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Answers to your most common questions
What is a fractional Chief Commercial Officer?
A fractional Chief Commercial Officer is a senior commercial leader who works with your company part-time, typically one or two days per week, instead of as a full-time hire. You get executive-level commercial leadership at a fraction of the cost and commitment.
You'll see different titles for similar roles. Fractional CMO, fractional Head of Growth, fractional CGO, fractional commercial leader. They all describe someone senior who helps your company grow on a part-time basis. The differences come down to scope and background. A fractional CMO typically comes from a marketing background and focuses on brand, content, campaigns and demand generation.
A fractional Head of Growth usually leans toward acquisition, experimentation and funnel optimisation. A fractional CCO or commercial leader tends to operate more broadly, sitting closer to the P&L and covering go-to-market, pricing, unit economics, revenue modelling and team structure alongside marketing and acquisition. I use the term Chief Commercial Officer because my background is in building full commercial functions, not just marketing departments. At Yuno I owned everything from pricing and category management to CRM, brand, partnerships and business development. That's a wider remit than most marketing-focused fractional roles, and it's what I bring to every engagement.
At the end of the day, everyone in these roles helps your company grow. The question is just how broadly they think about the problem.
What does a fractional CCO or commercial partner actually do?
I work as part of your leadership team, typically one or two days a week, owning your commercial growth function. That means strategy, positioning, go-to-market, pricing, unit economics, acquisition, team structure and operating cadence. I join your leadership meetings, your standups and your planning sessions. I'm in the room when decisions get made, not briefed on them after.
I don't hand you a strategy deck and disappear. I embed in your team, build dashboards, set up review cycles and stay accountable for outcomes. I'm also not an agency running one channel for you. I connect every commercial decision to your business model and make sure the whole system compounds.
Think of it as hiring a senior commercial leader who happens to work with 2-3 companies instead of one.
How is a fractional CCO different from a fractional CMO?
A fractional CMO typically focuses on marketing. Brand, acquisition, content, campaigns. A fractional Chief Commercial Officer also owns the marketing function, but operates more broadly across the entire commercial function: go-to-market strategy, pricing architecture, unit economics, revenue modelling, team structure and growth operations.
In many cases though, this distinction is theoretical and whatever a fractional practitioner calls themselves, you will get a senior marketing and commercial leader, with a bit of a different background and profile.
In my case, as Chief Commercial Officer, the work almost always includes marketing, but it starts upstream. What to sell, to whom, at what price, through which channels, and how to measure whether it's working.
For early-stage startups where marketing, sales and product are deeply intertwined, this broader scope is usually a better fit than a pure marketing lens.
How is fractional leadership different from interim management?
In the DACH region, interim management is well established. It typically means a full-time, temporary executive brought in to fill a gap, usually for three to twelve months, often through a placement agency. The interim manager replaces a missing executive and works four to five days per week.
Fractional is a different model generally, but can fulfill the same need on occasion. I work one or two days per week, with multiple companies simultaneously, on an ongoing basis. The goal isn't mainly to fill a seat temporarily. It's to build a commercial system that the company can run on its own. The commitment is lighter, the cost is lower and the engagement is designed to transfer ownership to the team rather than create dependency on the interim hire.
If you need someone to step in for six months and hold the line while you recruit a permanent CCO or CMO, a fractional engagement can definitely make sense to bridge the gap. It's just important to be honest about whether a part time engagement is enough in that transition phase.
At what stage does hiring a fractional commercial leader make sense?
Not every stage needs a senior commercial hire. But some situations really do need senior GTM leadership. Here are the three I see most often.
Your marketing is founder-led and it's starting to crack. You have a marketer or two executing, but nobody is setting the strategy, defining the priorities or connecting growth to the business model. The founder is still making every commercial decision between investor calls and product work.
You have a strong Head of Marketing or growth lead but no senior brain above them. They're good at execution. They need coaching on GTM strategy, positioning and cross-functional leadership. A fractional partner provides that layer without a full-time hire.
You're 6-12 months from a raise and your growth story isn't clear yet. Investors want to see ICP clarity, sharp positioning, channel conviction and a credible growth thesis. If your marketing and commercial backbone can't demonstrate that yet, you need someone to build it. Fast.
The sweet spot is companies between €1m and €10m+ in revenue. Enough traction to build on, but not at a point where a full-time C-level hire is the only answer.
When does it NOT make sense to hire a fractional commercial leader?
There are three situations where I'll tell you honestly that I'm not the right fit.
You're pre-product-market-fit but expect a fractional engagement will bring clients asap. If a repeatable acquisition channel is not yet clear or customers are not staying, we might face a go-to-market or value proposition problem. I'm eager to help with them, but that is foundational product & venture building work, rather than commercial operations, and will take time and testing. Marketing can't scale something that doesn't stick or retain customers.
