Quick answer: A fractional CTO is a senior technology leader who works with your business part-time - typically 1-3 days per week. They bring the strategic thinking, technical expertise, and leadership of a full-time CTO at 40-50% of the cost. UK rates range from £1,000-£1,600 per day or £3,000-£7,000 per month on retainer. It's the most popular way for growing UK businesses to access experienced tech leadership without committing to a £170,000+ permanent hire.
If you're running a business that relies on technology (and let's be honest, that's most businesses in 2026), you've probably hit a point where you need someone senior to make sense of it all. Someone who can look at the bigger picture, make the right calls on architecture, hiring, and tooling, and stop you from making expensive mistakes.
The problem? A full-time CTO in London costs north of £170,000 a year once you add up salary, National Insurance, pension, and benefits. For many growing businesses, that's simply not realistic. And even if you could afford it, good luck finding one - the UK's digital skills shortage is expected to cost the economy £4.4 billion annually.
That's where fractional CTOs come in. The concept has exploded in the UK over the past few years, with fractional executive roles doubling from 60,000 to 120,000 between 2022 and 2024. This guide covers everything you need to know: what a fractional CTO actually does, how much they cost, when you need one, and how to find the right person for your business.
Whether you call them a fractional CTO, virtual CTO, or part-time CTO, the idea is the same. Senior tech leadership, flexibly delivered, at a price that makes sense for your stage of growth.
What is a fractional CTO?
A fractional CTO is a Chief Technology Officer who works with your business on a part-time basis. Instead of sitting in your office five days a week, they typically dedicate 1-3 days per week (or 8-20 hours) to your company, while working with other clients the rest of the time.
The "fractional" part simply means you're getting a fraction of their time - and paying a fraction of the cost. But you're still getting the same calibre of person. These are experienced technology leaders with 15+ years of hands-on experience who've built teams, shipped products, navigated funding rounds, and made the kinds of decisions that determine whether a technology investment succeeds or fails.
The model has been around in other C-suite roles for years - fractional CFOs have been common in the startup world since the early 2010s. But fractional CTOs have really taken off in the UK since 2022, driven by a few things happening at once:
- Remote work became normal, so a CTO no longer needed to be in the office every day
- The tech talent shortage made full-time CTO hires harder and more expensive to find
- More experienced CTOs wanted portfolio careers with variety and flexibility
- AI, cybersecurity, and digital transformation created urgent demand for senior tech guidance
How big is the market? LinkedIn profiles featuring "fractional" alongside a C-suite title jumped from about 2,000 in 2022 to over 110,000 by late 2024 - a 5,400% increase. In the UK, roughly one in five businesses now engages some form of fractional leadership, with projections suggesting this will reach one in three by 2026.
Fractional CTO meaning - the terminology
You'll see several terms used almost interchangeably, which can get confusing. Here's a quick guide:
- Fractional CTO - Part-time CTO working with multiple companies. The most common and specific term.
- Virtual CTO - Usually the same thing, but emphasising that they work remotely. Since most fractional CTOs work remotely by default in 2026, the distinction is mostly academic.
- Part-time CTO - Another way of saying the same thing, though it can sometimes imply a more informal arrangement.
- CTO-as-a-Service (CTOaaS) - A broader term covering fractional CTOs, agency-provided CTO services, and hybrid models. The global CTOaaS market was valued at $255 million in 2024 and is projected to reach $532 million by 2031.
Throughout this guide, we'll use "fractional CTO" as the standard term since it's the most widely recognised in the UK market.
