The Five Phases of Fractional Success

When you go it alone, you instantly start looking too far ahead.

You want to build a successful business quickly, earning 7 figures and not working five days a week.

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You want to have less pressure than you’re ‘C’ level job.

But you forget about phasing.

Phasing and building over time is much more complex when you are alone, especially when you try to do everything yourself.

When you are in a business, you have others “on the journey” with you.

It binds you to a cause and provides motivation and momentum every morning.

How you capture that as an individual is much more complicated. It’s lonely.

Before you know it, you’re stressed, anxious about the future, and not where you want to be (you thought the holy grail of solopreneurship would be fantastic.

I was there and still suffer daily from this psychology. Well, the important thing is not to get too far ahead of yourself.

I love the term learn from someone “one step ahead” of you, not ten.

If you think about this each day, it helps you to build the business you want in the proper steps.

Here is an example of what that looks like;

There are five phases or “stages” of fractional solopreneurship.

And each phase is a challenge.

Today, I want you to understand these different phases so you can plan accordingly to learn from someone one step ahead and visualise the journey of long-term success.

Phase 1: Pre-Exit Planning

Your success will depend on pre-exit plans.

You’re considering going into a fractional role, but most do not plan what that looks like. Your vision is skewed by discontent in your role. You obsess over the future being much better than now.

However, you dedicate limited head space to what it looks like on the other side.

You need to think about:

• How you’ll get leads and business
• What problems are you solving
• Who's your ICP
• What's your Point of View
• What's your pricing
• What's the sales model
• How do you get repeatable business

You need to think of yourself as a product.

So here are two simple tips for pre-exit planning:

Do a lot of stuff for free: It’s what I did. Be as helpful to as many people as possible while still working full-time. Don’t charge and build leverage with goodwill through your expertise, i.e. mine was marketing GTM.

Focus on the network: You must be strategic about using your network. Your network is critical for the first 6-9 months of work (before worrying about repeatability).

Phase 2: Get Going

It’s all about landing work and learning.

When I started, I didn’t worry about traction or scaling. I took the opportunities, some imperfect, to begin the process and learn.

You can be torn in this phase because you might be doing work you don't want to do. Suck it up and do it.

It’s the only way the journey starts.

Use your network (through being useful in phase 1) as you should have goodwill.

At the same time, I’d recommend working on your positioning here for “what you do want to do”. Focus your content and business development on that, but don’t turn away opportunities to drive momentum.

Building recommendations, case studies and proof as a fractional is essential. Your operational knowledge will start the countdown of its expiration and value.

Phase 3: Systems Thinking

When you get going, you’ll be busy, yes. But it’s where, in parallel, you start to strategise the future of your business. Do you want to build a diversified portfolio of products and services? Do you want to be the highest-paid fractional?

You can only get to the subsequent phases without thinking about systems.

The only way to diversify your income streams is to:

• Build an audience
• Build a brand
• Create content
• Create products

To do that, you need to visualise systems and processes that enable you to leverage time. For example, I have my week scheduled Monday = Content, Tuesday - Thursday = Engine (core business), and Friday to work on stuff that scales, i.e. products.

My advice is not to obsess about your ultimate end goal too much. Mine was flexibility (time off), high earnings and automated income. It will screw you up unless you learn to think more about figuring out your systems than the end goal.

When you get some traction (i.e. you’re making some predictable money), you enter phase two, where you start building systems.

Phase 4: Diversification

Once you are making money, you have got going. You have started to design systems to work on stuff that scales, and then you can think about diversification.

By diversification, I mean different offerings and revenue streams.

For example, you start as a Fractional operator; you add coaching, you add an “audit”, you add productised services, you add products, you add retained work etc. etc.

I would focus on building your offer stack, leading to diversified income streams.

An offer stack connects all your different offerings:

• A free newsletter
• A free playbook
• A low-cost product/community offering
• An audit
• Audit leads to Fractional work
• Fractional work leads to advisory
• Advisory leads to product development or productised services

It took me about 15 months to start executing this concept. But when a few things click, and you’re clear on the offer stack, you’ll have a clear vision of what you’re building. P:S: I do 1:1 coaching to help people create their offer stack ;)

This was all part of my diversification-focused phase three.

Phase 5: Digital Leverage

I’m not entirely at phase 5 just yet.

I’m not earning enough from digital products (if anything).

I have diversified with five income streams, earning more than I did as a CMO.

I might think about it:

- Narrow my audience: Knowing your audience is a big part of success as a Fractional solopreneur. I know my audience for advisory work, but I am unclear about digital and product sales. I’m working on this.

- Test & Learn: This is a classic statement. But how I think of it is shipping quickly, learning, and iterating. I have been slow to ship products (all stuck in my head), so knowing what could work takes longer. That needs to be attacked head-on.

- Automation: Where can I be more efficient in leveraging the core of the business? The core is content. If I don’t have enough time to create content, I’ll never build a leveraged revenue model. It goes back to systems thinking.

I’ll hopefully learn more about this phase when / if I get there.

In Summary

I’m getting more comfortable with “winging it”.

Remember, as I do, you can still be “winging it” with a loose plan.

But remind yourself of that when you think too far ahead.

It’s better to think about how you can get one step ahead, or what I call zero-to-one thinking, i.e. what’s the checklist for going from where you are to one.

Zero-to-one planning is all about getting to your destination in the simplest way possible.

Lay out each step and keep it simple.

Remember, Fractional or being independent is a lot harder than you think. Most go back to full-time roles within 9-12 months. The reason is that they haven’t built the architecture of the business with phases in mind, a longer-term plan and, in the short-term, getting things done.

Good luck; I’ll be rooting for you.

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