By Laura Allen, Founder & Managing Partner, The Fractional Agency
There’s a version of fractional work where the brief is fairly forgiving. A founder-led business needs a part-time CFO to clean up the management accounts and help them think about growth. They’re grateful for the expertise, flexible on how you work, and the pace is set by the business rather than a deal clock.
PE-backed businesses are an entirely different environment.
When a private equity firm acquires a business, they have a thesis. They paid a multiple on that thesis. They have a hold period, usually three to five years, and a return target that the whole investment team is accountable for. Every hire, every decision, every leadership appointment is evaluated through the lens of one question: does this create or protect enterprise value?
If you want to work in this space as a fractional executive, understanding that context isn’t optional. It’s the baseline.
The reporting cadence alone tells you a lot. PE-backed businesses typically operate with monthly board packs, quarterly investor updates, and an ongoing relationship with a sponsor who has strong opinions and a financial model they’re tracking you against. There’s no room for vague updates or “we’re making progress” narratives. Numbers are expected to be clean, current, and defensible.
Beyond reporting, PE firms are running a value creation plan. That plan has specific workstreams, owners, and milestones. As a fractional executive, you will likely own one or more of those workstreams. You’re not coming in to advise. You’re coming in to execute, report, and be held accountable in the same way a permanent hire would be – just without the full-time seat.
The sponsor relationship is also something many fractionals underestimate. A PE-backed board is not a standard SME board. There will be operating partners with strong views, investment directors tracking your workstream closely, and occasionally a portfolio operations team benchmarking your performance against their other investments. You need to be able to hold your own in that room, push back where the data supports it, and build credibility quickly.
Not every phase of a deal cycle needs the same thing from a fractional. Here’s where the impact tends to be highest.
Pre-deal and due diligence: A fractional CFO or CTO with M&A experience can be invaluable during vendor due diligence, helping a management team get the numbers and narrative investor-ready. This is often a short, intensive engagement but one that materially affects deal outcome and valuation.
The first 100 post-acquisition: This is the highest-stakes window in any deal. The business needs to demonstrate momentum to the new owner, establish reporting disciplines, and often restructure or stabilise the leadership team. A fractional with deal experience can come in fast, get up to speed without hand-holding, and start driving the value creation plan from week one. This is where TFA places a lot of its executives.
Value creation phase: Once the business is stabilised, the work shifts to growth: commercial acceleration, operational efficiency, talent, and systems. A fractional CMO building pipeline and commercial narrative, a fractional CPO reshaping the people and culture strategy, a fractional COO driving operational leverage. These engagements often run for twelve to eighteen months and are where a strong fractional can genuinely move the needle on exit valuation.
Pre-exit preparation: The six to twelve months before a PE firm runs a process are critical. The business needs to look like the best version of itself: clean financials, strong management team, clear growth story, and no surprises in the data room. Fractionals who have been through exits before know what acquirers and their advisors are looking for. That pattern recognition is worth a significant amount to a sponsor preparing to run a competitive process.
This is where TFA vets hard, because the gap between a strong fractional and the wrong one in a PE-backed environment is significant and expensive.
The first thing we look for is genuine deal exposure. Not someone who has worked in a business that was PE-backed at some point, but someone who has been actively involved in transactions. Due diligence processes, 100-day plans, value creation workstreams, exit preparations. The pattern recognition that comes from having been through a deal cycle multiple times is something you cannot fake in a board meeting.
The second is commercial fluency. Can you talk to EBITDA? Do you understand what drives the multiple in your sector? Can you connect your functional work – whether that’s finance, marketing, operations, or people, to the enterprise value story? PE firms think in these terms constantly. The executives who earn their trust are the ones who think the same way.
The third is the ability to operate without handholding. In a permanent role, you have time to find your feet. In a fractional role in a PE-backed business, that luxury doesn’t really exist. You need to be able to read an organisation quickly, identify what matters and what doesn’t, build relationships at pace, and start making an impact within the first few weeks. That requires a level of professional confidence and situational intelligence that not everyone has, regardless of their CV.
This is precisely why we partnered with Dexta.io. Guy Ellis, Managing Partner, Broadfield Capital and Co-Founder of Dexta said:
“The fractional model only works if the person you’re bringing in can hit the ground running and make an big impact. In a PE-backed business, there is very little runway for someone to find their feet and we are working in high-pressure environments, so we need to get the right talent in first time. That’s why skills-based screening matters to us. A CV tells you what someone has done, it doesn’t tell you whether they can actually perform in a deal environment under real pressure. We are often in situations where we have what appear to be strong candidates, but none have the exact situational experience we are currently facing. Tools like Dexta exist because the market needs a way to understand the candidate quickly and on a deeper level than a CV. Skills-based assessment is quickly becoming essential due diligence in our fractional hiring.”
It’s worth being honest about these, because they come up in our vetting process regularly.
Vague impact statements. “I helped improve the finance function” or “I supported the commercial strategy” are not good enough in a PE context. Sponsors want to know what you actually delivered, what the measurable outcome was, and how it connected to value. If you can’t be specific about your contribution in previous roles, that’s a problem.
No deal history. Working in a business that happened to go through an acquisition is not the same as working on the deal. If your experience is operational but you haven’t been close to transactions, be honest about that. There’s a version of fractional work in PE-backed businesses that suits operational leaders without deep deal experience. Positioning yourself as something you’re not will unravel quickly.
Inability to manage up. Some highly capable executives are excellent operators but uncomfortable with the level of scrutiny and challenge that comes from a PE board. If you’re someone who needs autonomy and low interference to do your best work, a PE-backed environment may not be the right context. The fractionals who thrive here tend to be people who find that level of accountability energising rather than threatening.
When TFA places a fractional executive into a PE-backed mandate, we’re putting our reputation on the line with that PE firm and with that business. That means we vet hard. Deal phase expertise, sector credibility, specific M&A skills, the ability to operate under scrutiny. We also use TFA’s Value Scorecard, a structured framework that gives our fractionals a way to present their M&A track record in a credible, auditable format rather than relying on a standard CV that was designed for a different market.
That process isn’t an obstacle. It’s what gets you in front of the right mandates. The PE firms and deal teams that TFA works with are not trawling job boards. They come to us because we’ve already done the due diligence. If you’re in our network and you’re the right fit, you’re in the room.
The fractionals who build the strongest reputations in PE-backed environments are the ones who are honest about what they’ve done, specific about the value they delivered, and clear about the context in which they do their best work. If that’s you, this is a market worth being in.
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 have M&A or PE-backed experience and want to understand what mandates TFA is currently working on, register with TFA at www.thefractionalagency.com