Fractional CTO vs full-time, interim, consultant, and virtual CTO
One of the biggest sources of confusion is understanding how a fractional CTO differs from the other options. Here's how they stack up:
| Fractional CTO | Full-time CTO | Interim CTO | Technical consultant | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Time commitment | 1-3 days/week | Full-time (5 days) | Full-time (temporary) | Project-based |
| Typical duration | 6-18+ months | Permanent | 3-6 months | 2-6 months |
| UK monthly cost | £3,000-£7,000 | £14,000-£21,000 | £10,000-£15,000 | £800-£1,250/day |
| Annual cost | £36,000-£84,000 | £172,000-£255,000 | N/A (short-term) | Varies by project |
| Focus | Ongoing strategy + leadership | Full ownership of tech | Crisis management / gap-filling | Specific deliverable |
| Organisational knowledge | Builds over time | Deep | Limited | Minimal |
| Best for | Growing businesses needing strategic guidance | Large orgs with complex tech | Emergency cover, transitions | One-off projects or audits |
Fractional CTO vs full-time CTO
The maths is pretty straightforward. A full-time CTO in London earns an average base salary of around £129,000. Add on employer's National Insurance (£19,500-£25,000), pension contributions, benefits, equipment, and recruitment fees, and your true Year 1 cost lands between £192,500 and £255,000. In subsequent years, you're still looking at £172,500-£225,000.
A fractional CTO working 3 days per week at £6,000 retainer costs £72,000 annually - roughly 40-50% of the full-time equivalent. That's a saving of over £100,000 per year while still getting experienced strategic leadership.
The trade-off is obvious: you get less of their time. A fractional CTO won't be in the trenches with your engineering team every day. They won't manage daily standups or handle the operational detail of running an engineering department. But for many businesses, particularly those with fewer than 50 staff, that level of day-to-day involvement isn't necessary. What you need is the strategic thinking, the experienced eye, and the ability to make the right calls on the big decisions.
Fractional CTO vs interim CTO
An interim CTO is a full-time, temporary appointment, typically lasting 3-6 months. They step in during transitions - when your CTO leaves unexpectedly, during a merger, or while you recruit a permanent replacement.
At £10,000-£15,000 per month, interim CTOs approach full-time costs and are designed for full-time involvement. If you need someone five days a week to keep the ship steady during a crisis, an interim CTO is the right call. If you need ongoing strategic guidance on a sustainable budget, that's fractional territory.
Fractional CTO vs technical consultant
Technical consultants solve specific, defined problems. They might conduct a security audit, design a cloud migration plan, or review your architecture. The engagement has a clear start, end, and deliverable.
A fractional CTO, by contrast, provides continuous strategic oversight. They get to know your business, your team, and your goals over months or years. They might identify the need for a security audit and hire the consultant to do it, then factor the findings into your broader technology roadmap. The relationship builds institutional knowledge that a project-based consultant never develops.
When to hire a fractional CTO
Not every business needs a fractional CTO, and not every moment is the right time to bring one in. Here are the situations where we see the strongest case for it:
You're a non-technical founder building a tech product
This is the classic scenario. You've got a brilliant business idea, you understand your market, you can sell - but you don't speak "tech" fluently. You need someone who can translate your vision into a technical roadmap, evaluate whether your developers are making good decisions, and prevent you from making costly mistakes that won't become obvious for months.
Your tech lead isn't ready for the CTO role
You might have a talented senior developer or team lead who writes excellent code but hasn't led technology strategy at a company level before. A fractional CTO can mentor them through the transition while providing the strategic leadership your business needs right now. Think of it as training wheels with an experienced hand on the handlebars.
You're preparing for a funding round
Investors scrutinise your technology leadership. They want to see that someone experienced is making the technical calls, that your architecture can scale, and that your team has the right skills. A fractional CTO strengthens your pitch, prepares your infrastructure for due diligence, and adds credibility to your leadership team.
Technical debt is slowing you down
When years of quick fixes and shortcuts start catching up with you - features take three times longer to ship, bugs multiply, and your developers spend more time fighting the codebase than building new features - you need someone who can assess the damage, prioritise what to fix, and guide the team through the recovery without stalling the business.
You're starting a digital transformation
Digital transformation is a phrase that gets thrown around loosely, but when your business genuinely needs to overhaul how it uses technology, having experienced guidance matters enormously. 70% of transformation projects fail to achieve their goals, and poor technology leadership is a major reason. A fractional CTO who's been through the process before can help you avoid the most common and expensive pitfalls.
