Every fractional seat I take, CMO, CTO, or Chief AI Officer, has a floor and a ceiling: three months minimum, two years maximum. Both are on purpose.
Why two years?
Because two years is a growth cycle you can actually see. Year one is the plan, the first fixes, and the first results. Year two is growing what worked, cutting what did not, and hiring the person who will own it.
Give a new initiative two years to get from zero to sixty and the team stops analyzing and starts deciding. Give it ten and it spends the first three deciding.
Why not one year?
One year is usually enough to write the plan and prove the first results. It is rarely enough to grow them and hire the person who keeps them going. A year-one seat that leaves right when the work starts paying off hands you a plan and a gap.
Why three months minimum?
The first month is mostly listening: the people, the vendors, the bills, what is about to break. The next two show whether the plan works. Less than that and you are paying for an opinion, not a seat.
What happens when the two years are up?
One of three things, and all three are good outcomes:
- You hire a full-time owner. I help you write the role, interview for it, and hand over the work.
- The work runs with the team you have. The plan, the vendors, and the reports keep going without me.
- We stop it. Some things turn out not to be worth more money. Saying so out loud is part of the job.
A third year of the same fractional seat is not on the list. If the work still needs a senior person after two years, it needs a full-time one.
Can you rescue a program that has been running for ten years?
Usually I would rather wind it down. I have watched decade-long programs in big companies burn money like a hungry furnace enough times to know what one looks like. Most of the time it is not worth bringing back, and I am better at winding one down than at resurrecting it.
Winding down is real work: find what is still worth keeping, move it somewhere it can live, end the contracts cleanly, and give the people a clear next thing. Then put the budget on something new with a two-year clock.
The seats are fractional CMO, fractional CTO, and fractional Chief AI Officer, at $3,500, $6,500, or $11,000 a month. What a fractional exec does in the first 90 days covers the start.
Answered by Jared Lukes, Minneapolis. Twenty-five years in brand, UX, and technology, currently holding fractional AI and technology seats at three companies. About Jared.