Hi. I'm Simon. I've been a fractional executive since January 2023 and I'm going to be using my experience in making that transition successfully to help you do just the same.

In my work as a fractional COO I enjoy working with a range of clients, have much more flexibility in my work and am enjoying the variety that fractional work gives me. I'm the top fractional COO on Google and have spent a lot of time sharing my experience with other budding fractionals.

When I made the decision to go fractional, it was after a lot of reflection on my career and personal life.

For many years, I had been in corporate leadership roles, most recently as Chief Operating Officer of a UK-based consulting and digital transformation business with around 700 people.

While the role was great on paper, I found myself increasingly disconnected from the parts of the work that really excited me - working directly with clients and leading teams to solve meaningful problems.

I was caught up in organisational politics and the complexities of managing a large, acquisitive business, especially as we navigated the challenges of the pandemic.

By mid-2022, it became clear I needed a radical change.

I wanted to regain the variety and flexibility that I'd lost. I wasn’t seeking just another executive job. I wanted the autonomy to choose my projects, work closely with founders and smaller teams and apply my operational expertise in a more hands-on, practical way.

These goals led me to the relatively new and still evolving world of fractional leadership.

I handed in my six months’ notice without having another job lined up, which was kind of thrilling and terrifying at the same time.

The idea of not having a regular salary after 25 years of steady employment was daunting.

But I was determined to embark on a journey that would allow me to build a way of working that was right for me and my family.

My goals for this transition were clear: I wanted to work with a diverse range of businesses, enjoy greater control over my time and find a renewed sense of satisfaction from the work I did.

I found the first year of my transition to fractional working pretty challenging.

The first six months involved two fractional roles and a health scare which needed an operation and some unplanned time off work.

These roles gave me valuable insights and a steady income initially, but I soon realised that I needed to be more strategic about how I positioned myself and built my fractional business.

One of the biggest lessons I learnt early on was the importance of mindset —particularly getting over my limiting beliefs about my value, money and selling myself.

I recognised that for me to succeed in this new career path, it wasn't just about having the right skills but really about overcoming mental blocks that hold many people back from taking the leap out of being an employee.

It was also about building a set of new playbooks for fractional working. Through a lot of trial and error I've found effective ways of building my fractional brand, generating a pipeline of interesting work and learning how to apply my career experience most effectively as a fractional leader.

That’s the system that I’m going to teach you in this course. Let me explain a bit more about this system that I’ve developed and use today to run my successful fractional work. There are eight key building blocks in the system.

You’re going to learn about what a fractional executive business model is - as I learnt early on successful fractional working is about being more than a leader for hire - you need to start  treating yourself as a business of one. 

First, we're going to look at who your ideal fractional client is. We'll develop an ideal fractional client profile using deep insights into the problems you've solved so far in your career, and the types of people who might want you to solve those problems in the future.

With those insights from your ideal fractional client in mind, let's look at your fractional value proposition. This is what you take to market as a fractional - your best view of the difference you make for your clients.

Once we've established your ideal client profile and your fractional value proposition, then we've got to think about how to build your fractional executive brand, re-positioning you from a core leader to being a credible and compelling fractional executive.

Then, we'll look at the crucial stage of how you build a pipeline of fractional work. We'll examine how your network needs to develop to supply you with a stream of reliable, interesting, and exciting work opportunities that fit with both your ideal client profile and your fractional value proposition.

To help you win work effectively, I'm going to take you through my playbook for the fractional client proposal. You're going to develop your own template that allows you to produce high-conversion-rate proposals quickly for your prospective clients.

Next, we're going to develop your fractional value framework. This is your unique methodology for working as a fractional executive, ensuring you deliver early value and work effectively with your clients, even though you're only in the business part-time. It also maximizes your chance of repeat contract extensions and great recommendations for future work.

And then, finally, we're going to put together your fractional transition roadmap. This is a practical plan for what you're going to do over the next few months to make your leap  to being a fractional executive as successfully as possible.

I'm also going to take you through my Fractional Tech Stack. This is the suite of tools and systems you can use to be as efficient as possible when working as a Fractional Executive.

So as you can see in this course you'll learn the playbooks and plot out your own roadmap to leaving employed life behind and create your own effective fractional leadership practice.

I suggest you work your way through each of the ten mini-courses in sequence. Each mini-course has one or two assignments to help you take on board the key aspects of the system. 

I suggest you skip these assignments until you have taken all of the mini-courses - then once you’ve worked your way through the whole system, then come back to do the assignments at the end. They’ll make more sense that way as you’ll see the links between the work you’ll do in each assignment.