You're scaling rapidly
What worked when you had five developers rarely works with twenty. Scaling brings challenges around architecture, team structure, processes, tooling, and hiring. A fractional CTO who's guided other companies through similar growth can help you scale intelligently rather than just quickly.
You're in a regulated industry
UK regulatory complexity has grown sharply. The Cyber Security and Resilience Bill introduces penalties up to £17 million or 4% of global turnover, with mandatory incident notification to the National Cyber Security Centre. The Online Safety Act carries fines up to £18 million or 10% of global turnover. The government has written directly to the top 250 UK businesses stating that cybersecurity is a board-level responsibility.
If your business handles sensitive data, operates in financial services, or runs any kind of online platform, having a fractional CTO who understands the regulatory landscape can help you avoid penalties that would dwarf their fees many times over.
of UK tech leaders report an AI skills shortage
of UK firms have basic cybersecurity skill gaps
annual cost of the UK digital skills shortage
Benefits for UK businesses
The fractional model isn't just about saving money - though the savings are significant. Here's what UK businesses actually gain:
Cost efficiency without cutting corners
At 40-50% of the cost of a permanent CTO, fractional arrangements free up budget for the things that directly grow your business - hiring developers, investing in infrastructure, or funding marketing. You're not paying for idle hours on slow days or funding a salary during quiet periods. You pay for the strategic thinking and leadership you actually need.
The numbers bear this out across UK case studies. Companies working with fractional CTOs typically see 20-50% improvements in development cycle time and 20-40% reductions in cloud infrastructure costs within the first quarter alone. One London-based SaaS company reduced development cycles by 30% within six months, which directly enabled them to secure their next funding round.
Access to experience you couldn't otherwise afford
Many fractional CTOs have led technology teams at companies far larger and more complex than yours. They've seen what works and what doesn't across multiple industries and business stages. That breadth of experience is almost impossible to get from a full-time hire at a comparable salary, because the best CTOs command salaries well beyond what most SMEs can offer.
Speed to impact
Recruiting a full-time CTO typically takes 3-6 months. A fractional CTO can start within 2-4 weeks. When you're facing urgent technology decisions, approaching a funding deadline, or dealing with a technical crisis, that speed matters.
Flexibility that scales with you
Fractional arrangements can flex up and down. Need more support during a product launch or funding round? Your fractional CTO increases their time commitment. Things settle down? Scale back. Try doing that with a permanent hire.
Objectivity
Because fractional CTOs work across multiple businesses, they bring an outside perspective that full-time hires sometimes lose. They're less likely to get caught up in internal politics, pet projects, or "the way we've always done it." They can give you a straight answer when you need one.
What a fractional CTO actually does
This is the question that comes up most often, and the answer depends heavily on your company's stage and needs. Here's a realistic breakdown of the four main areas a fractional CTO covers, followed by what a typical week actually looks like.
Strategy and roadmap
- Setting and maintaining the technology strategy aligned to business goals
- Building and updating the technical roadmap
- Making architecture decisions that balance current needs with future scalability
- Evaluating build vs buy decisions for bespoke software and off-the-shelf solutions
Team and hiring
- Defining roles and writing job specifications for technical hires
- Interviewing and evaluating candidates
- Mentoring junior team leads and senior developers
- Setting up engineering processes, code review standards, and development workflows
Technical oversight
- Reviewing architecture and code quality
- Evaluating and selecting technology platforms and tools
- Assessing and prioritising technical debt
- Overseeing security practices and compliance requirements
Business alignment
- Translating business needs into technical requirements (and vice versa)
- Managing vendor relationships and system integrations
- Preparing technology sections of investor presentations and board reports
- Advising on technology budgets and costs
- Developing an AI strategy - where AI adds real value to your business, and where it's hype
What a typical week looks like
For a two-day-per-week engagement (the most common setup), here's how a fractional CTO typically structures their time:
| Morning | Afternoon | |
|---|---|---|
| Day 1 | Team standup, 1:1 with tech lead, code and architecture review | Strategic work: roadmap updates, vendor evaluation, technical decisions |
| Day 2 | Stakeholder meetings, progress reports, priority alignment with founders | Hands-on guidance, process improvements, documentation, hiring reviews |
| Between days | Available on Slack or Teams for urgent questions and async code reviews. Most fractional CTOs respond within a few hours during business days, even when they're working with other clients. | |
The key thing to understand is that a fractional CTO's value isn't measured in hours at their desk. It's measured in the quality of decisions they help your business make and the problems they prevent before they happen.
