The team portal. Private.
For the Fractional 360 team. Please do not forward.
You can hire a great fractional CFO for forty grand a month and get real perspective for less than the hire. That is a good product, and it is not this one. Fractional 360 is the complete C-suite, held by operators who have actually sat in the seat, who argue in private and commit in public. One ninja has one sword; ten standing back-to-back can slay any giant. This portal is the team's home base: who we are, what we believe, and how we work.
What was said, what got decided, and who owns what, written from the recordings so nobody has to rely on memory or take notes in the room. Both recordings are linked on the entries.
How we operate, where this goes. Steve's close reframed the offering into the vision below. Every chair gave a one-liner and named their exclusions. Norm took the lead on the operating and financial model, and the paid assessment became the front door.
Who we are, what we believe. Introductions and draft principles. The room split “principles” into two tracks, how we operate and our ethos, and “do the right thing” emerged as principle one.
Open the full session log → · Corrections are welcome. If something reads wrong or unlike you, tell Chris and we will fix it.
Steve Wymer said it best on August 28, and it reframed the whole offering. Every founder standing at a decision that will either compound the company or break it should have a full, coordinated C-suite of operators who have already been there, not a fraction of one.
“You get somebody like Tom on the budget, somebody like Greg in his area of expertise, someone like Henry on a monstrous breach that's going to implode your company, and the three of those people are making one plus one plus one equal twelve for your company. You're not getting a fractional anything. You're getting a badass global perspective.”
“If you don't have us, you're going to hire one ninja with one sword against all of the G.I. Joes. If you hire us, you get ten ninjas with their backs to each other, swords out, who can slay any giant.”
. Steve Wymer, Session 2
Research is consistent: a team of engineers reaches worse answers, slower, than a team mixing engineers, finance, legal and operators, and functional diversity in senior teams tracks with higher market share and profit. Meanwhile 2026 survey data on solo fractional operators shows those juggling three to eight clients hit administrative burnout and critical operational blind spots. One person cannot be the bench.
Those gains only appear with clear objectives, real communication, and someone accountable for the whole. That is the job of the First Chair and of our operating model. A group of great people without it is just a directory.
Sequence, not services. The most valuable thing we say is often “you don't need that yet.” You need this now, you will need that next, here is the trigger point, here are the trade-offs. Boutique, bespoke, and refusing to burn their money.
Founders at an inflection point, explicitly including the ones the market underserves: brilliant founders whose first language isn't English, teams with talent and no funding, leaders excellent at one thing and missing another. Nobody's good at everything.
Even when it costs us. The worked example: helping a buy-now-pay-later client build the product that graduates their customers off the product.
Sheren: this has to be the forum where ugly and beautiful ideas both get beaten up, before anything reaches a client.
Godfrey's rule, via Steve. All three, or we don't work together.
Pressure-test each other, decide what's best for the client, go in with one voice. Internal friction is a feature.
Norm: build the client profile and the intelligence first. Never leave money on the table because we didn't understand them.
Tom: be a net plus or say no to the seat. No hand-waving. Say out loud which stages you are not right for.
Every chair is held by someone who has run the function, carried the number, and kept the scars. The CFO chair is newly added on a placeholder basis, and two chairs stay open; we would rather leave a seat empty than fill it with the wrong person.
Co-founder, Innovative Group. Led marketing at VMware, Netgear, and Hitachi before building IG's operating company: six specialty teams, a VC arm, and the AI operating system behind the engagements. Three IPO runs, including turning a security-camera acquisition into Arlo Smart Home.
Serial CIO: founding CIO at Marketo through IPO, nine private-equity engagements, and the Everfox carve-out (a $400M entity stood up in twelve months under a step-down TSA). Pragmatic and business-first. The judgment behind the diligence practice.
Security through the Walmart.com IPO, three Silicon Valley IPOs, and cybersecurity diligence for one of the world's largest banks' venture portfolio. Zero-trust and high-end compliance. A decade-plus in the fractional model, hands-on to this day, deep in agentic AI.
Thirty-plus years building HR functions from the ground up. The trusted advisor CEOs call before the hard conversation: unbiased, direct, and focused on culture as the thing that makes the rest work.
Product leadership across the 49ers, Facebook, Salesforce, and PayPal; now advising a Fortune 500 and a pre-IPO on product management. The chair that keeps the roadmap honest.
Twenty-five years in technology, the back half in the CFO chair across B2B and B2C, through IPOs, venture-backed growth, and private-equity ownership. Ran all of G&A (finance, HR, IT, legal) at Malwarebytes. Sweet spot: the scale-up moment a company outgrows its first finance hire and needs someone who can run planning and stand in front of a board. Introduced by Greg; confirming his own fit after the working sessions, like everyone.
Revenue leadership with operator scars. If you know the right person, say so: introductions are how this team was built.
Operations leadership, likely vertical-specific. Named once we anchor the first target verticals.
None of these were written in a brand workshop. Each one came out of a real conversation between the two firms, and together they are the standard the work is held to.
A pre-seed company does not need a full-time CIO any more than it needs a full-time CMO. What moves the needle is 35 years of judgment for a few hours a month: look over the plan, name the trap, help build the team. Part of our job is telling a client which level they actually need, including when the honest answer is less than they expected.
Where it came from: Greg, on why the model exists. "They don't need a CIO at startup any more than they need a CMO. What they need, what's extraordinarily valuable, is to have advisory capability at that level."
AI made information nearly free and instantly available. What it cannot hand anyone is the scar tissue: which of the nine workstreams breaks first, which vendor promise is real, when to say no. Every chair in this model is sold on that difference, and the big firms are being commoditized precisely because they were selling the part that got cheap.
