A CTO one day a week, without hiring a CTO

Your company runs on software, but nobody on the management team really understands it. The bookkeeper decides on the accounting package, the operations manager on the planning tool, and the vendor on everything else. Every quote looks reasonable, because nobody knows what to look for. And nobody asks whether it all still fits together.

When one day a week is enough

A full-time CTO is rarely justified for a company of twenty to a hundred people. There are not enough technical decisions to keep someone busy five days. And the people who do this well do not want to sit around for five days waiting for one. As a result, the role does not exist, and the work spreads across people who were not hired for it.

A fractional CTO fills the role part time. You get one fixed day a week, at your office or remote, with someone who sees the same questions at other companies during the rest of the week. That is an advantage. Someone who has guided ten software choices spots the traps in the eleventh proposal faster than someone doing it once. You are not buying working hours. You are buying judgment.

What a fractional CTO does for you

The first weeks are for looking and writing things down. Which systems do you have, who manages them, what is in the contracts, and where does one person hold knowledge nobody else has? The result is an overview in plain language, with the three or four items that need attention first. It usually includes something you already suspected and something nobody had seen, such as a backup that has not restored properly in months or a license that renews silently every year.

After that, the day becomes a normal workday. We sit in the meetings where technical choices are made, we read quotes with you, and we talk to your vendor at a level where they cannot dodge the question. If a development project is running, we direct the developers, whether they are your own people, an outside agency, or our on-site developers. If you want to build something new, we first check whether a prototype in ten business days can answer the question, before a large budget is approved.

Vendors, quotes, and whether it adds up

Most of what a small company spends on IT goes to vendors. Software packages, hosting, an agency that runs the website, a firm that handles the workstations. These vendors are usually fine, but they have their own interests. Without a counterweight, every proposal is accepted as it comes. A fractional CTO is that counterweight. The aim is not to send vendors away. It is to ask the right questions: why this version, what happens if we stop, and who owns the data afterward.

For a bigger choice, such as a new ERP system or outsourcing all your IT management, we work more formally and combine the fixed day with vendor selection and tendering. If you are buying a company, or someone is investing in yours, the technical side of that deal is a separate project, technical due diligence. We run it apart from the CTO role so the judgment stays independent.

You stay in control

A part-time CTO is not a vendor who makes themselves indispensable. Everything we record, from the overview to the roadmap to the notes of every vendor meeting, sits in your systems and belongs to you. We write for management, not for engineers, so you can follow why a decision goes the way it does. Knowledge that sits with us goes to your own people, and where it helps, we arrange a session through AI training and workshops.

Every quarter, we review together whether the day is still needed. Sometimes it becomes half a day. Sometimes your company grows to the point where a CTO of your own makes sense. Then we help you find that person and hand over. That is the honest end of this service, and we tell you when it comes.