A practical example: A Leeds-based e-commerce business hired a fractional CTO for 2 days per week after their site crashed during Black Friday for the second year running. In the first month, the CTO audited the existing architecture, identified a critical scalability bottleneck in their monolithic application, and created a prioritised migration plan. By month three, they'd moved the most performance-critical services to a microservices architecture and set up proper load testing. The following Black Friday, the site handled 10x its normal traffic without a single outage.
UK costs and engagement models
One of the most common questions we hear from UK businesses: "What will this actually cost me?" Here's an honest breakdown.
Engagement models
Fractional CTOs in the UK typically work under one of three structures:
| Model | Typical UK cost | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly retainer | £3,000-£7,000/month | Ongoing strategic guidance, most common model |
| Day rate | £1,000-£1,600/day | Intensive short-term projects, audits, due diligence |
| Hourly rate | £150-£350/hour | Light-touch advisory, ad-hoc consultation |
London-based fractional CTOs tend to sit at the higher end of these ranges, with day rates of £1,200-£1,600 compared to £800-£1,100 in Manchester, Leeds, and other regional tech hubs. That said, most fractional CTOs work remotely, so geography matters less than it used to.
What you'll pay by company stage
| Company stage | Typical involvement | Monthly cost | Annual cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-seed / seed | 1 day/week | £1,500-£3,000 | £18,000-£36,000 |
| MVP / product-market fit | 2-3 days/week | £4,500-£7,000 | £54,000-£84,000 |
| Series A / growth | 3-4 days/week | £6,000-£10,000 | £72,000-£120,000 |
| Series B+ / advisory | 4-8 hours/month | £2,000-£4,000 | £24,000-£48,000 |
The full cost comparison
To make a fair comparison, you need to look at the total cost of each option, not just the headline number:
| Cost element | Fractional CTO | Full-time CTO |
|---|---|---|
| Base cost | £72,000/year (3 days/month) | £140,000-£180,000 salary |
| Employer's NI | None | £19,500-£25,000 |
| Pension / benefits | None | £8,000-£12,000 |
| Equipment / software | £2,400-£3,600 | £5,000-£8,000 |
| Recruitment fees | None | £20,000-£30,000 (Year 1) |
| Equity | Optional (0.2-0.5%) | Typically 1-3% |
| Year 1 total | £74,400-£75,600 | £192,500-£255,000 |
Equity arrangements for early-stage companies
Cash-strapped startups sometimes offer equity alongside a reduced cash retainer. Common structures include:
- Seed stage: £2,000-£2,500/month cash plus 0.5-0.75% equity, four-year vesting with one-year cliff
- Series A: £5,000/month cash plus 0.25-0.5% equity
- 50/50 split: Half the normal retainer in cash, half in equity options
If you're going down this route, get proper legal advice on vesting schedules, cliff periods, and intellectual property protections. It's not the kind of thing you want to wing.
How to evaluate and hire a fractional CTO
Finding the right fractional CTO is different from hiring a permanent employee. The process is faster (typically 2-4 weeks rather than 3-6 months), but you still need to get it right.
Where to look
- Your network: Most fractional CTO engagements start through personal introductions. Ask other founders, your investors, and advisors who they'd recommend.
- Specialist platforms: Platforms like Fractional Quest, A.Team, and GoFractional have pre-vetted fractional executives.
