What being a fractional CMO is teaching me about how I work

Since leaving corporate life, one of the things I’ve started doing is working as a fractional CMO, and while I knew there would be a lot for me to learn about running my own business, I hadn’t really considered that I would also have to learn how to structure my brain around working for several companies at the same time.

If you’re wondering what a fractional CMO actually is, it basically means a company hires an experienced marketing leader for part of the week rather than hiring someone full time. Depending on what the company needs, that can mean setting the marketing direction, helping make decisions, working with the leadership team, building plans and also doing quite a lot of the actual work.

It is something I really enjoy because I love getting inside a business, understanding what is happening and trying to figure out what needs to happen next. I like complicated problems, I like asking lots of questions and I really like the variety of working with different companies.

But after doing this for a little while, I’ve discovered something about the model that I hadn’t expected.

When I’m working with a client one day a week, that day becomes incredibly intense because I’m very aware that they only have me for those hours. I need to catch up on everything that happened since I was last there, understand what has changed, decide what we need to prioritise and then actually get the work done.

And because my fractional days usually involve relatively few meetings, I can spend most of the day doing deep work. I’m listening, thinking, analysing, writing, making recommendations, producing things and generally trying to move as much forward as I reasonably can before the day ends.

Recently I’ve had a few situations where I did this for one client and then went straight into another client the following day, and that is when I realised that working for eight hours and being fully switched on for eight hours are actually very different things.

I can work five days a week, obviously. I did it for more than twenty years.

What I don’t think I can do, or at least don’t think I should do, is spend five consecutive days operating at that level of concentration while also switching to a completely different company every morning.

For me there is also a neurodivergent element to this because switching contexts takes energy. Moving from one client to another doesn’t simply mean opening a different folder on my laptop, it means loading an entirely different business into my brain. Different people, different products, different challenges, different conversations we had the previous week, different things I need to remember and completely different priorities.

Do that across five companies and suddenly my supposedly very efficient fractional business sounds completely exhausting.

And the experience has actually made me reflect on the traditional working week too, because I think we sometimes talk about eight hours of work as if every one of those hours should involve the same level of attention and output.

Looking back at my corporate career, that was never how a normal working day actually worked.

There were periods of very intense work and there were important meetings where I needed to be completely present, but there were also emails, administrative work, conversations with colleagues, walking between meetings, travelling, reading, thinking and moments where I simply needed to let something sit in my brain before deciding what I thought about it.

All of that was work.

My brain also has its own rhythm, which doesn’t particularly care about traditional office hours. Sometimes I do my best work incredibly early in the morning, sometimes late at night, sometimes I can work for three very concentrated hours and get an enormous amount done, and sometimes I can stare at something for an hour, get nowhere, walk away and suddenly know exactly what to do later.

I suspect I’m not particularly unusual in this.

Our brains need time to concentrate, but they also need time to process, connect things, recover and occasionally do something that looks completely unrelated to the problem we are trying to solve.

Fractional work has simply made me notice this because the intense parts of work are much more concentrated into one day.

So I’m already changing what I imagined my own fractional model might eventually look like. Rather than five clients for one day each, I think I would much rather have two clients for perhaps two days each, which would allow me to go deeper with those companies, reduce the amount of switching my brain has to do and still leave room for advisory work, writing, speaking and everything else I’m building through PAQ Anyway.

I’m still figuring it out, and I expect I’ll become better at managing the switching as I get more experienced at this way of working.

But I also don’t want to become so good at managing an unsustainable model that I forget I now have the option of designing a better one.

One of the reasons I wanted to work for myself was to have more control over how I work, and I’m starting to realise that this doesn’t only mean choosing what work I do or which clients I work with.

It also means building a working life around how my brain actually works.