By Laura Allen, Founder & Managing Partner, The Fractional Agency
My entry into the fractional world wasn’t the result of a carefully crafted career plan. It happened organically, almost by accident.
After leaving my corporate career, I ran a business coaching and consulting practice, working with business owners across accounting, recruitment, equipment hire, architectural designers and more. I loved what I was doing! Offering my expertise in operations, people and mindset support, but I kept hitting the same wall. There was only so much I could do with a Founder or CEO in a biweekly coaching session. They were given the strategy, but walking away before it was implemented meant the impact was always diluted.
So I made a shift. Instead of advising from the outside, I pitched myself to my existing clients as a part-time executive. Someone embedded in the leadership structure, working alongside them and their team, to actually make things happen. My first clients were clients I already knew. It worked. And from there, my fractional Career was born.
What I didn’t have was a roadmap. I had to figure out the legal setup, pricing, positioning, and pipeline almost entirely on my own. That experience is exactly why I want to be straight with you about what going fractional actually involves, especially if you’re considering doing it in the context of M&A and private equity, which is a very different game to generalist fractional work.
The case for going fractional and creating an executive portfolio career is compelling. Autonomy over your time. Freedom to choose who you work with and when. The ability to do your best, most focused work rather than being pulled into every operational meeting or the political nonsense that comes with a full-time seat. And financially, the earning potential is strong: senior fractional executives in the UK typically command £800- £1,500 per day, working with multiple clients simultaneously.
Those things are all true. But most people who struggle in their first year aren’t struggling because of a lack of capability. They’re struggling because of three things nobody tells you up front.
First, positioning: Most senior executives thinking of becoming a fractional CFO/CMO/CPO etc default to describing themselves in terms of their last job title. ‘Former CFO’, ‘Ex-COO’, ‘20 years in finance’. That’s a CV, not a proposition. The fractional market rewards specificity. What problem do you solve? For which type of business? At which point in their journey? The executives who land well are the ones who can answer those questions in a single sentence. I got really good at this, and one LinkedIn post landed me some amazing clients.
Second, pipeline: Your existing network will probably get you your first one or two clients. That’s usually enough to prove the model works. But it’s not enough to sustain it. Fractional work requires active, ongoing business development. Not in a salesy way, but as a consistent practice of staying visible, relevant, and easy to refer. The feast-and-famine cycle that trips up early-stage fractionals almost always comes down to neglecting the pipeline when the work is good, then scrambling when a contract ends. It’s happened to me, and I have seen it happen to so many others, too. Don’t get complacent.
Third, mindset: In a full-time role, your authority is structural. You have a title, a team, a budget. In a fractional role, you earn your authority quickly through judgment and results, and then you do it again with the next client. That’s energising for the right person. For someone who needs the psychological security of an org chart and a team to lean on, it can be exhausting.
There’s a version of the fractional market that’s largely about cost efficiency, giving growing SMEs access to senior leadership they couldn’t otherwise afford it or realistically don’t need 5 days a week support. That market is real, and it’s growing fast and that is where TFA started. I used to advertise myself coming from a FTSE 50 background as ‘giving little businesses the big businesses experience at a fraction of the cost’.
But TFA now operates in a distinct niche: fractional C-suite executives placed into PE-backed and mid-market businesses during high-stakes transactions. This isn’t about being a part-time marketing director for a founder-led business. It’s about being the person who can walk into a business six weeks post-acquisition, understand the deal thesis, get up to speed on the numbers, engage a PE board with credibility, and start driving value before the dust has settled. We focus on protecting and growing EV, not saving costs.
That requires a different profile. It requires people who have worked inside deals, who understand due diligence, 100-day plans, value creation frameworks, and what a PE sponsor actually needs from leadership. People who can hold a room in a board meeting, challenge commercial assumptions, and operate without handholding.
The reason this distinction matters to you as a candidate is simple: if this is your background, you are in a premium niche. There are plenty of platforms for generalist fractional work. There are very few specialists focused on the deal lifecycle. That’s the gap TFA exists to fill and the reason the mandates we place are materially different in quality, scope, and remuneration.
The honest reality of going fractional in the UK – particularly in a specialist context, looks something like this:
Months 1- 3: are about positioning and activation. You’re clarifying your proposition, updating how you present yourself (LinkedIn is your shop window, not your CV), and having a lot of conversations. You’re probably not generating significant revenue yet unless you’re converting existing relationships quickly.
Months 3-6: are when most people land their first one or two roles. If you’ve been deliberate about positioning and you’ve been showing up consistently, doing a mixture of posting, outreach and networking, you’ll start to see traction. If you’ve been vague, trying to appeal to everyone and hoping one random post a week will work, you’ll be met with crickets and the creep of financial anxiety.
Months 6- 12: are when the model either starts to compound or stall. The fractionals who are building something durable are generating inbound interest and referrals alongside active business development. They have a clear story, a track record that travels, and a way of working that clients want to extend.
None of this happens by accident. It happens through the deliberate design of your proposition, visibility, pipeline, and commercial structure.
There are broadly two routes into fractional work. You can build your pipeline independently, relying on your network, LinkedIn, and direct outreach. Or you can work with a specialist who sources and places mandates on your behalf.
The honest answer is that the best fractionals do both. Your own network and profile will always be your most valuable long-term asset. But working with a specialist, particularly one focused on a specific context like M&A, accelerates the path considerably. You get access to mandates you wouldn’t find on a job board. You benefit from being part of a vetted network that PE firms and deal teams already trust. And you avoid the time cost of business development that, in the early stages, can consume more energy than the work itself. (By the way, be prepared for the mountain of unpaid hours that goes into self-promotion.)
What TFA does differently is that we don’t simply match CVs to job descriptions. We vet for M&A context specifically: deal phase expertise, sector credibility, and the ability to operate under PE scrutiny. That vetting process is what makes the difference for our clients, and it’s what means the mandates we place are the kind that genuinely build a fractional career rather than just fill gaps in it. We also create the TFA Value scorecard partly to give fractionals a way to provide credible, auditable proof of their achievements and expertise in M&A, so they can build a reputation that stands out among generalists.
Before you make the move, I’d encourage you to build a short list of the reasons why you want to do this. Be specific. For me, it came down to three things: autonomy over my time, the freedom to work from anywhere, and the ability to deliver focused impact in the way I know works best. Those three things ground me when the inevitable hard parts of self-employment and entrepreneurship arrive. And they do arrive.
The fractional world isn’t for everyone. It demands resilience, commercial self-awareness, and a comfort with uncertainty that not everyone has or wants. But if you have the background, the appetite, and the right context, and particularly if that context is M&A, the opportunity is genuinely significant.
The question isn’t whether the market exists. It does. The question is whether you’re positioning yourself to access the best of it.
Laura Allen is the Founder and Managing Partner of The Fractional Agency, a specialist M&A fractional C-suite platform connecting PE-backed and mid-market businesses with vetted fractional leaders across the deal lifecycle.
If you’re an experienced executive with M&A or PE-backed business experience and you’re considering a fractional career, register with TFA to find out what mandates we’re currently working on.