- Technology communities: CTO Craft, London CTO, and similar communities are where experienced CTOs hang out.
- Recruitment firms: Some UK recruitment firms like Maxwell Bond specialise in fractional tech leadership placements.
- LinkedIn: Search for "fractional CTO" with UK location filters. Look at their career history, not just their profile summary.
What to look for
Green flags
- Experience at companies similar to your stage and size
- Can explain technical decisions in plain English
- Track record of building and leading engineering teams
- Familiarity with your industry or similar regulated environments
- References you can actually call
- Clear about what they can and cannot do in the hours available
- Asks smart questions about your business, not just your tech stack
Red flags
- Can't explain technical concepts without jargon
- More interested in the technology than the business problem it solves
- No experience at a company anywhere near your size or stage
- Wants to rewrite everything from scratch (the "not invented here" syndrome)
- Vague about deliverables and how they'll spend their time
- No references from previous fractional engagements
- Pushes a specific technology stack regardless of your needs
Questions to ask in the interview
- How do you handle competing priorities across your clients?
- Tell me about a time you helped a business at our stage - what did the first 90 days look like?
- How do you stay effective with limited hours? What do you prioritise?
- What's your approach when you inherit a tech stack you'd have built differently?
- How do you work with non-technical founders? Can you give me an example?
- What does your typical week look like across all your clients?
- How would you handle an urgent issue that comes up outside your scheduled hours?
Structuring the engagement
Once you've found the right person, set things up for success:
- Start with a trial period: A 1-3 month trial gives both sides a chance to evaluate the fit before committing longer-term.
- Define clear objectives: What do you need them to achieve in the first 90 days? Be specific.
- Agree on communication cadence: Weekly check-ins, monthly reviews, and how to reach them for urgent matters.
- Set up reporting: Regular updates on progress, decisions made, and recommendations for the leadership team.
- Document the arrangement: Even if it's a straightforward retainer, get the scope, hours, intellectual property ownership, and notice period in writing.
Contract essentials for UK businesses
Your contract should cover these non-negotiables:
- Scope of work: Clearly defined responsibilities and deliverables
- Intellectual property: All IP created during the engagement should be assigned to your company. Pre-existing tools or frameworks the CTO brings in are typically licensed, not assigned - make sure the contract distinguishes between the two.
- Confidentiality: NDA covering both technical architecture and commercial information
- Notice period: 30-60 days is standard for either party
- Professional indemnity insurance: Confirm they carry appropriate cover
- Data protection: GDPR compliance obligations, particularly if they'll access customer data
- Non-compete: Keep these reasonable in scope and duration - overly broad clauses are unenforceable under English law anyway
IR35 and off-payroll working rules
If your business is medium or large-sized, you bear responsibility for determining whether your fractional CTO falls inside or outside IR35. Most genuine fractional arrangements sit outside IR35 because the CTO works for multiple clients, controls how and when they work, uses their own equipment, and there's no mutuality of obligation.
Use HMRC's Check Employment Status for Tax (CEST) tool to make a formal determination, and make sure your contract reflects the actual working relationship - not just the label you've put on it. If in doubt, take professional tax advice. Getting IR35 wrong can result in significant tax liabilities and penalties for your business.
How to measure success
Don't just hire a fractional CTO and hope for the best. Track their impact with clear metrics:
- Deployment frequency: How often your team ships to production (target: weekly or more)
- Lead time for changes: Time from code commit to production (target: under one week)
- Change failure rate: Percentage of deployments causing incidents (target: under 15%)
- Mean time to recovery: How fast you recover from outages (target: under one hour)
- Team retention: Are your developers staying? Good technical leadership reduces turnover
- Cloud cost trends: Are infrastructure costs stable or decreasing relative to growth?
Review these monthly with your fractional CTO. If the numbers aren't moving in the right direction after 90 days, have a direct conversation about what's blocking progress.
