Every conversation starts the same way. A fund CTO or COO leans across the table and asks: "What does fractional CTO actually mean in practice? What will you do on Tuesday at 2pm?"
It's a fair question. "Strategic technology leadership" is consultancy-speak that obscures the work. So let me tell you exactly what we do.
What the First 30 Days Look Like
The first month is diagnostic. We're not building anything — we're reading the room.
We sit in on the Monday morning operations call. We review every vendor contract in the tech stack. We audit the data lineage from trade booking through to LP reporting. We interview the three people whose heads the fund can't afford to lose.
At the end of 30 days, we deliver one document: The Technology Risk Map. It's not a 60-page slide deck. It's a single spreadsheet with four columns: risk, likelihood, impact, and owner. Every item has a name attached. Someone is accountable.
Month Two: The Quick Wins
The fastest ROI always comes from the same three places:
1. Vendor contract renegotiation. Most funds are 18 months into a 36-month contract for software they're using at 40% capacity. We know the renewal leverage points. We've had the same conversation with the same vendors across 20+ clients.
2. The spreadsheet dependency audit. There's always a spreadsheet no one knows how to rebuild. Find it, document it, automate it. This is where most operational risk lives — not in the systems, but in the files.
3. The hiring filter. Technology hiring at funds is broken because the people evaluating candidates don't know what questions to ask. A fractional CTO runs the technical interview loop and filters out the candidates who interview well but can't execute.
Where the Real Work Happens
After the foundation is set, the ongoing engagement looks like this:
- Investment committee prep: Every board meeting needs a technology slide. We write it, we defend it, we own the follow-up.
- Vendor selection: When you need to replace your OMS or your data warehouse, we run the RFP. We've seen every vendor's pitch. We know which demo features don't actually exist.
- Crisis response: When systems go down at 4am before a redemption deadline, we're on the call. Not a junior consultant — the principal.
- Regulatory prep: When the SEC audit letter arrives, we know which questions to answer and which questions to escalate.
What We're Not
We're not a staffing agency. We're not project managers. We're not going to tell you to "move to the cloud" and hand you a vendor shortlist.
We're operators who've spent careers doing the work you need done — and we'll do it again at your fund, on your timeline, with your constraints.
The best fractional CTO engagement is the one where, after 12 months, you either hire a full-time CTO with clarity about what you need, or you decide you don't need one because the technology risk is under control and the processes run themselves.
Both outcomes are good. Both are what we're aiming for.