Most founders asking "fractional or full-time?" at Series A have a phase rather than a function. A phase is a defined piece of work that ends, and it wants a proven operator against a ninety-day task. A function wants a full-time hire. Here's how to tell which one you have before you open a search.
Earlier this year I wrote about a CEO who told me she needed a COO, and what happened when I asked what the COO would actually do. A week later I wrote about a founder who was sure the company needed a full-time head of data, and why it probably didn't. Those two posts traveled further than anything I'd put on LinkedIn, and I've been thinking about why.
I think it's because both of them turn on the same question, and most founders have never been asked it out loud. You have a title in mind. What is the list of work under the title?
One of our founding experts said something on a call last week that I've been turning over since. First-time founders, in his experience, tend to believe there are only two ways to get senior help: hire someone full-time or give away equity to a cofounder. That belief is doing a lot of quiet damage, because it means every gap on the team gets treated as a permanent seat.
A full-time executive search at Series A runs three to six months when it goes well. Add the ninety days a senior hire needs to learn your business before they change anything in it, and you're looking at most of a year from "we need a COO" to "the COO did something."
Most of a year is a long time when the actual problem is a specific process that's broken. Someone who's fixed that process at other companies could map yours in a week and have it running differently in a couple of months. You don't need that person forever, only until the problem stops being a problem.
So that's the question I'd put ahead of every leadership hire now. What are the next ninety days of work, specifically? Write it down. If it takes ten minutes and you end up with a real list, you know what to buy. When the list won't come, you don't have a hiring problem yet. You have a diagnosis problem, and a senior salary is an expensive diagnostic tool.
Every month a lot of founders type "fractional vs full-time" into a search bar or ask an AI model the same thing. I get why. The debate is everywhere. It's also mostly a debate about employment terms, which turns out to be the least interesting part of the decision.
The interesting part is whether the work in front of you is a phase or a function.
Phases end. Getting onboarding under four weeks is a phase. So is building the pricing model for your second product. Running a forty-person engineering org for the next five years is a function. A phase wants a proven operator who's done that exact thing before and can leave when it's done. Functions are different, because they want someone whose whole career becomes your company.
Most early-stage companies have three or four phases running at once and maybe one true function. They hire like they have four functions, and then wonder why the burn went up while the problem stayed put.
I'll show my hand here. The founders reaching out to me lately are asking a different version of the same question. They want help with founder-led marketing, with getting the product in front of the right people. Distribution is the number one problem in early-stage right now, and it's the one most founders feel they should be able to solve themselves, which is why it's the last thing they ask for help with.
AI cut the cost of building. It did nothing for the cost of getting the right people to notice, so a founder can now ship in a weekend what used to take a quarter and then sit there with a great product and no one looking at it.
They ask for a VP of Marketing. What they usually need is ninety days of somebody who's built a channel from zero, sitting next to them, finding the one motion that works before anyone spends money on a second. That's a phase, and it should be staffed and priced like one.
This is what ForwardShare is built around, so I'll say it plainly. ForwardShare is a venture studio with an expert network attached. The Network side puts expert operators into companies against a defined piece of work, people who've run the seat, matched to what's actually in front of you, in the company until the phase is done. On the Studio side we cofound a small number of companies a year, three to five, and every month we sit down with the founder and make the call together: double down, pivot, or stop.
Both start with the list, and neither starts with the title.
If you're about to open a search, write the ninety days first. When the list is real you'll know what to buy, and when it isn't, the search can wait.