The team portal. Private.
For the Fractional 360 team. Please do not forward.
Each persona is built from what each leader actually said in Session 1 — their words, their stories, their blind spot — cross-referenced with the public record and anchored to 2026 market data, with a north-star metric and a real industry exemplar to model. Facts drawn from public record (not the room) are tagged. Click any chair to open the full persona.
The fractional-executive market is growing fast, and full-C-suite players already exist (TechCXO, Right Side Up, KORE1). Our wedge is not "nobody does this" — it's the model: a coordinated team of specialist operators who interoperate from day one, plus an ethos marketplaces can't claim. Confidence: high; figures from multiple current 2026 sources.
Session 1 surfaced two threads every chair's content ladders back to.
Embedded operators from day one, a vetted bench behind every chair, everyone hunts for everyone, slow is smooth. The model is the differentiator.
Do the right thing, balanced with running a real business. Customer-first. Trust through value. Emerging principle #1: "do the right thing."
Click a card to expand. Verbatim Session 1 quotes are the proof each persona maps to what was said.
We built Innovative Group off the basis of building trust through providing value. That's it, simple.
Helping them keep their jobs and show value in their organization, and have marketing not be a cost center.
Brand-to-revenue operator who has held the fractional CMO seat many times; his truest superpower is convening leaders — "bringing leaders together." His scar (laid off as a top enterprise marketer) is his North Star: he stands beside the leader, not in the spotlight, and proves marketing is a value engine. Co-founded IG on one idea: trust through value.
Founders/CEOs and the marketing leaders whose seats he protects. Pain: marketing seen as a cost center; a CMO who can't show the board a return.
Marketing a board can trust — brand-to-revenue, retention-aware, defensible.
Fractional-CMO clients have seen ~29% revenue growth vs ~19% without; the market is ~$1.27B in 2026. CMOs own marketing-sourced pipeline, ARR, and LTV:CAC.
Alan Gonsenhauser (11-time CMO; advised 100+ CMOs at Forrester; founded Demand Revenue) — the embedded-exec model that speaks EBITDA and LTV/CAC to PE/VC. Also CMOx (Casey Stanton).
Marketing as a value/retention engine · Managing up: earning the board's trust · Data-backed, art-of-war growth · Building Fractional 360
LinkedIn POV + operator stories + the F360 vision narrative. — 2–3/wk; alternate story, POV, and movement post.
Partnering with the business teams to deliver meaningful business value that aligns to the strategy is kind of my happy place.
You need a Henry, not a Greg.
35+ year serial CIO; founding CIO at Marketo through IPO (and its $1.8B Vista sale — public record), later CIO at Malwarebytes past $250M, where he worked alongside Tom Fox (public record — the source of their trust). In the AI era the job is business alignment, not burning tokens. Famously picky, high bar.
PE firms, CEOs and boards facing carve-outs/transitions/AI decisions; scale-ups needing a CIO. Pain: tech spend untied to strategy; a carve-out clock with severe penalties.
The honest read on what you actually need — stood up under a brutal timeline.
Fractional/interim CIOs cite fast, measurable value — ~23% efficiency gains, six-figure savings, ROI in 3–6 months; 90-day deliverables like vendor consolidation, a security baseline, and an operating model.
Fortium Partners' fractional-CIO model (vision-to-value, 90-day deliverables) — a specialist-operator standard, not a marketplace match.
Fractional vs interim, by stage · The carve-out / TSA playbook · AI-era business alignment · "Tell the client what they really need"
LinkedIn POV + the carve-out field guide + AI-alignment POV. — 2–3/wk; carve-out war stories + AI-alignment POV.
Security were the policemen, they always said no. At some point you realize you have to enable the business to be successful.
It's the devil in the details.
Reframes the CISO from the "policeman who says no" to an enabler, at scale. An abstract mind that lives in the details, now deep in AI and its governance gap. Loves the mid-market for the outsized impact.
Mid-market and AI-forward companies; CISOs, CTOs, CEOs racing on AI. Pain: shipping AI with no governance; a breach with no plan.
Move fast safely — adopt the AI you're racing toward without opening the door you can't see.
vCISO engagements typically run $60–150k/year with KPIs on risk-maturity and time-to-contain; 77% of leaders say AI is boosting demand for specialized fractional talent.
Modern vCISO firms (Cynomi, Fractional CISO Inc.) — business-aligned metrics, not compliance checkboxes.
