Three experienced fractional operators joined a live YOKE Leaders conversation to share what the work actually looks like: how they found their first clients, how they structure their time, how they have hard conversations, and what they wish someone had told them before they started.
We recently hosted a panel with three Co-Builders who are doing this work right now. Beata Rouleau, MacKenzie Korsi Thomas, and Tim Buttrill each came to fractional leadership through a different path. They serve different clients at different stages. They structure their time differently. But when we pressed them on what actually makes the model work, they kept landing in the same place.
Here is what came out of that conversation.
Where Every First Client Comes From
None of the three panelists found their first client through a cold pitch or a LinkedIn campaign. All three found them through first or second degree relationships. A brother’s company. A former CEO who made an introduction. A best friend whose professional services firm was starting to outgrow him.
This is almost always how it starts, and it is worth taking seriously rather than treating it as a temporary workaround until your funnel is built. The reason is not just that warm intros convert better. It is that fractional leadership is what Tim described as “high trust work.” You are embedded in someone’s business. You own outcomes. You have access to the real numbers and the real conversations. That kind of access is not extended to strangers. It gets extended to people who come through someone the founder already trusts.
The practical implication: before you build a LinkedIn strategy or a lead gen system, work your network. Who do you know who runs a business? Who do you know who knows someone who does? Start there. The more sophisticated sourcing can come later.
The Niche Tension Is Real, and There Is No Clean Answer
One of the more honest exchanges in the conversation was around niching down versus staying general. The conventional sales wisdom says to niche: pick an industry, pick a function, pick a problem, and own that lane. You will be easier to refer, easier to position, and easier to sell.
All three panelists acknowledged the logic. None of them have fully followed it.
Beata has moved toward revenue operations for B2B technology companies in the one to twenty million range. That is a defined niche. But she got there gradually, starting broad and narrowing as she learned what she enjoyed most and where she could tell her story most clearly.
MacKenzie described herself as still figuring out her niche, having started with systems implementation and expanding into chief of staff and special projects work. Tim said plainly that he has chosen to stay general because the work is more interesting to him, even knowing it costs him on the sales side.
What connects all three is that the niche, wherever it lands, has to be anchored in the problems you actually want to solve. Not the ones that are easiest to pitch or the ones that pay the most. The ones that, as Josh put it in the conversation, you wake up excited to go work on. Founders and owners can tell the difference between someone who is genuinely energized by their problem and someone who is tolerating it. That energy is part of what makes the model work.
Embedded Is the Operating Word
When Tim was asked for his best practices, the first thing he said was: fractional means embedded.
It is worth sitting with that because a lot of what gets called fractional work is not actually embedded. It is advice. It is consulting with a retainer. It is project-based work with a more casual label attached to it.
Embedded means you are on the team. You are in the team. You own specific outcomes and you are accountable to results over time. You show up to the leadership meeting not as a guest but as a member. You use “we” and “our” because that is how you actually think about the work, not because it sounds better.
Beata described a client she told: “It is time for us to start transitioning me out. It is best for your business.” That is an embedded operator talking. Someone who is genuinely invested in the outcome rather than protecting their own revenue stream. A consultant does not say that. A Co-Builder does.
Start With Three Months, Not a Deliverable
Two specific structural recommendations came up consistently in the panel discussion.
First: start with a three-month contract rather than an open-ended engagement. It gives both sides a natural check-in point. It gives the Co-Builder room to get oriented without the pressure of proving a specific deliverable. And it gives both sides a clean exit if the fit is not right. Most of the time the engagement continues. But having the structure matters.
Second: avoid deliverables-based contracts, especially early. Beata shared the example of spending weeks building an onboarding system for a client before realizing the client had not closed a new customer in months. The deliverable was not wrong in isolation. It was just disconnected from what the business actually needed. When you scope the engagement around outcomes rather than deliverables, you preserve the flexibility to go find what actually needs to be done.
This is one of the harder things to explain to clients who are used to project-based work. But the ones who understand it end up getting significantly more value.
