What is a Fractional CTO?

The meaning of the term Fractional CTO, or Fractional Chief Technology Officer, is a CTO who works for a company for a fraction of their time, for example 1 day per week. A Fractional CTO will tend to work with a small portfolio of clients, giving each of them a fractional of their overall time. Similarly, for companies this means they can appoint a CTO for a fraction of the cost of a typical C suite hire. For more information read our article comparing the roles of Fractional CTO and Part Time CTO

A CTO is a Chief Technology Officer. A CTO is responsible for designing and implementing a technical strategy that enables the wider business strategy to be delivered.

What are some alternate names for a Fractional CTO?

While these terms are not wholly interchangeable people often use the following terms Fractional CTO, FCTO, Part Time CTO, CTO as a Service, Consulting CTO, Virtual CTO.

What are typical fractional CTO rates?

As with many things, the rates charged by fractional CTOs depends on many things, such as: experience, track record, scarcity of a specialist skill, geographic location and more. Expect to pay £1,000/day+.

How much does our Fractional CTO service cost?

Our fractional CTO service is typically based on a fixed monthly management fee, starting at £5,000/month, plus some form of uplift participation for incentive alignment.

Fractional CTO Services

Valuation Engineering for Scaleups & Sub-£10M Businesses

We turn technology headaches into high-value intellectual property.

Startup CTO: Bring your idea to the market without making costly technology mistakes. We help you secure funding, find a development team & build a quality product.
Scaleup CTO: Scale your technology stack, innovate quickly, integrate your systems and automate your processes to support your rapid business growth.
SME CTO: Drive value creation with high ROI technology investments, internal disruption & business model innovation. Maximise your business valuation prior to exit with focussed technology enablement.

Proprietary Value Creation Frameworks.

We don't just join your team. We bring proprietary Assessment frameworks to your business to isolate the technical liabilities that hinder growth and discount your valuation. We offer three distinct tiers of engagement.

01. The Audit

The Validation.

Best for: Identifying technical debt and structural liabilities before they stall your growth.

£995

Explore the Audit

02. The Sprint

The Intervention.

Best for: Surgical strikes on a single high-pain process (e.g., Lead-to-Cash).

£4,995

Explore the Sprint

03. The Blueprint

The Architecture.

Best for: Re-engineering your entire technical estate for maximum EBITDA and multiple.

£20,000

Explore the Blueprint

Looking for long-term fractional leadership?

Strategic Execution

Available for firms that have established a roadmap through one of the three Assessment tiers above and require a board-level peer to orchestrate the implementation.

View The Execution Model

NED Advisory

For boards that require independent technical oversight, technical risk mitigation, and governance to protect long-term enterprise value.

Request NED Advisory Briefing

Engineered for Valuation. Built on Trust.

Two decades of technical leadership distilled into a methodology that
de-risks operations and secures a high-multiple exit.

"I'm confident that with the improvements through Full Stack Consulting we'll be able to double the volume of work we are doing without having to double the resource of the team that we need to deliver it, and that's because we're using technology and AI in a way that we wouldn't have dreamed about 24 months ago."

- David Hopkins, Pro Insight

Who We Help.

Startup CTO

We help startups figure out how much money they need in order to bring their idea to the market. Next we use our network of trusted contacts to find the right team to build out the tech. We implement effective ways of working to get your idea built to spec at the first time of asking and then we help you iterate quickly as you establish product market fit.

Scaleup CTO

We enable scaleups to grow their business by ensuring their tech stack is ready for rapid growth. Sometimes this means upgrading the software and infrastruture of the core product to handle increasing usage, sometimes it means prioritising and implementing innovative new features and at other times it means upgrading and integrating essential business systems so the operational side of the business can meet growing demand in areas such as sales, customer support and fulfilment.

SME CTO

We help SME owners and leaders make the technology investments that will power massive growth and drive value creation. We apply technology to enable ambitious business transformations, we disrupt from within to secure market leadership and we unlock hidden value by introducing digitally and data backed business models.

We are commercially focussed and align our efforts with priority KPIs and will support business owners in maximising their valuation prior to exit.

Making Smart Technology Investments

The right technology investments can power massive growth for your business. But the wrong technology investments can burn cash, tie up your people and destroy value.