Where it came from: Greg. "Knowledge is getting super cheap and easily accessible. What isn't is experience. You can't buy the lessons learned, the scars."
The most valuable thing in the room is an experienced outsider with no internal politics and no stake in the answer. The outsider on the inside. It is why the CEO calls before the hard conversation rather than after it, and it is the through-line across every chair, not just the people one.
Where it came from: Sheren, on the CHRO seat and the "CEO whisperer" role she has played for 30 years.
We use AI heavily and say so plainly. It drafts, accelerates, and refines. It does not care which way a decision goes, which is exactly why a human owns the call. Our working split is roughly 20 percent AI and 80 percent judgment, not the other way round, and anything AI-made gets labeled as AI-made.
Where it came from: David, on the human-empathetic layer. "It doesn't care if we win or lose. That takes leadership judgment."
An interim or fractional engagement is not a seat-warming exercise. The job is to right-size the function, ask honestly whether the client needs this chair permanently at all, and put the talent in place for the long game. Done properly, we work ourselves out of the seat and the client is stronger for it.
Where it came from: Maureen, on interim and transitional work. "Prepare the organization to be its strategic future self."
We back a company whether the first attempt works or not. If it struggles, we help it find the next level. If it takes off, we have already done that ride and we stay for it. No hand-off at the moment it gets interesting, and no walking away at the moment it gets hard.
Where it came from: Ken. "We're there whether you succeed or not. We can help you through the first part, and when you become a rocket ship, we're there too. And we've done it."
Eight chairs sold as one engagement, not eight vendors. The CMO's plan assumes the CIO's stack; the CHRO's org design assumes the COO's process. Peanut butter and jelly, by design.
Every seat gets vetted the way Greg asked to be vetted: Q&A us, check the fit, make sure it's not a square peg in a round hole. Reputation is the shared asset; nobody gets applied to a client who isn't right for it.
Startups get advisory hours, not a full-time seat. Growth companies get fractional. M&A and carve-outs often need interim. Part of the job is telling the client which one they actually need, including when the answer is "less than you thought."
We use AI heavily and label it plainly. It drafts, we judge. If a piece of content is AI-made, it says so. The 80 percent that matters (the judgment) stays human.
Startups through their accelerators and incubators, SMB and scale-up companies, and the enterprise. Different stages, different depth, same bench.
A weekly working cadence, recorded sessions that become shared content, a Slack channel (#fractional360) for the day-to-day, and the all-chairs working sessions over Zoom: Session 1 ran Tuesday, August 25, and Session 2 is Friday, August 28, 1 to 2:30 PT. Message, model, pricing, go-to-market, together.
Confirmed by Chris and Greg on August 11, and the thing that separates this from a pool of freelancers. A chair is a standard, not a seat for one person.
Not every capability needs to become a chair. Principal-level depth (program management, infrastructure, applications, and the rest) is marketed as bench strength rather than a new seat, which is how both firms already work.
Decided in the Chris and Greg session on September 1, and it changes how every one of us should talk about this.
A prospect does not buy a C-suite. Greg's words: "They're going to go, what I need right now is a CMO." He is glad the rest of the bench is there, and he will call for it when the need arrives. So the offering gets marketed as a team and sold as a chair, with the rest available on call.
His own carve-out work is the proof. A 400 million dollar startup had no CFO, no CMO, no CRO. What they went looking for was a CIO, because the carve-out needed a CIO. What they actually needed was everything the team could have brought. The need was total. The entry point was one seat.
Two things follow. The bundle is the story, and it earns the expansion once the first chair is seated. And nobody is paying a large monthly retainer for standing access to a team, so the pricing has to be built around the entry chair.
The exception is private equity. Carve-outs, diligence, team build, evaluating what comes over, managing a TSA. That is the one place a client says "call the whole team, we need them all." PE firms already place a CIO as an operating partner across a portfolio and then add a CMO and a CRO. We are building that as the first framework to take to market.
The fractional executive market is the largest leadership re-architecture in a generation, and it is still unorganized. What is missing is not demand. It is an operating model that holds the chairs together, which is exactly what this team is.
Most fractional engagements today are a CMO contract here, a CFO contract there, a security advisor on the side, and no shared cadence connecting any of them. The chairs sit independently, the operating model fragments, and value compounds slower than the math says it should.
When the fractional CMO and the fractional CIO show up to the same Monday operating review with shared metrics and a joint roadmap, the chairs compound. When they do not, they cancel. That shared cadence is the product.
Each chair is held by the firm that specializes in that function, rather than one firm hiring breadth it does not have. That is the structural difference against the single-firm benches, and it is not a positioning claim, it is how we are built.
The market-facing framing lives on the Fractional 360 page: the interoperability model, the comparison against single-firm benches, and the buyers who get the most from it. Note that page predates the current roster, so the chair mix there is being reconciled.
Early drafts, shared here for the team to react to before they go wider. In review with StrataFusion first, then out to everyone. Say what you would change.
Every chair's persona, verbatim quotes, north-star metric, an industry exemplar to model, and the go-to-market wedge, plus the roll-up of how the chairs work as one. Click any chair to expand.
The first month of coordinated posting across the chairs, week by week.
The always-on posting model, plus four thought-leadership briefs to build from.
The template every chair can follow, in the order it happened.
The public page at innovativegroup.io/solutions/fractional-360 still shows an earlier version of the chair mix, written before the bench filled out. This portal carries the current roster. The public page gets reconciled once all eight chairs are named.