FRACTIONAL COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR
You're the reason the business works. That's also the problem.
When every commercial decision runs through you, growth has a ceiling, and it’s your capacity. A Fractional Commercial Director embeds in your business to build the infrastructure that lets revenue grow without you at the centre of everything.
What fractional actually means
A Fractional Commercial Director is a senior commercial leader embedded inside your business, not a consultant who visits occasionally and hands you a report, and not a full-time hire you’re not ready to justify yet.
Fractional means embedded. It means 1–2 days per week inside your business, working on the commercial problems that matter most: how you’re positioned in the market, how your pipeline is structured, how deals get closed, and how the business builds the systems that make growth repeatable.
The difference from a consultant: a consultant diagnoses and advises. A Fractional Commercial Director owns the outcome. They don’t just tell you what to fix, they build it with you.
"Senior commercial leadership, without the £120k+ full-time salary."
This tends to be the right move when…
Every commercial conversation goes through you
Pricing decisions, key client relationships, new opportunities, if any of it stalls when you’re not available, you’re not running a business. You’re running a job with employees.
You've hired salespeople and it hasn't worked
Not because they were the wrong people, but because there was no commercial infrastructure for them to operate in. No playbook, no pipeline system, no defined process. A sales hire without infrastructure fails almost every time.
Revenue has plateaued and activity isn't fixing it
You’ve tried more outreach, more networking, more effort. The numbers don’t move. At some point more activity stops working, what changes the trajectory is fixing what’s underneath.
You're growing but the business feels fragile
Revenue is up but it’s founder-dependent, relationship-dependent, or concentrated in a handful of clients. Growth that isn’t structural isn’t reliable, and fragile growth is stressful to manage.
Your team can sell, but only with you in the room
The moment you step back, conversion drops. That’s not a team problem, it’s a commercial infrastructure problem. The system should work without you present for every deal.
You know what needs fixing but don't have the time
You’ve diagnosed the problem yourself (positioning, pipeline, process), but delivery keeps pulling you back. The issue isn’t insight. It’s bandwidth and execution.
What they own day to day
The scope varies by business and by what the diagnostic reveals. But across most engagements, a Fractional Commercial Director is working across four areas.
Commercial Positioning
How the business is understood in the market. Whether the proposition attracts the right buyers at the right price, or forces price-led conversations. Getting this right changes everything downstream.
Pipeline Architecture
Building the system that generates and moves opportunities through a defined process, so pipeline isn’t dependent on who the founder knows or how hard the team is pushing this month.
Sales Infrastructure
The playbooks, processes, and tools that let your team convert consistently without needing a senior commercial leader in every room. This is what makes a sales hire actually work.
Commercial Rhythm
The cadence, metrics, and decision-making structures that give you visibility into what’s working, what isn’t, and where to focus. Running the business on instinct stops working at Plateau 4.
How Fractional Works
Step 1:
It starts with the Discovery Engagement: Every Fractional Commercial Director engagement begins with a two-week diagnostic. Before anything is built, we need to understand where the commercial infrastructure is breaking down and what matters most to address first. This produces a clear remediation roadmap that shapes the fractional engagement.
Step 2:
We agree the focus and the cadence: Based on the diagnosis, we agree where to focus first and how many days per week make sense. Most engagements run at 1–2 days per week. The scope is fixed at the start of each quarter and reviewed as progress is made.
Step 3:
Embedded, not advisory: The fractional engagement is working time, not consulting time. That means being inside the business, working on real problems, building real assets, and having real commercial conversations, not producing reports for someone else to action.
Step 4:
We measure what changes: Every quarter we review progress against the original diagnostic. What’s been built, what’s shifted commercially, and what the next priority is. The engagement continues as long as there’s meaningful work to do, and stops when it’s done.
Investment
Discovery Engagement
£4,000 Fixed Fee
Two weeks. Full commercial diagnostic plus remediation roadmap. The starting point for every fractional engagement.
FRACTIONAL COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR
£2,500 - £4,500 Per Month
1–2 days per week. Minimum three-month commitment. Includes Discovery Engagement.
The Discovery Engagement is included at the start of the Fractional Commercial Director engagement. It ensures the work is grounded in diagnosis, not assumptions.
Questions founders usually ask
Q. Is 1–2 days a week enough to make a real difference?
A. It depends what those days are spent on. Most founder-led businesses between £2m and £15m don’t have a shortage of effort, they have a shortage of commercial focus and direction. One to two days per week of senior commercial thinking, applied systematically to the right problems, moves more than five days of unfocused activity. The Discovery Engagement makes sure the focus is right before the engagement begins.
Q. How is this different from hiring a consultant?
A. A consultant diagnoses and advises. You receive recommendations. What happens next depends on whether you and your team have the time and expertise to implement them. A Fractional Commercial Director owns the outcome — not just the analysis. They build it, implement it, and stay in the business until it’s working.
Q. Will you understand my business quickly enough?
A. The Discovery Engagement exists precisely to answer this question. Two weeks of structured diagnostic work (conversations, commercial review, market analysis) means by the time the fractional engagement begins, the context is already there. You’re not paying for a learning curve.
Q. Can we afford it?
A. The more useful question is what the current situation is costing you. If revenue is plateaued, sales cycles are long, or you’re personally involved in every commercial decision, the cost of not fixing it compounds every month. The fractional model is structured to be accessible for £2m–£15m businesses, it’s a fraction of the cost of a full-time hire, with none of the overhead.
Not right for everyone
The fractional model works well in specific circumstances. Outside of those, it’s not the right fit, and I’d rather tell you that upfront than start an engagement that doesn’t deliver what you need.
- Your business is pre-revenue or below £2m turnover
- Founders looking for a short-term boost rather than structural change
- Businesses that need execution resource, not commercial leadership
- You've already decided what the solution is and need someone to implement it
- Budget is the primary filter for every decision you make
- You're not willing to look honestly at how the business currently operates
WHAT THEY SAY
“Tom took the time to fully understand what we wanted to achieve and knew how to get us there. I learned so much from working with him, and it really transformed the business. He could empathise with my frustrations, and put solutions in place from day one that helped both me and my team.”
Nikki Bennett,
Managing Director, Professional Services Consultancy
The right starting point is a conversation, not a proposal.
If you recognise the situations on this page and want to understand whether a Fractional Commercial Director is the right move, get in touch. We’ll talk through where you are, what’s driving the stall, and whether there’s a fit.