Fractional 360

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For the Fractional 360 team. Please do not forward.

Fractional 360
Team portal · v2 · August 10, 2026
Innovative Group × StrataFusion · The team behind the offer

Seven chairs.
One team.

Fractional 360 is the complete fractional C-suite: every chair filled by an operator who has actually sat in it, designed to interoperate from day one. One operating model, one cadence. This portal is the team's home base: who we are, what we believe, and how we work. It grows as we do, and it will eventually live at fractionalcxo360.com.

01 · The team

Operators, not observers.

Every chair is held by someone who has run the function, carried the number, and kept the scars. Two chairs are open; we would rather leave a seat empty than fill it with the wrong person.

CMO
Chris Salazar

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.

CIO
Greg Higham

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.

CISO
Henry Ivey

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.

CHRO
Sheren Bouchakian

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.

CPO
Chad Kutting

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.

CRO
Seat open

Revenue leadership with operator scars. If you know the right person, say so: introductions are how this team was built.

COO
Seat open

Operations leadership, likely vertical-specific. Named once we anchor the first target verticals.

02 · What this was built on

Six principles, and where each one came from.

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.

Principle 01 · The whole reason fractional works

Advisory at the right level beats a seat you cannot afford.

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."

Principle 02 · The overarching one

Knowledge got cheap. Experience did not.

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."

Principle 03 · What the client is actually buying

The trusted advisor to the C-suite, with nothing to gain from telling them anything but the truth.

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.

Principle 04 · Where the humans stay

AI has no judgment, and no stake in whether you win.

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."

Principle 05 · What an engagement owes the client

Leave the organization as its strategic future self.

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."

Principle 06 · The promise we make

We are there through the hard part, and still there when it becomes a rocket ship.

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."

03 · How we operate

One model, one cadence.

Interoperate from day one

Seven chairs sold as one engagement, not seven 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.

Fit before flattery

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.

Right level, right stage

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."

Transparent about AI

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.

Who we serve

Startups through their accelerators and incubators, SMB and scale-up companies, and the enterprise. Different stages, different depth, same bench.

The rhythm

A weekly working cadence, recorded sessions that become shared content, a Slack channel (#fractional360) for the day-to-day, and a joint working session when all seven chairs are named: message, model, pricing, go-to-market, together.

04 · Why now

The category is real. Nobody has named it yet.

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.

$5.7B → $19.1B
Fractional executive market, 2024 to 2033
72%
CEOs increasing fractional use in the next 12 months
46%
Year-over-year demand growth, 2024 to 2025
40%
Mid-market C-suite roles projected fractional by 2027

The problem we solve

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.

Why it compounds

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.

Specialists beat a generalist bench

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 public version

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.

05 · What's next

Where this goes.

Now

  • Fill the CRO and COO chairs
  • Each chair sketches its offering: what a client gets, at what depth, at what stage
  • Join #fractional360 on Slack

Next

  • The all-chairs working session: message, model, pricing, go-to-market
  • Content engine: each chair's voice on LinkedIn, produced by IG, approved by you
  • fractionalcxo360.com becomes the public home; this portal stays the team's

One note before you click through

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 seven chairs are named.