You don't have the team or budget to execute. I can build the best strategy in the world. Without resources to execute it, it sits in a Google Doc and nothing moves. If there's nobody to do the work alongside me, the engagement won't produce results. I am very eager to get into the trenches and operational, but I will hardly be able to produce satisfying results when lifting strategic and operational work alone on a part-time basis.
You're not ready to be challenged. If you've already decided on your ICP, your pricing and your channels, and you want someone to execute your plan without questioning it, a fractional partner is the wrong choice. That's what agencies are for. My job inherently includes to challenge and test assumptions and work with you on building a functional growth engine. If you're not open to that collaboration, we'll create friction before we create results.
In any case, the best engagements are the ones where both sides are honest about fit from the start. If you're unsure about the fit, let's have an open chat and see where we land.
How much does this cost compared to a full-time hire?
A full-time Head of Growth or commercial executive (CMO, CCO) at a European startup costs €120,000-€180,000 per year in salary alone, plus equity, employer contributions, benefits and a three to six month hiring process.
A fractional engagement starts at €4,500 per month for one day per week. That's roughly 30-50% of the full-time cost, with no long-term commitment, no equity dilution and the ability to start within weeks.
The cost comparison also misses something subtler: someone who has built commercial systems at multiple companies brings pattern recognition that a first-time hire at any level doesn't have. You're not paying for time. You're paying for judgment.
If you're not looking to hire fractionally, but are facing a specific challenge in time or need help with a concrete project, I do take on certain projects on an individual price bases.
Do you only do strategy, or do you also execute?
I can do both and in the end, I work on whatever moves the needle the most. My background is in the operational work. Performance marketing, e-commerce, venture building. I've built websites, ad accounts, automations, processes and everything in between myself. I don't shy away from getting hands dirty and I genuinely enjoy it.
But on a one or two day per week engagement, the question is where my time creates the most value. And that's usually not in the ad account. It's in building the commercial system that tells your team what to do in the ad account and why.
The best engagements are the ones where you already have operational capacity on your team, but you need to decouple growth decisions from the founder or bring a more strategic person into the leadership team without hiring full-time. That's where fractional makes sense. If what you actually need is someone to run campaigns five days a week, you're better off hiring a strong growth marketer directly or find a great agency. You'd be overpaying for that with me, and I'd rather tell you that upfront.
Most early-stage companies don't fail at growth because they're running the wrong tactics. They fail because there's no system connecting those tactics to business outcomes. I build that system.
What happens when the engagement ends?
Everything I build is yours to keep. Strategy documents, dashboards, operating cadences, playbooks, unit economics models, all of it.
The goal of every engagement is to make the commercial function run without me. In practice, that usually means one of two outcomes. Either you're ready to hire a full-time commercial leader and I help define the role, write the brief and hand over a functioning system. Or the engagement transitions into a lighter ongoing retainer where I stay involved one day a week while the team runs the day-to-day.
The only bad outcome is if the system stops working when I leave. That's why building operating cadence and writing things down is a core part of every engagement, not an afterthought.
Do you work with companies outside Berlin or outside the DACH region?
Generally speaking yes, but there is a preference and benefit to geographic proximity.
I'm based in Berlin and most of my clients are in the DACH region. I also spend considerable time in Zurich, where I spent several years building and scaling companies. I work actively with clients in both cities, but the model works across Europe.
I work remotely with regular on-site days as needed. Some engagements are fully remote, others involve one or two on-site days per month. The rhythm depends on what the company needs.
What matters more than geography is language and market context. I work in both German and English and have deep experience in the DACH market from nearly a decade of building and scaling companies across Germany and Switzerland. For companies targeting DACH customers, that market knowledge is often more valuable than physical proximity.
What kinds of companies and industries do you work with best?
The honest answer is that my background shapes where I add most value, even if I don't limit myself to one sector.
Most of my hands-on experience is in consumer-facing businesses: e-commerce, D2C brands, and circular economy models. I've scaled a consumer electronics rental platform from zero to 22 people, managed seven-figure ad budgets across eight e-commerce clients in DACH, and spent years in markets where acquisition cost, retention, and unit economics are existential questions rather than quarterly metrics. If you're building something in that space, I'll understand your business model without a lengthy onboarding.
That said, I've also worked with B2B consultancies, corporate venture studios, and product businesses at various stages. The commercial problems tend to overlap more than people expect. Positioning, go-to-market clarity, pricing architecture, building a growth function that doesn't depend entirely on the founder. These show up across sectors.
Where I'm a less natural fit: deep enterprise sales with long institutional cycles, regulated industries like fintech or healthtech where compliance shapes commercial decisions, or highly technical products where the commercial challenge is mainly sales engineering.
If you're a founder in DACH building a consumer or digitally-native business and you're trying to figure out how to grow it without hiring a full commercial team yet, you're probably exactly who I had in mind when I built 100north.
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