Your decision to hire a CTO will unlock your company's potential. A force multiplier will join your team and will enable:

Rapid innovation
Process optimisation
Business transformation
Scale up
High Performance Development Teams

You will be empowered to make high ROI technology investments. Your technology investment portfolio will be part of a digital strategy that secures market leadership for your company.

Your digital strategy will draw on transformative technical know how to leverage your Full Stack to create long lasting value for your business.

Create value for your SME today and engage our Fractional CTO services.

Our battle tested playboook that has been refined by working with multiple teams, industries and technology stacks, plus a wide range of real world business challenges can deliver value to your business from day 1.

Get in touch today to discuss the impact you could make to your business by hiring a fractional CTO.

Our Specialisms

No two companies are the same and no two CTOs have the same background and skillset. At Full Stack Consulting we specialise in helping SMEs who have realised a need to make transformative use of technology. Our Fractional CTO service places particular emphasis on the following areas, which have proven to be high value for our SME clients:

Taking High ROI Technology Investments To The Board
Business Model Innovation
Building High Performance Development Teams
Using Outsourced Development Teams Effectively
Enablement

Taking High ROI Technology Investments To The Board

Working with business stakeholders we will quickly understand how your business works. We start by understanding what value is created by your company - what products and services do your customers purchase from you? Next we analyse internal processes and customer touchpoints to understand how that value is created. Finally we analyse your relative strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

This process often reveals technology investment opportunities ranging from:

Automating business processes
Optimising customer experience
Improving, integrating and liberating data so it can drive better decsion making

The portfolio of investment candidates is prioritised with the business based on a high level assessment of the expected effort and impact. The high priority investment candidates are scoped in detail to establlish a business case that analyses:

What needs to be delivered?
How could it be delivered?
What is the likelihood of success?
What is the value to the business?
What is the likely cost?
What is the time to value realisation?

If the business case demonstrates that the technology investment will yield a high return on investment the case is presented to the board of directors so the investment profile can be assessed alongside other investments the board may be considering.

Business Model Innovation

At Full Stack Consulting we have an abundance of both technical and commercial experience. We use this experience to evaluate what is unique about your business that we can bring to market in new and innovative ways.

This could involve taking a product/service that has traditionally been consumed passively, offline and adding a new, digitally backed offering that is available on demand, online.

It could involve leveraging your intellectual property that has been established servicing your current target market by identifying components that could serve a wider market and offering them to market as a Software as a Service offering.

No two companies are the same, but with technology continuously evolving there are huge opportunities to build revenue by developing new business models.

Building High Performance Development Teams

Too many companies fail to execute because their development team is stuck in the weeds. At Full Stack Consulting we have played the role of developer, architect, consultant, CTO, dev agency owner, dev agency customer and we know how to build high performance dev teams that deliver high quality projects at pace.

Using Outsourced Development Teams Effectively

Over the years we have worked with a lot of outsourced development teams. Sometimes we parachute in to help resolve customer-supplier relationships that are reaching breaking point. At other times we have a blank canvas and identify the ideal outsourced development team for a particular situation.

In either scenario we set about implementing effective ways of working that benefit both parties. Customers get a development team offering transparency, quality and value. Outsourced partners get clear direction on requirements and happy customers.

Enablement

Technology moves fast. In the last decade we have seen rapid innovation in areas such as:

Cloud, containers, serverless
AI (artificial intelligence)
Augmented reality
Big data
Blockchain

As your Fractional CTO we help you understand not only which technologies you should be considering, but also what it will take to enable your company to adopt these technologies.

For example, this could be more data or better data. It could be integrated data sets. It could be a new development team with an entirely different skillset.

Regardless of the gap, we will identify it. Next we will help you determine how urgently to bridge that gap. Some technologies should be adopted urgently to gain competitive advantage. Equally some technologies, while fashionable, might be wholly inappropriate for certain use cases, simply presenting the opportunity to burn time and money on vanity projects.

