’t always fit into Wednesday morning. So you establish the rules around that — office hours, a 911 link — and you make it make sense to them.

But you also have to set the expectation, said Sam Aarons, that an issue and a big idea are not the same thing.” The first might need a phone call today. The second can wait for the next planning session and probably should.

The signals that say you’re ready. Most fractional engagements don’t start because a founder reads an article like this one. They start because something is breaking. 

 The patterns the panel described are remarkably consistent: 

• The plateau. Revenue stalls. The tactics that built the company are no longer producing ROI, and no one can articulate why. “It’s typically when the business has plateaued and there’s a disconnect or disparate activities taking place that they don’t understand,” Stacy said. 
• The CFO sees it first. “A lot of times it’s actually the finance officer that sees the first problem,” Sam noted. “There’s this really solid top line, but the bottom line is just mush.” 
• The growth ceiling. “There can be a crisis of leadership. There could be a crisis of distributed management within the organization,” Randy said. “The symptoms are all going to feel the same. The things that used to work are now no longer working. There’s more growth, less time, less resources. We don’t seem to be able to keep up. It’s no longer fun.” 
• The founder bottleneck. Every meaningful decision flows through one person. Projects sit at 98 percent complete. Customers grow frustrated. The CEO hasn’t taken a real vacation in years. 

Randy named the gravitational pull of that last pattern bluntly: “The time to plant the tree is 10 years ago. If you wait until you’ve implemented every system, you’re going to try to do heart surgery on your organization while none of the other vital systems are working.” 

The good news, according to the panel, is that the company often already knows what’s wrong, its just isn’t talking about it.  

“The intelligence is in the system,” Randy said. “The organization knows what their issues are. They’re just not talking about it, and it’s not being prioritized. It always comes down to: people aren’t doing what we think they should be doing. That’s usually a symptom of something much deeper. There’s a lack of critical decision making happening.” 

This is supported by management research more broadly. Gallup has long found that roughly 70 percent of the variance in team engagement is attributable to the manager, meaning that what looks like a “people problem” is almost always a leadership and decision-making problem (Hunt Scanlon Media). 

What makes an engagement actually work 

If hiring well is the hard part of running a company, hiring a fractional well requires a different muscle. The panel converged on three things that separate successful engagements from disappointing ones. 

1. Commitment, communication, and collaboration

Stacy organized this around what she calls the Three Cs. 

“There needs to be a commitment from them to give us the platform, the access, that day-to-day visibility so we can be effective as an in-house leader. Next is communication, frequent communication, even when we’re not in the day-to-day. And then collaboration. The best clients I’ve worked with are always asking me, ‘What do you need from us?'” 

 That last question: what do you need from us?, is the operating signal of a CEO who is going to get the full benefit of the model. 

2. A willingness to actually execute the plan 

“What makes an engagement really successful,” Randy said, “is a commitment on the side of the organization to actually follow through on the plans they create. It all sounds good until you have to actually start doing it.” 

He told the story of a founder who delayed the engagement because new payroll and project management software were going in first. A year later, after the systems were live and the leadership alignment work was finished, the founder told Randy something simple: 

“I’m sleeping on weekends. It’s amazing.” The business hadn’t been fixed in the sense of every problem solved. The CEO had been freed from constantly firefighting it. 

That outcome, a CEO who can think instead of react,  is the one Sam optimizes for:

“All of my favorite outcome stories deal with senior leaders who have called me and said, ‘I can breathe. We took our first vacation in 10 years.’ That’s the kind of success we go after. It’s why we work in the small business space. We’re affecting real people and we’re changing real lives when we do our jobs well.” 

3. Cultural onboarding, for real

The third pattern is the one most CEOs underweight: a fractional needs to be onboarded into the culture the way any other senior hire would be. 

 “Culture is so important,” Ken said. “And onboarding the fractional into the organization like you would a new employee, so that people don’t feel threatened because somebody is already in the VP of marketing or VP of finance or VP of operations role. A fractional comes in and sometimes they feel threatened, and we’re there to raise the entire organization’s skill set, not to take somebody’s job.” 

Robert told a story that captured why this matters.

A small company, an owner trapped in the daily operation of his own business, no real sales process and a willingness to be coached. “He’s a sales guy, but he’s willing and open to ideas he hadn’t really thought of yet. He’s not one of these owners that says, ‘I know everything, get out of my office.'”