Hard Conversations Are the Job
All three panelists circled back to this at different points in the conversation. The fractional operator’s ability to have hard conversations, and to be trusted when they do, is not a nice-to-have. It is the core of the value proposition.
The reason is structural. When your entire income depends on one employer, there is a gravitational pull toward telling them what they want to hear. You soften the feedback. You let the bad decision slide. You protect your position by avoiding the conversation that might jeopardize it.
Fractional operators break that dynamic by design. When no single client represents your entire livelihood, you can afford to be honest. The paradox, as the original YOKE blog post put it, is that the less dependent you are on a single client, the more valuable you become to them.
But the license to have hard conversations has to be built early. MacKenzie and Beata both emphasized starting with radical transparency from the first engagement: being direct about what you see, honest about what might not work, and clear about what the client needs to give you to make the engagement successful. That candor, established early, is what creates the trust that makes the hard conversations later actually land.
Communication Is the Infrastructure
MacKenzie’s word for it was overcommunication. You are not in the room all the time. You are not the one holding the daily operating rhythm together. So what you communicate, how often, and with what clarity becomes the infrastructure that holds the engagement together between your working sessions.
Different panelists handle this differently in practice. MacKenzie dedicates specific days to clients and protects longer-form conversations for those windows. Beata checks in across all her Slack and email accounts in the morning and afternoon rather than blocking by client. Tim focuses less on time blocking and more on being available for hard conversations as they arise.
But all three agreed on the underlying principle: clients need to know they can reach you, and they need clarity on what to expect. Setting those expectations explicitly, rather than leaving them to figure it out on their own, is one of the most important things a fractional operator can do at the start of an engagement.
For operators newer to the model, one specific recommendation came through clearly: push clients toward written communication for things that come up between sessions. If someone can reach you by call at any hour, that habit is very hard to walk back. Getting ahead of it early protects your capacity and sets a more sustainable rhythm.
Build to Outlast Yourself
Patrick, one of the attendees, asked a question that landed well: how do you build systems that survive you?
MacKenzie’s answer was worth writing down. She said she builds documentation and training as she goes, not at the end. She builds out the onboarding materials for whoever is going to step into the role while she is still in it. She gets the founder bought in on the thing being built, because without that, no one else on the team is going to use it no matter how well it works technically.
Tim’s version of the same idea was: hand things off as fast as you reasonably can. Not because you are trying to exit but because handing off frees you to go do the next thing. A fractional operator who is still running the system they built six months ago is not adding the kind of value they should be.
The goal is not to make yourself indispensable. It is to make the business more capable than it was before you arrived. That requires building things that work without you there to operate them.
What This Actually Costs at the Start
Randy asked the question a lot of people in the room were probably thinking: he had come from large companies, knew what his experience was worth, and was considering a significant rate cut to land his first client. Was he crazy?
The answer from the panel was more or less: yes, but so is everyone who does this, and it is the right call.
Tim said he still makes that trade-off for clients and types of work he genuinely wants to do. Beata said: tell the client it is a great deal at this rate so it is less awkward when your rates change later. And both emphasized that the first logo is not just a client. It is the proof of concept. It is the case study. It is the referral engine. The relationship built in that first engagement is the thing that makes the second one easier to find.
The rate gets right over time. The relationship does not happen twice.
The Thread Underneath All of It
Across the whole conversation, something kept coming up that was less about tactics and more about orientation. The fractional operators who are doing this well are not optimizing for the easiest clients or the highest rates or the clearest niche. They are optimizing for meaningful work with people they genuinely want to help.
That sounds soft until you see what it produces. It produces operators who have hard conversations because they actually care about the outcome. Clients who trust them enough to listen. Relationships that generate referrals without a formal referral program. Engagements that outlast the original scope because the trust was built to hold.
That is the Co-Builder model. And it is worth taking seriously.
If you are an experienced operator exploring what fractional leadership looks like in practice, we would love to have a conversation. Visit yokeleaders.com to learn more about what we are building.
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