You run a firm of thirty people. Your software bill has doubled in three years, a vendor wants your signature on a five-year contract, and two of your partners disagree about whether staff can put client files into an AI tool. Your IT provider keeps the laptops working and your developer builds what you ask for. Neither of them owns the harder question of what you should buy, build, or stop paying for.
You end up deciding yourself, or the most confident partner decides, and when neither of you feels sure, you let the contract auto-renew.
The job a thirty-person firm can’t fill
Full-time chief technology officers cost more than most small firms can carry. Built In’s 2026 salary data puts the average CTO at $224,550, and employers pay between $290,000 and $315,000 once they add benefits and payroll costs (Fractionus, citing Built In). A firm under 200 people has no use for forty hours a week of that role anyway.
The decisions keep arriving whether you hire for them or not. A five-year vendor contract signed without anyone qualified reading it, or an AI tool that sends privileged client documents to a third party, will cost you more than a year of senior advice. You keep paying for either one long after the meeting ends.
A fractional CTO is an experienced technology executive who works with your business part time, for around ten hours a week.
Four areas of work
Technology leadership. You get a roadmap for the next two years, decisions on infrastructure and cloud services, a security posture with a named owner, and oversight of the developers and vendors you pay today.
AI strategy and implementation. I work out where AI saves your firm money and where it only adds a subscription, and then I deploy the parts that earn their place. For firms that hold client files, that often means private models running on your own hardware, so the documents stay on your network.
Vendor and budget calls. Before you sign, someone qualified reads the contract, prices the alternatives, and tells you what the agreement costs over its full term instead of its first year.
A person to ask. Your staff stop guessing. If someone wants to know whether a vendor is legitimate or whether a process can be automated, they ask me instead of searching for an answer and hoping.
What it costs
Fractional pricing in 2026 sits in a narrow band. In the Frak Conference State of the Fractional Industry survey, 69.5% of fractional executives charged between $5,000 and $10,000 a month per client (Fractionus).
I publish my own rates at b4help.com, because you should be able to check the price before you book a call.
Two jobs from my own work
In 2011 I took over the network of an office running ten to twelve consumer routers from Netgear, D-Link and Linksys, chained together as the business had grown. The owner had no single view of the network and no consistent security policy across it. I replaced the chain with HP ProCurve managed switches and SonicWall firewalls, and the firm had one network to monitor and one place to set policy.
The second job shows where I spend most of my time now. Firms that handle confidential documents want AI, and they can’t send those documents to a public service. I built a document AI system that runs offline from a USB drive. It indexes PDFs, spreadsheets and presentations, answers questions with a citation to the source file, and makes no network requests at all. A law firm or an accounting practice can use it on real client material and keep that material in the building.
A one-hour test
Block an hour this week and work through four questions. Write the answers down.
- Can you list every software subscription your firm pays for, with the monthly cost and the person who uses it? If you can’t finish the list, you have found the first thing to fix.
- Who made your last three technology decisions? Mark the ones that happened by default, such as auto-renewals and tools a single employee brought in.
- What are your staff putting into AI tools right now? Ask them. If anyone has pasted client data into a public chatbot, you need a written policy this month.
- What did your last bad technology decision cost? Put a dollar figure on it and set it beside the price of part-time senior advice.
If two or more answers turned up a problem, you are paying for the missing technology leader, in renewals and in risk you haven’t priced.
I work with a small number of firms at a time and publish pricing at b4help.com. If this post described your business, book a free 30-minute call. You describe the situation, I tell you whether I can help, and I won’t pitch you anything.