Hiring a C-Suite Executive: Full-Time Search or Fractional Seat?
C-suite executives are the "Chief" titled leaders responsible for a company's direction. Once you have decided you need one, the real question is how to fill the seat: run a full-time search, or bring in the same judgment on a fractional basis.
What a full-time search actually involves
A proper executive search means defining the role clearly (responsibilities, required experience, what success looks like) before you post anything, then searching across multiple channels: job boards, professional networks, and often an executive search or placement firm that specializes in senior talent. Interviews need to go beyond credentials into leadership style and how the candidate actually makes decisions under pressure, since a resume does not show either.
What it costs
A real search takes months, not weeks, and a placement firm's fee typically runs as a percentage of the executive's first-year compensation. That cost is justified when the seat genuinely needs to be full-time: heavy day-to-day decision load, constant availability, deep institutional history. It is a much harder cost to justify when the business needs the judgment of the role more than it needs someone in the building forty hours a week.
The fractional alternative
A fractional executive holds the same seat, with real decision-making authority, on a part-time schedule rather than a full-time one. There is no months-long search or placement fee: the arrangement can start as soon as you find the right person, and it can also end cleanly if the fit is not right, without the severance and reputational cost of an executive hire that did not work out.
Which one actually fits
Run a full search when the role needs someone physically present, or carrying institutional relationships and history that a part-time person cannot build fast enough. Consider fractional first when what you actually need is senior judgment applied to specific problems: a financial model that needs fixing, an operations bottleneck, a go-to-market strategy, without paying for the hours when there is no problem to solve.
FM Enterprises' fractional C-suite advisory works this way: a specific, experienced person takes the seat and stays accountable for the outcome, on a schedule sized to what the business actually needs.
If you are not sure which path fits your situation, book a call and describe the gap you are trying to fill.