Five Years Fractional: What's Changed and What Hasn't

What's changed most

The production layer, entirely. Work that used to consume weeks of an engagement — drafting, reformatting, assembling reports, first-pass research — now takes hours. That has changed what a fractional engagement can cover in the same number of days, and it's raised expectations accordingly. It has also removed a category of work that used to justify agency retainers, which is reshaping that market considerably faster than most agencies are acknowledging.

What hasn't changed at all

Why companies call me. It is, with remarkable consistency, one of three situations: they don't know who they're selling to, they know but can't articulate why anyone should care, or they've got both right and have no repeatable way to reach those people. Not one of those is a production problem. Not one has become easier to solve with better tools, because each requires deciding something, and deciding remains stubbornly human.

• The ICP is too broad and nobody wants to narrow it
• The positioning describes the category rather than the company
• There's no operating rhythm, so nothing compounds
• Marketing and sales are working from different definitions of the same words

What I'd tell myself in 2021

Say no more often and earlier. My best engagements have always been the ones where the founder genuinely wanted to be told uncomfortable things, and I could usually tell within the first two conversations. The engagements that went badly were the ones where I could tell too and took the work anyway. That pattern has held for five years without a single exception, which suggests it isn't coincidence.

Where I think this goes

The fractional model gets more common, not less. The economics that made it work — senior judgement is scarce, production capacity is not — have moved further in that direction, not back. What I expect to change is the composition of the work: less oversight of execution, more time on research, positioning and the decisions that set direction. Which is, in fairness, the part I wanted to be doing when I started.