Security as a business enabler · Shadow AI and the governance gap · The details behind the celebration · Breach response, calmly
LinkedIn POV + the "AI win that was a risk" story + breach lessons. — 2–3/wk; ride the AI-governance wave.
I describe myself as half unicorn, half spreadsheet.
I love that I can hold the space for the stuff that keeps them up at night.
"Half unicorn, half spreadsheet" — reads the EQ and the P&L. VP HR at Splunk (assessment tool still used 16+ years, 10k employees), later CPO at Twilio (public record). Believes in corporate karma. Moves executives out with grace — a ~95% hit rate leaving people as brand ambassadors.
Founders/CEOs and HR leaders. Pain: a C-suite not speaking the same language; the exec transition nobody wants to run; culture debt.
A company that performs because its people, communication, and leadership actually work.
Healthy voluntary turnover is under 10% (Gallup); top organizations hit 90%+ retention (Mercer avg ~13%). The fractional CHRO's job is translating people metrics into P&L language.
The fractional-CHRO playbook standard (Umbrex) — people metrics translated into founder/CFO language.
Communication as the foundation · The CEO whisperer role · Graceful executive transitions · Culture as what makes the rest work
LinkedIn POV + the assessment framework + exec-transition stories. — 2–3/wk; communication + culture POV.
We built this thing. Why aren't we getting paid for it? Where are the customers?
Not just building what they say, but building to where they need to be.
Product across the 49ers, Facebook (ads), Salesforce (SalesforceIQ), and PayPal (Sr Director, PayPal Ads); now co-founder/CEO of Gaimplan.ai (public record). Owns the end-to-end voice of the customer — the why and the who — and builds to where customers need to be.
Founders and product leaders; post-M&A teams. Pain: "we built it — where are the customers?"; a roadmap disconnected from reality.
Product clarity and acceleration grounded in what customers actually need.
Net Revenue Retention has overtaken acquisition as the primary growth focus; top performers exceed 120% NRR. Fractional CPOs own OKRs and stand in front of the board (retainers ~$12–25k/mo).
The Reforge / Amplitude north-star discipline — one metric that matters, instrumented and owned.
Voice of the customer, end to end · Product-market truth · Integration through M&A · Acceleration for founders
LinkedIn POV + the M&A-integration story + product-truth POV. — 2–3/wk; product-truth POV + a founder story.
I'm usually the guy that has to tell the CEO or the board the bad news.
Thinking about where the puck will be, not where the puck is.
25 years in tech; Malwarebytes President & CFO (ran finance, HR, IT, legal), ex-Angie's List CFO and NAVTEQ, Kellogg MBA (public record). The one who tells the CEO and board the bad news. Insists on cross-functional buy-in; thinks outside-in. Uniquely, he's usually the client, not the vendor.
CEOs, boards, scale-up founders. Pain: a plan the CEO ignores; navel-gazing; no one willing to say no.
A plan the whole C-suite owns — and a CFO who tells you the truth.
Fractional CFO is the most mature sub-vertical; north-stars are burn multiple, runway, and gross margin, reported on a weekly/monthly rhythm.
The mature fractional-CFO field (The Expert CFO, Paro-style embedded CFOs) — finance translated into board decisions.
Cross-functional buy-in beats a finance plan · Outside-in: where the puck is going · The value of the honest no · Decisions = people + process + tools
LinkedIn POV + the planning-buy-in story + outside-in POV. — 2–3/wk; the honest-CFO voice.
Hundreds of millions of dollars of market cap value could have been saved by making a different, better decision.
You learn not to touch the stove by touching it.
IG mentor, partner, and advisor; empathy is his word. A three-arc career (U.S. Senate, tech, nonprofit leadership) at the intersection of hard things. On Nextdoor's early founding team (8 years to monetization). Believes trust beats short-term money. His First Chair idea: who tunes a coordinated C-suite.
Founders and entrepreneurs in the grind. Pain: the wrong path at an inflection point; isolation; investors and employees not to disappoint.
Empathy plus judgment — help founders make the next best decision before it costs them.
As fractional teams form, someone has to own interoperation — a "concertmaster"/First-Chair role the marketplaces don't offer. Advisory value shows up as decision quality and value-at-risk avoided.
The trusted board-advisor / concertmaster archetype (the outside operator every strong founder keeps close).
Empathy as a business strategy · The "next best decision" · Do the right thing, even at a cost · Learning by touching the stove
LinkedIn POV + founder-empathy stories + the "next best decision" framing. — 1–2/wk; the ethos + empathy voice (pairs with Sheren).
