The Hot Takes on Fractional Work

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I’ve been sick this week, which means I’m in an agitated mood :). So these are a collection of some of my own personal hot takes on fractional work.

My opinion only! I’m sharing for fun and to spark conversation. Do you have your own hot takes? I’d love to hear them. Email us at hello [at] fractionaljobs.io

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Stop Pretending To Be A “Boutique” Agency

It’s not helping you. It’s probably hurting. Clients aren’t going to be impressed by your agency name or logo or website. Companies want to hire A PERSON. A human face that they can trust to do the work they need done.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to explain to hirers on Fractional Jobs that “no, they’re not really an agency. It’s just a person. They’re just branding themselves as an agency.”

If your ambition is to build an agency, fine. You’ve gotta start somewhere. But if you’re one person planning to do the work, you’re much better off leading with your human-ness and not a faceless “agency”.

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Your Personal Website Doesn’t Matter

Nobody’s visiting it! Nobody’s discovering it organically!

You’re going to spend all this time creating it, and it won’t matter. The only thing I think it’s good for is to find your Linkedin profile so hirers can see the work you’ve done (in a visual format they are much more familiar with).

** Exception #1: If you have a large volume of inbound from your content marketing or other sales tactics. Then, it probably makes sense.

** Exception #2: You’re a designer.

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You’re Selling Your Time, There’s No Way Around It

Your monthly retainer should be associated with hours worked.

Value-based pricing works well when the deliverables are EXTREMELY clear, and with little room for uncertainty. It’s for fixed projects. It does not work well when priorities are changing, scope is vague, etc.

The sooner you accept this truth the better.

“But it takes me only 1 hour to do something that a more junior resource would spend 5 hours on!” Yes! So price that hour accordingly.

Here’s the thing - if you can get away with selling a monthly retainer for $10K/mo and only putting in 2 hours of effort per week … congrats. You hit the jackpot. But your client is getting the short-end of the stick.

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Early-stage Companies Don’t Want Pure Managers

They want Fractional CTOs that can code. They want CMOs that can write email copy.

This is the very nature of startups. Fractional work doesn’t magically get around this. Hands-on work is fundamental to early-stage companies.

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Most Fractionals Will Fail

Doing fractional work full-time means being a business owner. And we all know that 9 / 10 business fail on average. I don't believe 9 / 10 fractionals will fail, but it's definitely more than half.

Because it's hard! It's really hard to get and sustain clients. Congrats to you for making the effort.

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If doing fractional work sounds exciting to you, or you want to learn more, check us out at https://fractionaljobs.io. We've got plenty of live jobs from startups looking for senior-level fractional talent.