There is a stage almost every growing business reaches where the founder is the bottleneck. Operations, finance, hiring, and strategy all route through one person, and that person is out of hours. The instinct is to hire a senior operator — a COO or CFO. The maths rarely works yet.
A full-time executive in the Netherlands costs six figures, plus the time and risk of recruiting, onboarding, and possibly getting it wrong. For a business doing €1–3M in revenue, that is a heavy bet to place before you even know the role's exact shape.
A fractional executive solves the timing problem. You buy senior operating capacity by the day, for the months you need it. The work gets done, the capability transfers to your team, and you defer the permanent hire until the business has clearly grown into it.
The test is simple: if you can name three things a senior operator would own this quarter, but you can't yet fill forty hours a week with executive-level work, you want fractional — not full-time.
Tamim Kbarh
Fractional executive in Haarlem, helping ambitious SMEs with operations, tax, growth, and grants. More about me.