A question that sometimes comes up in my world: what were "fractionals" doing before they became a fractional CMO or a fractional CFO or a fractional whatever?
Well, the LinkedIn scraper I use pulls both current and past job titles, and LLMs make it easy to analyze such data at scale, so I can actually answer that question with pretty reliable data!
Here's the short, condensed answer for both fCMOs and fCFOs:
23.5% of LinkedIn profiles for people who have become a fractional CMO within the last 90 days had a corporate job immediately before. The main kinds of jobs this cohort had were:
- CMO / Head of Marketing: 53.0% of this cohort.
- Marketing Director / Demand Generation: 20.8%
- Marketing Specialty Lead: 8.1%
- Revenue / Growth Leadership: 7.4%
- Other roles: 10.7%
The other cohort -- 76.5% of the total -- had a non-corporate job immediately before. This cohort had these kinds of jobs before becoming a fCMO:
- Consultant / Advisor / Fractional: 72.4% of this cohort.
- Founder / Owner / Partner: 18.8%
- Board / Mentor / Investor-only: 5.4%
- Other roles: 3.5%
For fCFOs, the pattern is similar, though a little less extremely skewed towards non-corporate prior jobs.
31.2% of LinkedIn profiles for people who have become a fractional CFO within the last 90 days had a corporate job immediately before. The main kinds of jobs this cohort had were:
- CFO / Head of Finance: 50.6% of this cohort.
- Finance Director / FP&A: 18.5%
- Operations / General Management: 6.2%
- Controller / Accounting Lead: 6.2%
- Other roles: 18.5%
The other cohort -- 68.8% of the total -- had a non-corporate job immediately before. This cohort had these kinds of jobs before becoming a fCFO:
- Consultant / Advisor / Fractional: 69.5% of this cohort.
- Founder / Owner / Partner: 18.8%
- Board / Mentor / Investor-only: 6.7%
- Other roles: 5.0%
The most fun way to look at the movement through various roles is a Sankey diagram, so here are those. Click a node to highlight its connected paths; double-click to reset.
New fractional CMOs: career-path clusters from T‑3 to T‑1, leading into the current role.
New fractional CFOs: career-path clusters from T‑3 to T‑1, leading into the current role.