As the owner of a small business or nonprofit organization, it’s a common dilemma to find your team stretched beyond their capacity after launching a new product, service, or initiative. Smaller clients start to fall between the cracks, systems start breaking down, and tensions run high. The typical response is to consider creating a new position and hiring someone full-time.
However, in many cases, simply adding a new full-time position won’t significantly increase your team’s capacity to take on bigger projects, more clients, or more complex initiatives. Here are a few reasons why hiring full-time may not be the best solution:
- You need less help than one full-time person can provide. To fill up your new hire’s time, you may layer on unrelated duties, which distract from their main priorities and limit their effectiveness.
- You need a higher level of expertise than you can afford full time. Often, the growing pains that prompted you to hire someone indicate a need for not just more people, but more infrastructure and organization to help everyone operate more efficiently. While you might be able to find a junior-level candidate with a lot of natural talent and know-how, their lack of experience will often mean they lack the strategic mindset that can help bring order to your chaos.
- You need someone right now, not six months from now. Writing job descriptions, finding and interviewing candidates, sending out offers — all of that takes time.
Fortunately, there’s an alternative solution: hiring a vChief fractional executive.
A vChief fractional executive is a thought partner, strategic doer, and organizational change agent who provides hands-on support to companies on a part-time basis.
Here are three reasons hiring a vChief fractional executive is a better option than hiring full-time for many organizations.
1. vChiefs Offer Flexible Help That Meets Your Needs
When your most urgent needs aren’t enough to keep one full-time hire occupied, a fractional executive is a great solution.
You can bring on a vChief for as few as 20 hours per month or up to full-time for a short-term project. You can flex your vChief’s hours up or down as needed from month to month. And you’re not locked into any long-term contracts. You can cancel at any time with just 30 days notice. That’s more flexible than most gym memberships!
If you’re not sure how much help you need, our team can help with that too. Our matching process begins with an intake interview where we listen to your challenges and identify your most urgent needs.
Our experienced team will determine how many hours of support you need and create a narrow scope of work, meaning you don’t have to spend time writing a job description. This also eliminates the risk of hiring someone into a poorly defined role with unrealistic expectations, which Harvard Business Review has identified as a major source of turnover within the C-Suite.
2. vChiefs Add Capacity, Not Complexity
Expanding your team’s capacity to take on more work and more complex projects requires more than an extra set of hands. You may also need to improve your internal organization and standardize your processes — something that requires more experience than a junior-level hire can typically offer.
That’s where the vChief talent network can help. With an average of 12 years of senior leadership experience in such as strategy, management, operations, finance, human resources, and project management, vChiefs are skilled at identifying and implementing the kind of infrastructure that helps organizations do more with less. Whether it’s a template for onboarding new clients, an SOP for your biggest fundraising event, or a better CRM system, a A vChief fractional executive can tackle projects that build a foundation for long-term growth.
Plus, vChief’s flexible month-to-month contracts give you access to this level of talent and expertise without the overhead or commitment of a full-time hire.
3. vChiefs Make an Immediate Impact
The average time to fill new positions has stretched to 11 weeks in 2023, according to Robert Half’s State of U.S. Hiring Survey. That figure only includes the time between posting a job and the candidate accepting the offer. If it’s a new position, you may need several weeks to create the job description, and the candidate may need to provide at least two weeks’ notice to their current employer. And then, even with the best onboarding practices and training materials, a full-time employee may need several months to get the lay of the land and build relationships before making an impact.
vChief fractional executives are poised to make an immediate impact.
Our matching process typically takes less than three weeks from your initial contact to your vChief’s first day on the job. And with a narrow, well-defined scope of work, your vChief can skip the months-long process of digging into your organization and trying to determine where they can make an impact, as often happens with new hires in new roles.
Create Capacity With a Flexible Staffing Solution
At vChief, we place talented change-makers in fractional roles such as Chief of Staff, Chief Operating Officer, Associate Chief of Staff, and Executive Director. Our clients include startups, nonprofits, foundations, educational organizations, and corporate enterprises.
The best time to expand your team’s capacity is before you’ve reached a breaking point. Bringing on a fractional executive can help your team achieve more with less stress while building a foundation for growth.
Schedule your free consultation with vChief today.
