By the time a founder calls me, they usually know something is broken and aren't sure whose job it is to fix it. The job titles don't help much, since you can now hire a COO, CTO, CIO, CFO and even a CRO a few days a week, and from the outside they all sound like someone experienced who'll sort things out. Choosing between a fractional COO, CTO or CIO mostly comes down to where the problem sits.
What each one owns
The short version, for a small business:
- COO (chief operating officer): how the business runs. The processes, the people, the tools the team uses and the day-to-day decisions.
- CTO (chief technology officer): the technology you build or sell. The product, the code, the developers and the technical choices behind them.
- CIO (chief information officer): the technology you run on. Systems, data, security and who has access to what.
- CFO (chief financial officer): the money. Cash, reporting, forecasts and raising investment.
- CRO (chief revenue officer): sales. The pipeline, pricing and whoever is bringing the work in.
In a big company those are five separate people with their own teams; in a small one the lines blur quickly, which is where most of the confusion comes from.
Signs you need a fractional CTO
If you're building a software product and paying developers with nobody on your side who can check their work, or you're facing decisions about how the product is built that you can't judge yourself, that's a CTO's job. It isn't mine. I've managed an MVP build alongside a CTO and a team of developers, which is exactly how I know it's a different role.
Signs you need a fractional CIO
A CIO looks after the systems the business runs on rather than the product. The signs are usually quieter: nobody is quite sure which accounts the business owns or who can log into them, customer data sits in several places, a former employee still has access to the shared drive, and every new tool gets bought by whoever needed it that week.
In a small business this is mostly operations work under a different name, and it's often where the first few weeks go: getting the workspace, the accounts and the access in order before anything else gets built on top.
Signs you need a fractional COO
If the trouble is that nothing has an owner, with deadlines slipping, the founder doing everyone's admin and processes living in someone's head, you're looking at a COO. I've written up the four signs I'd look for separately, along with what the role involves week to week.
When one person can cover more than one
In a small team the person setting up the accounting software is doing part of a CFO's job, and the person deciding how the shared drive is organised is doing a CIO's, whatever their title says. Until the business is big enough to need each of those full-time, one experienced generalist can usually cover operations, the internal systems and a good share of the finance, which is most of what I do.
The time to split them up is when one area starts taking most of the week on its own. A product that needs a technical lead every day, or a fundraise that needs a finance person on it full-time, is the moment to bring in a specialist.
If you're still not sure which one you need, feel free to reach out for a quick call.