A co-founder's ownership, without the equity.
Partner is the seat people mean when they ask for a fractional CRO, an operating partner, or a paid co-founder. Two 60-minute calls a week, a place in your leadership meetings, and my hands on the work: the model, the deck, the pricing page, the negotiation. Fundraising, acquisitions, and exits are in scope, with your board and across the table from the buyers. From $20,000 a month (USD), six-month minimum with a scope review every quarter, because this seat usually ends when the hire is made or the deal has closed.
What a week looks like.
- Two calls
- Two 60-minute working sessions a week, plus whatever the week needs. One is usually the founder call; the other is with whoever owns the problem in front of us.
- Leadership meetings
- I sit in your weekly leadership meeting and your board meetings as a contributing member, not an observer. The title undersells it: revenue is where it starts, but the constraint is rarely revenue. It is the roadmap, the positioning, the offer, the pricing, or how the marketing money is being spent, and those are in scope from day one.
- Hands on the work
- I build the model, write the deck, draft the pricing page, run the agency review, sit in the negotiation. Partner is the only tier where the deliverable is sometimes mine rather than yours.
- Slack and everything else
- Everything in Advisory: the channel, the models, the on-site weeks, the network. Same business day, always.
- The exit
- Most Partner engagements step down to Advisory once the hire is made or the deal has closed. That is how it is meant to go.
Get underwritable before the process starts.
Most founders treat raising and selling as events. They are audits. The audit starts the day someone serious opens your data room, and whatever the business was doing for the eighteen months before that is what gets priced. So the useful work happens early: real contribution margin by channel and by SKU, retention that survives a cohort chart, customer concentration you can explain without flinching, and inventory and cash modelled without optimism. Underneath all of it, a story about why the next dollar in returns more than the last one, in language an investor or an acquirer can underwrite.
I am not an investment bank and I do not run your process. Your banker and your lawyer do that, and the good ones are worth every point. What I do is the part that decides what they have to work with. I founded getuptime.co and sold it to Tiny (TSX-listed), so I have been on the founder side of a signed deal. On the sell side, a beauty brand engagement produced a nine-figure exit in nine months, built on an operator narrative the buyer could underwrite. On the buy side, an operating screen across fourteen acquisition candidates closed three in eighteen months and passed on eleven. If you want to see where you stand before we talk, the brand exit-readiness scorecard and the app exit-readiness scorecard are free.
A priced round
The operating story and the metrics made to agree with each other before the deck goes out, and a data room that answers the second question before it is asked.
An exit in 12 to 24 months
The things a diligence team will flag, ranked by what each one costs you, fixed early enough to show up in the reporting before the process opens.
An acquisition or roll-up
An operator's screen on what to buy, the discipline to pass on the rest, and the first hundred days after close, where most of the value is won or lost.
For Fortune 500 brands, retailers, and CPG.
Large companies usually buy this work as a phased, fixed-fee statement of work rather than a retainer; that shape, with its own fees and terms, is on the Enterprise Engagements page. Partner is the retainer that follows it, often with a quarterly on-site sprint. The work is commerce modernisation and category defence: the move from monolithic to composable, from channel-specific to unified commerce, and where large brands keep losing to DTC challengers. The value is a practitioner's lens rather than a systems integrator's, because the problems enterprise is facing now are ones the DTC and Shopify ecosystem already solved. Clients on this side have included Nike, Coca-Cola, Hallmark, and P&G.
Executive briefings and leadership workshops are part of the seat. What enterprise teams get from an operator is less a framework than a translation: the DTC playbook rendered in enterprise constraints, focused on the few moves that recover ground rather than another innovation programme that changes nothing. Field notes on this: where enterprises keep losing to DTC challengers and what Shopify taught enterprise commerce.
Two homes, one seat.
Partner has a home for each side of the practice. For consumer brand founders scaling toward $50M and beyond, it is the GMV seat: brand architecture, DTC growth, retail expansion, agency partnerships, and the operating systems that survive scale without giving up margin. For SaaS and app founders building from six figures ARR toward $100M, it is the ARR seat: pricing, packaging, distribution, hiring, and the GTM shifts most founders get wrong the first time because nobody told them the pattern. The record on both sides is on the case studies page: $8M to $42M in 28 months at 40 percent EBITDA on one side, under $2.5M to $140M ARR in 48 months on the other.
$20,000 to $25,000 a month, and what that buys elsewhere.
Where a client lands inside the range depends on the size of the business, the number of leaders I work with directly, and whether a deal is in process. It is stated in the readout of The Read. Against the market, Partner sits at the top of what an experienced fractional CRO charges for ten hours a week of one function, for roughly twice the hours across every function, with M&A in scope, and still at two-thirds or less of a full-time leader before the recruiter fee and the ramp.
Ranges are 2026 US market figures from published rate guides and salary data, stated at the level a scaling brand or software company actually pays. The comparison that matters is not the monthly number; it is whether you are buying hours or the call.
Six months, a quarterly scope review, then a year at a time.
Six-month minimum with a written scope review at the end of each quarter, then renewing for twelve months at a time. Sixty days' written notice either side once the minimum has run. One thirty-day pause per contract year at a holding fee. Ten percent off for twelve months paid in advance. Stepping down to Advisory happens at the end of the minimum on sixty days' notice. Buy-side or sell-side diligence deliverables a third party will rely on are quoted separately, as is a board deck built end to end. Cash first at every tier; advisor equity, where it makes sense, sits alongside the fee on a standard vesting schedule and is usually attached to fundraising or exit work. The full terms are on the engagements page.
Questions before we talk.
Tell me where you're stuck.
Every engagement starts with a free 30-minute scoping call. No pitch, no deck, a direct conversation about where you are, where you're going, and whether there's a fit. If there is, the next step is The Read.