Fractional Isn’t a Concession

There’s an assumption founders make about hiring part time roles. At some point, when we can afford it, we’ll stop patching things together and hire the real person. We’ll commit to the singular owner. We’ll professionalize the function.

Fractional or modular support is what you do before you’re serious or successful.

I see this mistake everywhere. A founder hires one early marketing leader and expects them to own brand, demand gen, content, performance, product marketing, analytics, and team building.

It works for a while when you’re growing off a small base. Having someone do a smattering of things is better than having no one on it.

Then the job changes when you need focus and specialization to move the needle.

The skill set that got you from zero to traction isn’t the same skill set that scales paid acquisition, builds a content engine, or manages a team of specialists. Suddenly the first hire isn’t wrong. The role has outgrown the shape it started in.

Finance is a case study of the same dynamic.

Founders talk about hiring a “finance person” as if it’s one job and I recently interviewed my friend Chris Fenster at Propeller about this.

In reality, that early person, be it a VP, Director or Head of Finance, has a title that compresses bookkeeping, controllership, compliance, forecasting, fundraising support, board credibility, and strategic partnership into a single person. At scale, those are separate seats.

Subscale, they’re awkwardly collapsed into one—often times with the person being above average at one of those things and doing their best for the rest.

When you can afford four or five W-2 employees, specialization makes sense. Most companies can’t. Even companies that can afford one senior hire usually cannot afford all the jobs that person is implicitly being asked to do.

The common instinct at that point is to “fix” the function by making a bigger hire, mostly to solve an accountability issue to get “someone responsible for this.” That’s rational, but it doesn’t create capacity.

Chris said something in our conversation that reframed this for me: “If you’re subscale, it’s almost impossible to solve a systemic subscale problem with a scale solution.”

In other words, the reason this feels so hard isn’t that you’re bad at hiring. It’s that you’re trying to install a permanent, enterprise-grade answer to a company that hasn’t stabilized yet.

Plus, the job definition when a company is in hyper growth mode isn’t normally stable enough to justify locking it into a rigid, full-time box.

Early-stage companies are volatile by design. The work changes every few quarters. One quarter you need scrappy execution. The next quarter you need process discipline. Then you need institutional polish. Then you need deep specialization. Committing too early to a singular, fixed owner in a function whose requirements are still evolving often creates fragility rather than stability—be it finance, marketing, or any number of other areas.

Modular support is not a budget workaround in that environment. It is a flexibility tool. It lets you match resources to the actual shape of the work as it changes.

There is also a healthier mental model here: assume planned transitions. The early marketing generalist you hire is unlikely to be your VP of Marketing at $100M in revenue. The Series A/B finance director is unlikely to be your Series D CFO.

That’s not a failure. It is the normal arc of scaling.

Accepting that reality changes how you design the function. You document processes. You standardize workflows. You avoid over-titling in ways that make layering impossible later. You build redundancy so the company is not dependent on one person’s private playbook.

Modularity also supports that approach. You can maintain internal accountability at the top while surrounding that leader with specialized capacity that handles repeatable, lower-stack work. As the company grows, you can peel off the most standardized pieces and systematize them. That frees your senior talent to focus on judgment-heavy decisions precisely when complexity spikes.

What surprises people is that this logic does not disappear at scale. One of the more counterintuitive things Chris shared is that about half of their new work at Propeller comes from companies already doing $30M+ in revenue. Modular isn’t disappearing as companies scale; in many cases it becomes more valuable because it creates redundancy, standardization, and leverage for senior leaders during hypergrowth. Even companies doing tens of millions in revenue continue to use hybrid models. At that stage, modularity isn’t about scrappiness. It’s about resilience. Boards want accountability, credibility, and reliability. They do not care whether your most repeatable workflows are executed by a perfectly staffed internal team or a standardized external partner.

They care that the numbers are right, the systems are durable, and the leaders are focused on strategy instead of mechanics.

Fractional or modular is not what you do until you can afford to build the “real” thing. It is often how you build the real thing intelligently. I recently told an up and coming food business that their next step beyond pop-ups shouldn’t be a lease—they should work up through a step function. Commit to a weekend food court that will cost $6k, not a signature that demands $60k. Even if you’re blowing the doors off, keep the flexibility.

The work changes too fast to justify rigid commitments. Later on, the work becomes too complex to rely on single points of failure. In both phases, modularity is a feature.

The goal is not to avoid hiring. It is to avoid pretending that a singular early hire can permanently solve a function whose requirements are still in motion. If you design your organization around flexibility, documentation, redundancy, and the steady migration of repeatable work down the stack, you give yourself room to grow without breaking every time the job evolves.

That’s not a compromise. That’s strategy.

If you’re interested in geeking out over finance functions and how to staff the back office and ops infrastructure of a company, check out our next conversation with Chris, How Finance Leaders Should Actually Implement AI in 2026.