The ownership
Fractional CxO
A role is open and needs someone in it — just not forever, and not as a hire.
The situation
The role is missing. You still don’t want to open the position.
The board wants to see AI and you have slides. Or the growth is there and nobody is holding marketing, sales, and product together. Or the data sits in four places and nobody decides which number counts. What’s missing isn’t another analysis — it’s someone who takes the thing on and makes the first decision on Monday morning.
A search takes months, and at the end of it you still don’t know whether the role was cut the right way to begin with. Sometimes the honest order is the other way round: do the work first, open the position after. By then you also know who you’re looking for.
What happens
Four flavors, one way of working.
I take the subject on with a clear mandate, a fixed rhythm, and an end date. Formally it stays what it is: advisory ownership on a freelance basis — no employment contract, no officer role. Ownership still means I answer for the outcome, not for a document.
- Fractional CAIO
- AI off the board slide and into operations. We sort out which use cases actually carry, what gets built and what gets bought, and how legal, privacy, and the works council end up at the table early — instead of braking at the end.
- Fractional CMO (growth)
- Growth as a craft rather than a campaign: offer, price, channels, and measurement set up so that one iteration a week is possible. And marketing translated so your CFO recognizes his own numbers.
- Fractional CDO (data)
- From four truths to one. Which number counts, who owns it, and which decision it actually changes. Data isn’t an end in itself; it gets interesting once somebody acts differently afterward.
- Chief evangelist
- For the cases where the strategy is sound and still nothing moves — what’s missing is conviction, not strategy. I explain the thing inside and out, in each audience’s own language, until the house carries it: leadership, sales, customers, stage.
Scope is the dial: a fixed rhythm per week or per month, agreed at the start and adjusted honestly if it doesn’t fit. And an end date that’s in the contract from day one.
Straight talk
Not the right fit if …
- … you actually want to fill a permanent position. Then fill it. I can bridge the gap and help sharpen the profile — I won’t take the job.
- … someone just needs to carry a title for the outside world. A name on a slide changes nothing, and I don’t answer for anything I don’t get a say in.
- … the decisions keep being made elsewhere. Without a mandate it’s consulting — and for that, advisory sparring is the more honest format.
- … it has to be five days a week, permanently. That’s a job, and it isn’t one I can fill.
Fractional means a fraction, not a discount: you get a role part-time, not half a person.
Track record
Why this works.
I don’t fit in a box. That’s exactly why this works.
Miele · BMW · Google · SAP · Mercedes-Benz · Payback · MediaMarktSaturn · Deutsche Telekom
Marketing, technology, data, leadership — I have never fitted neatly into exactly one of those columns. On a CV that reads as a flaw. For these roles it’s the precondition, because the subjects sit between the disciplines. An AI initiative rarely fails on the model. It fails because business, technology, and legal mean three different things and everyone nods politely.
25+ years between startups and enterprise, usually in the places where a decision was due and not just a recommendation. So what I bring isn’t a methodology, it’s the habit of translating a situation until everyone sees the same thing — and then deciding.
The long version is in my book Der Elefant im Raum (in German).
Rate
€3,200 a day.
It’s here so neither of us wastes time — whether it becomes a single day, a series, or a longer mandate is what the first call is for.
The call
30 minutes before anything starts.
Describe the role that’s missing and what should be different in six months. If a permanent hire is the better route, I’ll tell you — even when it costs me the engagement.