Fractional or Full Time?

TLDR: Most young businesses would benefit from an experienced, expert fractional hire to get the ball rolling by figuring out the unknown unknowns in expansion markets. What questions should founders consider before activating the fractional option?

Even If you haven’t read about the chicken-and-egg issue that startup founders face when expanding into lucrative markets, you’ve surely faced it already. We wrote about it here and we’d recommend reading that one first.

Step one of expanding into a new market often involves understanding many unknown unknowns. The first step feels large, hazy, risky. And, there’s more risky steps after understanding, to adapting to conquering. These risks are further compounded by the chicken-and-egg choices that young businesses face when taking their first, unsure steps in a new market.

An experienced, expert fractional hire can mitigate that risk, if done right. What factors should you founders or CEOs consider before bringing on a fractional hire in an expansion market:

1. How large is your business?

If you’re a early stage startup or a young business with less than $10M in revenue, a good fractional hire can deliver disproportionately large results. A business of this size wouldn’t have brand recognition or product-market fit in an expansion market. Piggybacking on the networks, knowledge, track record that an experienced fractional leader has built over the years, buys a level of credibility in that market. This allows the business to skip some (not all) of the birthing pains in that market like lack of trust, knowhow, supporters or recognizable logos.

2. How mature is your business?

A fractional leader isn’t going to take the usual 6 months to onramp in your company to learn the processes, people and ways of working. Since the leader is usually incentivised by outcomes, they’re not going to play by the rules of your home market. Delivering outcomes quickly requires a high level of flexibility, agility and communication from your team on contract terms, demand planning, service levels, pricing, meeting timezones, etc. Large businesses that are set in their ways, usually struggle with this.

3. What’s your runway?

Early stage startups and young businesses, are always bumping up against the end of their runway. In such a scenario, quick results in quick time are doubly important. Being able to do so without burning up even more runway, is triply important. A fractional hire can shine in such circumstances because (a) they are heavily incentivised by outcomes like sales or expansions or renewals (b) the upfront time and money investment is much smaller and (c) there’s a shared understanding of the existential importance of supporting the hire in delivering outcomes.

4. Where are you expanding to?

Bloomberg reported that Singapore hosted an incredible 4,200 regional HQs in 2024, almost 3x of Hong Kong. If you’re expanding to SE Asia, your path to budgets and approvals most likely passes through Singapore. The world’s most expensive city’s sky high wages and long term networks of senior leaders, makes it the ideal location to experiment with a fractional hire (as we wrote about here).

If you’re expanding into countries and industries that have unique languages or entry barriers, those are also the perfect place for a local, experienced fractional hire or partner. Think Vietnam or Japan or China, automotive or cybersecurity or government. Local business knowledge and networks count for a lot, as does getting an early win or a marquee logo in that market. However, if you’re targeting heavily regulated industries like private banking or aviation or payments, then fractional is not for you.

5. Are you clear on your objectives?

Fuzzy goals, unclear timelines and scope creep often lead to failed outcomes and unhappy relationships in a fractional arrangement. Agreeing to clear, measurable, time bound and heavily incentivised quantitative KPIs ahead of kicking off are critical For this, the founder or CEO needs to be clear of what the objectives in the expansion market are.

An example of a clear objective would be to get a foothold in the Malaysian market, the KPI would be to get $500K of ACV within 12 months. Level 2 KPIs to achieve that goal might be 10 meetings with ICPs and 3 new deals in the pipeline monthly.

6. How complex/flexible is your offering?

As your fractional hire starts to figure out the unknown unknowns one by one, you’re going to get requests of your product and service to make them more sellable in that market. E.g., language support, onboarding support, custom dashboards, compliance with local privacy laws, co-branding arrangements, payment terms, discounts, etc. Inflexibility on this front will inevitably lead to frustration and slow progress.

Having a complex offering is not necessarily an automatic no no in a fractional arrangement, but it puts additional emphasis on getting #5 right (clear objectives and KPIs). A less technical, more platformised offering with flexibility baked in, is ideal though.

7. How big a priority is this?

Treating a fractional hire as a regular employee is a recipe for disaster. If this expansion is a priority for you, then you will need to dedicate time to the hire at the highest levels (C-suite and C-suite minus one) for the 3-6 months of the initial contract. Time is at a premium here, you want to get to your outcomes quick and dirty(ish), this needs quick turnarounds, flexibility, support. On your end, you want to keep on top of how the KPIs are trending and offer help/direction/critique where required. There are also a lot of learnings that come from this approach, that you want to be able to capitalise on.

We have more questions, more examples, more hacks that we had to exclude for brevity, let’s get a cup of coffee to go over those?