We wanted to create a consulting company that was not conflicted by the delivery capabilities that it had.
Bad news is important to deliver right away.
30+ years; co-founded StrataFusion in 2001 with John Dick to build unconflicted "Technology-plus-Business" consulting — advise the what, architect the how, never do the delivery. Earlier built Core Technology Group (Inc. 500) and sold it (public record). Leads with balance and champions the assessment-first commercial model.
Founders, PE, scale-ups needing senior judgment without a conflict. Pain: consultants who profit from selling more delivery; not knowing where to start.
Unconflicted senior advice — and a low-risk way to start (a paid assessment).
The assessment-first model matches how mid-market buyers de-risk: a low-cost paid diagnostic that earns the right to the engagement — increasingly the norm in advisory.
The unconflicted-advisory model (StrataFusion's own "advise, don't deliver") — trusted precisely because incentives are clean.
Balance as a business advantage · Unconflicted advice · The assessment-first model · Every scar a young exec will hit
LinkedIn POV + the commercial-model POV + the balance story. — 1–2/wk; unconflicted-advice + commercial-model voice.
Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.
There's never any gates. Nobody stops at the gates to say, was this correct? Was this aligned?
30 years in tech (in 2027): UX, front-end, growth, and heavy AI. Infrastructure-OCD — gates before you go — and the builder of Agatha, IG's AI operator. Sees the same failure everywhere: personalization always planned, never shipped.
Internal (the F360 engine) and growth/ops for clients. Pain: speed without gates; personalization that never ships; ROI that leaks.
An AI-powered content and ops engine that lets the whole team move fast — safely.
The content engine is the amplification layer — 'one post, ten amplifiers.' AI ops (agents like Agatha) are how a small team produces at scale.
Modern RevOps / content-ops teams that pair a publishing system with AI leverage.
"Slow is smooth, smooth is fast" · Gates before speed · Personalization done right · AI operations (Agatha)
How-to / ops POV + AI-ops content + the personalization POV. — 1–2/wk; ops + AI POV — and he runs the engine for everyone.
The customers that stopped opening support cases, the ones that went dark — those were the customers that were walking out the door.
It costs three, five, ten times as much to acquire new customers than to retain existing ones.
Post-sales, support, and customer success leader. Conviction: you can't outsell poor retention, and the answers are already in your data. Big word: outcomes.
Post-sales/CS leaders and scale-ups with a base quietly leaking value. Pain: chasing new logos while retention erodes; missing the churn signals.
Stop the leak, read the signals, compound the base.
NRR has overtaken acquisition as the growth focus; top performers exceed 120% NRR. Retaining costs a fraction of acquiring.
Modern CS leadership (Gainsight-style) — signals-driven retention, not reactive support.
Retention economics · Signals hiding in the base · Customer-first · Outcomes over activity
LinkedIn POV + the retention-data story + customer-first POV. — 2–3/wk; the retention + outcomes voice (pairs with Chris + Chad).
The product isn't ten fractional executives — it's the interoperation. The cross-chair plays the team can run and sell:
Chris (CMO) + Michael (CS) + Chad (CPO): marketing feeds the base, CS reads the churn signals, product builds to where customers need to be.
Greg (CIO) + Henry (CISO) + David (AI ops): AI adopted aligned to strategy and governed for risk.
Tom (CFO) as honest broker + every chair: cross-functional buy-in so the plan gets executed.
Sheren (CHRO): communication and culture; her assessment maps how the team works.
Steve (First Chair): diagnosis, integration, exit criteria, north-star — the chairs playing as one.
A low-cost paid assessment (Ken's model + Sheren's exec assessment) — low risk for the client, high signal for us, opens the full-team engagement.
Interview each chair (David + Agatha) → draft in their voice → the chair approves → publish. Session 1 stories are the first raw material.
One post, ten amplifiers — two company pages + eight chair profiles; #fractional360 is the daily channel.
"One team, not seven vendors" — the differentiated why-us.
Every chair's north-star ladders to one team metric: client outcomes that compound across functions — measured as engagement Net Revenue Retention (do clients expand across chairs?) plus referral rate. If interoperation is real, clients buy more chairs and refer us. That's the number that proves the model.
Lock the two-track principles + paid-assessment front door; run the chair interviews; ship the launch post (team reveal + why-now); each chair posts their first piece.
Cross-chair play posts; first paid assessment in-market; comparison/authority content vs the marketplace model.
First joint engagement live; the assessment → engagement motion repeatable; measure inbound + pipeline; plan the first webinar series.