What to expect: the first 30, 90, and 365 days
One of the most useful things we can share is what a typical fractional CTO engagement actually looks like over time. Here's a realistic timeline based on UK engagements:
First 30 days: audit and quick wins
The first month is about getting the lay of the land. Your fractional CTO will conduct a thorough technology audit covering your architecture, security posture, team capabilities, development processes, and infrastructure costs. They'll also look for quick wins - things that can be fixed immediately for visible impact.
Typical quick wins in the first month include:
- Setting up automated security vulnerability scanning in your deployment pipeline
- Implementing multi-factor authentication across critical systems
- Identifying and cutting obvious cloud spending waste (often 20-40% of your bill)
- Establishing a basic incident response process so your team knows what to do when things break
By 90 days: measurable improvements
Three months in, you should see concrete progress. Development velocity should be trending upward - around 20% improvement is typical. Your deployment frequency should be increasing, with fewer things breaking in production. If cloud costs were an issue, you should have clear evidence of optimisation. If compliance was the priority, you'll have a documented roadmap and the most critical gaps addressed.
This is also when a good fractional CTO will give you a frank assessment of whether the engagement should continue at its current level, scale up, or scale back.
By 6 months: real transformation
Half a year in, the impact should be clear to everyone in the business. Development teams ship faster and with fewer incidents. If you're in a regulated industry, compliance work is well underway. Your technical team should be stronger - both because the fractional CTO has helped you hire better and because they've been mentoring your existing people.
By 12 months: sustainable capability
After a year, the goal is that your organisation can sustain what's been built. Processes are documented and followed. The team has the skills and confidence to make good technical decisions. Technical debt is under control. At this point, many businesses either transition to a lighter advisory arrangement or, if they've grown enough to justify it, begin recruiting a full-time CTO with the fractional CTO helping to find and onboard their replacement.
Real UK example: A pre-seed fintech startup with two non-technical founders and £300,000 in seed funding engaged a fractional CTO. In week one, the CTO audited and scrapped six months of agency work that had consumed £40,000 without producing a working product. By week eight, they'd built a functional MVP with two senior contractors. Within 90 days, the founders raised £750,000 in seed funding. Total tech spend: £56,000 for a fundable product - compared to £40,000 previously wasted.
UK government support and grants
Here's something many UK businesses don't realise: the government actively supports digital transformation for SMEs, and a fractional CTO can help you access that funding. The UK's SME Digital Adoption Taskforce has even recommended developing a "scalable CTO-as-a-Service" for SMEs, recognising that just a 1% productivity uplift across all UK SMEs would add £94 billion annually to GDP.
A good fractional CTO will know about these programmes and can help you apply:
| Programme | What you get | Who qualifies |
|---|---|---|
| Made Smarter | Grants up to £50,000 plus free digital roadmapping | Manufacturing SMEs |
| Innovate UK | Grants up to £50,000 for transformative tech projects | Micro and small businesses in AI, quantum, biotech, telecoms |
| Help to Grow | 90% subsidised management training (£750 per person) | UK SMEs with 5-249 employees |
| R&D Tax Relief | 20-25% of qualifying development costs as tax relief | Companies investing in qualifying R&D |
| Full Expensing | 100% first-year capital allowances on IT equipment | UK businesses investing in qualifying assets |
Smart businesses layer these programmes together. A manufacturing SME might combine a Made Smarter grant with fractional CTO guidance, use Help to Grow to upskill the team, and claim R&D Tax Relief on the development work. The net cost of the entire digital transformation drops dramatically.
Fractional CTO vs development agencies and offshore teams
We've already covered how a fractional CTO compares to a full-time CTO, interim CTO, and technical consultant. But two other options come up often in conversations with UK business owners: development agencies and offshore teams.
Why a development agency alone isn't enough
Development agencies are good at building things to a specification. But they don't set the specification. They execute; they don't lead. The most common mistake we see is a non-technical founder hiring an agency to build their MVP, assuming the agency will make smart architectural decisions that support future growth. That's not what agencies do.