Months later, the same owner told Robert: “The work that we did was meaningful for me, my business, the people that work for me, and my family.” The goal shifted from “retire and close it down” to “build a business he gets to sell.” 

What fractional gives you that a full-time hire can’t 

The panel kept returning to one quietly powerful idea: when you hire a fractional, you don’t just hire one person. You hire the network they’ve built across their portfolio. 

“Fractionals are sort of wired to connect and to bring experts in,” Robert said. “The joke around my house is ‘so I know a guy.’ Even if what I do isn’t the answer, I’ve built this incredibly powerful network with incredibly smart people who can plug right into your problem and get going to fix it right now. It isn’t just about the work that I do. It’s about the networks we’ve all built.” 

Sam framed the operational version of the same principle: “Because the discovery phase is often where we start to see, we really need somebody in the revenue space. We really need somebody who has a strategic CFO component and not just a tactical CFO component. It allows us to reach broadly throughout the fractional arena and bring other folks in, where if you were buying one full-time senior leader, you wouldn’t have that distributed skill set.” 

This is one of the structural reasons the math works. Industry analysis suggests fractional engagements typically deliver 30 to 60 percent of the value of a full-time hire at 15 to 25 percent of the cost, and companies bringing in fractional executives report an average 25 percent improvement in operational efficiency within the first six months (HCC International).

The reason isn’t that fractionals work harder. It’s that one fractional engagement often unlocks two or three other ones in adjacent functions, run by people who already know how to work together. 

Ken named the unspoken value, too. A panel attendee once told him the most unexpected benefit of fractional support was that “they were willing to tell me my baby was not as attractive as I thought my baby was.” 

 “We’re not beholden to one company and one paycheck,” Ken said. “It’s three or four companies that we have in our portfolios. Even if you are very collaborative, your team follows your lead. Sometimes it’s good to get outside advice for that.” 

So how do you know if you’re “fractional curious”? 

The clearest test, the panel agreed, is felt before it’s named.  “If you’re feeling overwhelmed,” Randy said, “you probably ought to be thinking about it.” 

 A few specific signals to listen for: 

• The top line looks fine, but the bottom line is mush. 
• You’re using the same resources you’ve always used to try to get results you’ve never gotten. 
• You’re the decision bottleneck on everything that matters. 
• A function (marketing, sales, ops, finance) is producing activity but not outcomes. 
• You can’t articulate how every program ties to a strategic objective. 
• You haven’t slept on a weekend in a long time. 

If two or three of those resonate, the panel’s advice is to start with a conversation, not a contract. Talk to peers who’ve used a fractional. Ask what worked. Ask what didn’t. Find someone who matches your culture and who is more interested in your business than your retainer. 

“It’s an interview process that goes both ways,” Ken said. “I’m trying to figure out whether I want to work for that company, whether they already know all the answers, whether it’s a dictatorial environment. I want to help people grow. I want to help people expand their ideas. Finding the right kind of CEO who’s open to change is critical.” 

The bottom line 

Stacy’s parting thought was the one most worth pinning to the wall. 

“What I love most about fractional is there’s no longer a need for a trade-off. Before, when it came to money, you had to decide either/or: someone less experienced who can execute, or someone with high-level experience but a higher price tag. What I love is that it allows you to have the best of both,  so you can run faster and go farther.” 

 Or, as Sam put it: “We’re not a magic bullet. But the outcomes can be magical.” 

For the CEOs and SMB owners reading this, the takeaway is simpler than the model sometimes sounds. The question is not “can I afford a fractional executive?” The question is “what is it costing me to keep doing this the old way?” 

 If the honest answer is more than I’d like to admit, the math has already made the case. 

If you’re a CEO, founder, or business owner wrestling with a growth inflection point, gaps in the leadership team, a strategy that’s not landing, a sales engine that’s stalled and want to learn more? listen to leaders who’ve been exactly where you are.

Fractionals In Action is a series of in-person events where you’ll meet the fractional executives helping companies scale smarter.

Next event: 

📅 Thursday, June 11, 2026 | 2:00 – 4:00 PM
📍 Plante Moran | 8181 E Tufts Ave, Denver

Join and learn more: Fractionals In Action Denver