Frequently asked questions

What is a Fractional CTO?: The meaning of the term Fractional CTO, or Fractional Chief Technology Officer, is a CTO who works for a company for a fraction of their time, for example 1 day per week. A Fractional CTO will tend to work with a small portfolio of clients, giving each of them a fractional of their overall time. Similarly, for companies this means they can appoint a CTO for a fraction of the cost of a typical C suite hire. For more information read our article comparing the roles of Fractional CTO and Part Time CTO
What is a CTO?: A CTO is a Chief Technology Officer. A CTO is responsible for designing and implementing a technical strategy that enables the wider business strategy to be delivered.
What are some alternate names for a Fractional CTO?: While these terms are not wholly interchangeable people often use the following terms Fractional CTO, FCTO, Part Time CTO, CTO as a Service, Consulting CTO, Virtual CTO.
What are typical fractional CTO rates?: As with many things, the rates charged by fractional CTOs depends on many things, such as: experience, track record, scarcity of a specialist skill, geographic location and more. Expect to pay £1,000/day+.
How much does our Fractional CTO service cost?: Our fractional CTO service is typically based on a fixed monthly management fee, starting at £5,000/month, plus some form of uplift participation for incentive alignment.

“I have worked with Graham since 2016 in what started as a technology advisor role. Our team quickly learned that he brought invaluable business acumen. Whether it has been technical mentorship, establishing processes, hiring freelancers, adopting AI or exploring the intersection of business and technology, Graham's input has been a critical part of unlocking our growth. Joining his Blueprint Board would be time and money well spent.”

Tim Waxenfelter

Endurance Learning

“Graham has been an incredible mentor as we navigate the early stages of our technology development. As we are still in the pre-seed phase, his guidance has been instrumental in helping us make informed decisions, avoid common pitfalls, and focus our efforts where they matter most. What sets Graham apart is his ability to break down complex technical concepts into clear easy to understand ideas. He provides not just solutions but the knowledge and foresight to help us build a strong foundation while keeping costs and timelines under control. If you're looking for a fractional CTO who brings both deep technical expertise and strategic thinking to any stage of development, I highly recommend Graham.”

Cristina Grancea

Sylvian Care Franchising

“Graham is without a doubt one of the best consultants I have ever had the pleasure to work with. Always a useful thought, direction, and solution available. Incredibly personable, and an asset to any digital transformation project. I sincerely hope our paths cross again in the future and until then... If you're considering Graham to support your business efforts, I cannot recommend him highly enough. Do it, you won't be disappointed.”

Joseph Symons

CRM Made Simple

“Graham has been an invaluable asset from the word go. He has helped us to build and implement a strategy to make a big technological leap as a business to work more efficiently and improve our offering to clients.”

Matthew Houliston

Serve Legal Ltd

“Grahams expertise cannot be overstated! He was incredibly valuable in guiding us through a new technical project and ensuring the project was to be delivered to our spec and in budget. He's a very rare case of top technical knowledge, commercial accumen and crafting 'laymen explanations' to complex issues.”

Matthew Walsh

IMRG

“Graham's Cohort has been packed full of useful takeaways, relevant to any forward-thinking business owner. As the founder of a new tech startup, it was great to be able to ask direct questions and learn from the experience of not just Graham, but the other members of the cohort too. From introductions, to tech knowledge and strategy, these sessions are an absolute must for any SME business owner that is keen to learn how to do things better than they already are. Would definitely recommend!”

Tom Dalton

Stealth Startup

“In the short space of time that Graham has been working with Serve Legal his contribution has been really positive. We are grateful for his expertise and insight!”

Julian Sargeson

Serve Legal

“Graham has been a dependable, trusted advisor and practitioner in helping to develop and improve our startup's Drupal-based app. He is kind and truly cares. I recommend him to any founder or corporate leader who could benefit from a fractional CTO who is commercially aware and adept at mentoring team members, solving problems effectively, and assisting with scalability planning.”

Justin Belmont

Prose

“I have worked with Graham on a number of system integration projects over the last 3 years, Graham has always been extremely knowledgeable, diligent and excellent at producing and interpreting detailed specifications. I know I can rely on Graham to help out if and when issues arise.”

Denis Jenkins

The Scouts Association

A Message from the Founder

"The traditional Fractional CTO model is often little more than advice for hire. In sub-£10M firms, that isn't enough. Technology is either a platform for scale or a structural liability that leaves 20–30% of your valuation on the table.

We don't just fill a seat on your board; we bring a forensic methodology designed to turn operational headaches into high-value intellectual property. Whether we are conducting a surgical Sprint, engineering a full Blueprint our Executing the change, our focus remains on protecting your EBITDA and maximizing your exit multiple. If you are ready to move beyond routine advisory and start engineering your valuation, let's talk."

Graham Roberts
Founder, Full Stack Consulting

View The Execution Model