Fractional CTO — A fractional CTO in the seat, before you can hire one.

A chief technology officer working with you for part of a week rather than all of it, on the same remit a full-time one would have — architecture, delivery, the engineering team, and the technical calls that carry commercial consequences. The distinction that matters is not the hours. It is that a fractional CTO takes decisions and owns them, where a consultant or an advisor recommends and leaves. If nobody is accountable for the outcome, it is advice, not a CTO.

A fixed monthly fee against an agreed scope rather than an hourly or day rate, so the cost is predictable and there is no incentive to stretch the work out. The figure depends on the days a month and the remit, and it is agreed before anything starts. The short diagnostic that usually precedes it is priced separately and on its own, so you can stop there if that is all you needed.

Speed, cost and reversibility. A permanent CTO at this level is typically six months of searching and a six-figure salary plus equity, and it is a difficult hire to assess if you are not technical yourself. This starts in weeks, costs a fraction of that, and ends when it should. It is not better than the right permanent hire — it is what covers the two years before you can make one, and it usually includes making it.

Long enough to be useful and no longer. Reviewed every quarter, and the explicit aim is to end: we hire our replacement, document what we built and hand over deliberately. An arrangement that quietly renews forever has stopped being fractional leadership and become an expensive dependency.

Work with them, in almost every case. The team usually knows where the problems are — what tends to be missing is someone senior enough to make the calls and carry the consequences. Where a change is genuinely needed, we will say so early and directly rather than letting it sit.

Probably not yet, and it is worth saying so. A fractional CTO leads a team, and where there is no team most of the seat has nothing to do. What you are likely to want first is the thing built — deciding what version one contains, making the architecture calls that quietly set what the next two years cost, and writing it. We do that too; it is a different engagement, scoped and quoted as a piece of work rather than charged as a monthly seat, and it has its own page under build your MVP. Founders move from that to this as the team arrives, and we would rather start you in the right place than sell you a seat before there is anything to lead.

Yes, and often that is the better structure. Advisory for equity puts technical and product leadership into the business in place of cash — or alongside it, where a business wants to reduce the monthly cost without losing the seat. See investment and equity partnerships for how those deals are shaped.