How we research, and what you can trust

Who writes these guides

Our guides are written and edited by the FractionalChiefs editorial team. We work full-time on a single, narrow topic — the fractional executive market — which is how a small team can go deeper on cost, hiring, and role design than a general business blog that covers everything.

We publish under a team byline rather than invented personas. You will not find fabricated author photos, made-up bios, or borrowed credentials on this site. When a guide reflects a specific practitioner's first-hand experience, we say so plainly; when it is our synthesis of how the market works, we present it as exactly that.

How we build our numbers

The pay bands, hourly rates, and monthly retainers in our guides reflect commonly observed market rates for fractional executive engagements — drawn from public compensation data for the equivalent full-time roles and from how these part-time engagements are typically scoped and priced in practice.

They are ranges to budget against, not quotes. What any one company pays depends on seniority, hours per week, scope of ownership, and industry. That is why our cost guides show what moves the number, not just a single figure — so you can place yourself inside the range rather than trust a headline.

Where a number is genuinely uncertain or varies widely, we say so instead of inventing false precision. Illustrative examples — “a seed-stage SaaS startup that raised $1.5M…” — are scenarios written to show how the math works. They are not real named clients, and we never present them as such.

The lines we do not cross

• ✓No fabricated social proof. No invented testimonials, no fake reviews, no fictional people presented as real clients or team members.
• ✓No fabricated data. We do not make up statistics or attribute numbers to sources that did not produce them. A range is presented as a range.
• ✓No pretend track record. Our executive directory is still in development. We do not dress it up as a roster of completed placements, and we do not claim outcomes we cannot stand behind.
• ✓Advice is not for sale. What our guides recommend is independent of any commercial arrangement. When our marketplace launches, any paid placement or featured listing will be clearly separate from — and will never alter — our editorial guidance.

Updates and corrections

The fractional market moves, and so do the numbers. We review and refresh our guides rather than publishing once and walking away, and we date them so you know how current a figure is.

If you spot something wrong — an out-of-date range, a claim that does not hold up, a broken link — tell us and we will fix it. Email hello@fractionalchiefs.com. Corrections to a substantive error are noted on the page we change.