Commercial Architect | Customer(Fractional CCO)

A senior operator, working in the business, working on the strategy.

Our clients are typically growing companies based in Europe, at the point where a chief customer officer would change the trajectory and the full-time seat is still ahead of them. You take that seat. You sit with the founder and the commercial team, work out what is holding the number back, and then work alongside them to implement it.

You are an operator inside the business, part-time and interim by design. You are in the room when an at-risk account is discussed, on the review when onboarding slips, in front of the team when the segmentation changes, and close enough to them that they bring you the awkward ones.

We call this a commercial architect. You design the structure the business runs on, and you build it as you go.

Everything you work out goes into the client’s own workspace as you go. The positions, the evidence behind them, the logic joining them up. They keep it, and so does the next quarter of your work, which starts from where you left off.

What you own.

Customer is the span, which runs from the moment a deal closes to what a renewal is worth three years later. In a typical engagement you own:

1. The diagnosis. Where value leaks after the win, named and evidenced, inside the first weeks. Founders often arrive with a churn figure and a theory about price. Your job is to test the theory against the evidence and report what you find.
2. Onboarding and first value. What first value actually is for this product, how fast a customer should reach it, and what has to change for them to get there.
3. Retention. Why customers leave, in their own words, and the handful of changes that move it.
4. Expansion. Where the growth inside the base genuinely sits, which accounts match the pattern, and the motion that captures it at full price.
5. The handover from sales. What has to be true at the point a customer is handed over, agreed with the team that sells, and what happens when it is not.
6. The operating rhythm. The weekly cadence that keeps all of it moving once you have set it, and the judgement calls that come with it.

Every week you also weigh the signals coming up across the business. Plenty of them look important. Your depth of experience is what tells a team which ones actually are, and where to put their energy and focus.

What you get.

• We find the clients, and we match them to you. We source the business, qualify it and agree the engagement. We place each one against what you are strongest at and what that company actually needs, so your hours go on work you are good at and want.
• Premium rates. We pay at the top of the market for senior fractional work. Engagements are bought in blocks, starting at half a day a week per client and scaling with what that client needs.
• They have already bought in. A client came to us for senior judgement and a structure to hold it. You arrive expected and briefed, into a business that has decided it wants this.
• The picture, already assembled. You walk into a session knowing what moved since the last one, because the platform has been keeping the picture current while you were elsewhere.
• A method to work from. A structure covering the whole commercial picture, so every part of it gets looked at. Yours to apply, and yours to sharpen.
• Work that compounds. What you set in the first quarter is still there in the fourth, current, and being used by the client’s team. You build on it.
• Colleagues at the same level. Operators with the same background as you, and a standing habit of putting the difficult calls in front of each other.