Our About page has a leadership section with six headshots, six titles, and six short bios. Three of those six people work here roughly one day a week, split the rest of their time across three or four other companies, and are never, anywhere on the page, identified as fractional. We'd like to explain how this actually works, since the page gives no indication that it's happening at all.
What "fractional" actually means
It means a genuinely senior, genuinely capable executive — often someone who ran finance or marketing at a much bigger company — now sells their expertise in blocks of a day or two a week across several startups simultaneously, charging each one a fraction of a full-time salary for a fraction of their attention. This is a real, useful arrangement for a company too small to need or afford a full-time VP. It is not the same thing as having a VP, and the About page does not make this distinction, because the distinction is bad for recruiting, bad for fundraising optics, and bad for the fractional executive's own branding across their other four clients.
The Tuesday problem
Our fractional VP of Finance works Tuesdays. Nearly every finance question that comes up outside of Tuesday waits for Tuesday, because escalating it to anyone else means someone with less context making a worse-informed call. A real financial emergency on a Thursday gets a hastily scheduled call, squeezed between that VP's other client's board meeting and their own kid's dentist appointment, conducted with somewhat less depth than it would get from someone whose entire week belonged to this one company.
The "leadership team" page is a snapshot, not a structure
Six headshots in a row implies six people thinking about this company at comparable intensity. In reality, the three full-time executives are thinking about almost nothing else, and the three fractional ones are thinking about this company for the hours they're actually billing, and otherwise thinking about one of their other clients, a competitor's portfolio company, or their own consulting business's pipeline. The page flattens six very different relationships into one visual register, the exact same trick the trust badge footer plays with six certifications of wildly different rigor.
Why companies do this anyway
Because a fractional VP of Finance who used to run finance at a real company is a genuinely better Tuesday than a full-time junior hire who's never done the job before, and the arrangement is honestly a smart one for an early-stage company's actual needs. The dishonesty isn't in hiring fractional. It's in the About page implying something closer to full-time commitment than what's actually being purchased, because "fractional" reads, to an investor or a candidate evaluating the team, as thinner than the page wants to claim.
What candidates find out in week two
A new hire joins expecting a VP of Finance who's available for questions, discovers that VP is only reachable Tuesdays and sometimes Thursdays, and recalibrates their entire sense of how supported they actually are, weeks after accepting an offer built partly on a leadership page that didn't disclose the arrangement. This is the actual cost of the omission — not that fractional executives are bad, but that nobody got to make an informed decision about joining a team that includes them.
What we're not saying
We're not saying fractional leadership is a scam — it's often the single smartest way for an early-stage company to access real expertise it couldn't otherwise afford, and plenty of fractional executives do excellent, high-leverage work in their allotted hours. We're saying the About page's silence on which roles are fractional isn't an oversight. It's a specific choice to let six headshots imply six comparable commitments, when the actual commitment levels vary by a factor of five.
Our recommendation
Say it. "Fractional VP of Finance, available Tuesdays and Thursdays" costs nothing to write and tells a candidate, an investor, or a customer exactly what they're actually getting. The arrangement is defensible on its own merits. It doesn't need the cover of looking like something it isn't.
If your own About page currently has three fractional executives photographed identically to three full-time ones, email us at contact@b2bsaas.guru. We'll help you write the honest version. We'll check with our own fractional team first — Tuesday, probably.