Agencies optimise for delivering the brief, not for your business's long-term technical health. The result? A product that works today but needs an expensive rebuild 18-24 months later when you try to scale. One documented case saw a startup spend £40,000 on an agency-built MVP, only to face £80,000+ in rebuild costs when the architecture couldn't support enterprise customers.
The better approach is to pair a fractional CTO with a development agency. The CTO sets the architecture and technical direction; the agency executes. You get strategic oversight and build capacity without hiring a full engineering team.
Where offshore teams fit
Offshore development teams offer significant cost savings on paper. A senior developer in Poland charges £52-£70/hour compared to £80-£120/hour in the UK. Indian developers charge £25-£40/hour. But true costs run 40-50% higher than headline rates once you factor in management overhead, time zone coordination, quality assurance, and communication complexity.
Offshore teams work well for defined feature work where the architectural decisions have already been made. They're a poor substitute for strategic technical leadership. The strongest setup is a UK-based fractional CTO setting direction, with an offshore team handling execution - giving you senior strategy at UK rates and development capacity at offshore rates.
| Fractional CTO | Dev agency | Offshore team | Fractional CTO + agency | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | £3,000-£7,000 | £10,000-£40,000 | £5,000-£20,000 | £15,000-£35,000 |
| Strategy | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| Execution | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Best for | Direction and decisions | Building to spec | Defined feature work | Complete tech capability |
| Risk | Limited build capacity | No strategic oversight | Communication, quality | Coordination overhead |
When a fractional CTO is not the right answer
We'd be doing you a disservice if we didn't cover this. A fractional CTO is a brilliant solution in the right circumstances, but it's not always the right answer:
- You haven't found product-market fit yet. Before you know what customers will pay for, spending money on technology strategy is premature. Focus your capital on market research, customer feedback, and a quick proof of concept. Once you know what works, that's when strategic tech leadership starts to matter.
- Your tech requirements are genuinely simple. If your business runs on Shopify, WordPress, or a no-code platform, you probably don't need CTO-level decisions. A competent developer or agency can handle what you need.
- You need someone hands-on writing code daily. A fractional CTO is a strategic role. If your primary need is another developer, hire a developer. If you need a senior developer who also leads a small team, hire a tech lead.
- Your company has 50+ engineers and complex technical operations. At this scale, the operational demands of the CTO role typically require full-time attention. A fractional CTO can work alongside a VP of Engineering, but they probably can't replace a full-time CTO at this size.
- You're not ready to act on strategic advice. If your business is in firefighting mode and every hour is consumed by day-to-day operations, strategic guidance - however good - won't get implemented. Sort out the operational basics first.
- You actually need a technical consultant. If your need is a one-off project - a security audit, a system integration, or an architecture review - a consultant might be the more efficient choice.
- You're using "fractional CTO" as a cheap substitute for a full-time hire you actually need. If your technology is your core product and you need someone thinking about it every day, invest in a full-time CTO. The fractional model works because many businesses genuinely don't need a CTO five days a week. But if you do, don't cut corners.
Moving from fractional to full-time
Many businesses start with a fractional CTO and later transition to a full-time hire as they grow. Typical triggers for making the switch include crossing £5-10 million in revenue, managing 10-15+ engineers across multiple teams, or planning a Series B round where investors expect permanent technical leadership.
The transition typically takes 3-6 months. A good fractional CTO will help you define the full-time role, evaluate candidates, and overlap with the incoming hire for 2-4 weeks to transfer context. Some fractional CTOs then step back into a lighter advisory role - monthly strategic reviews rather than weekly involvement - keeping continuity while the new CTO settles in.
Frequently asked questions
Need technology leadership for your business?
At Red Eagle Tech, we work closely with UK businesses as a trusted technology partner. Whether you need strategic guidance on your tech roadmap, help with digital transformation, or support choosing between bespoke software and off-the-shelf solutions, we're here to help you make confident technology decisions without the jargon.
Curious about how we could help? Get in touch and let's start a conversation.
