SOPEOPLE
FRACTIONAL CPO
Chief People / HR Officer-level leadership without the cost of a full-time hire
Embedded, retained and board-ready People leadership for businesses that need it now, not when the budget allows.
Most scaling businesses of more than 50 people hit the same wall. They've outgrown ad-hoc HR. They need someone who can sit at the leadership table, shape people strategy and make the calls that carry commercial weight, but they're not ready to commit to a full-time CPO salary, package and notice period.
That's exactly what Fractional People / HR Leadership is designed for.
THE PROBLEM
Good HR advice is easy to find. This isn't.
The gap most businesses live inYou probably have someone handling the basics (contracts, employee relations cases, the odd recruitment campaign...)
What you don't have is someone who can look at your org design and tell you what's not fit for purpose - now or for the future.
Or someone who can read your retention data and tell you what it means commercially.
Or someone who can push back in a leadership meeting when a decision is going to cost you people you can't afford to lose.
That gap is expensive. It just doesn't show up as a line item until something goes wrong.
The types of problems we solve...
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You're making significant people decisions (restructures, senior hires, culture interventions, etc.) without senior people expertise in the room.
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Your HR function, if you have one, is reactive. It firefights. It doesn't lead.
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You know the people agenda is falling short of where it needs to be. You just haven't found the right way to fix it.
WHAT IT IS
The word "fractional" is used loosely in the market. For us it means one thing: You get an experienced, CPO-calibre People leader embedded in your business on a retained basis, attending your leadership meetings, contributing to your board, making decisions alongside you and being accountable for them.
This is not a day-rate arrangement where someone turns up, produces a report and leaves. It's an ongoing partnership with defined scope, regular presence and measurable outcomes agreed at the start.
The difference between a fractional CPO and an external HR consultant is the same as the difference between a CFO and an accountant you call when the numbers don't add up. One is reactive expertise on demand, the other is strategic ownership, maintained over time.
The best hiring decision you never made.
WHAT WE DO
The scope is defined at the start and built around where you are, and where you want to be. No two engagements are identical. But across Fractional CPO partnerships, the work covers:
Translating your business plan into a coherent people agenda across areas like org design, workforce planning, capability gaps, succession. This is arguably the strategic layer that most businesses never build properly.
Working directly with your senior team, individually and collectively, to raise the quality of leadership across the organisation. Not a workshop; an ongoing part of the engagement.
Diagnosing where your culture is, where it needs to be and what's standing between the two. Building performance systems that people actually use... because they work.
Understanding why people stay and why they leave. Designing the conditions that keep your best people and attract the next ones. Exit data read and acted on, not filed away and forgotten.
If you have an HR team, leading it. If you don't, building the foundations so that when you do hire, they're set up to succeed. Either way, you're not the person managing HR anymore.
Representing the people agenda at board level. Providing the commercial narrative around people investment that CFOs, investors and NEDs need to hear in language they trust.