With direct experience scaling a fractional COO practice from crisis to capacity, Simon Wakeman shares how founders can resolve the internal chaos that stalls growth, build leadership teams without losing control, and scale smarter through the fractional model.
-- Simon Wakeman, founder of Going Fractional and a practising fractional COO, has joined Xraised for a conversation addressing one of the most consistent and costly challenges facing founders of growing businesses: the point at which internal chaos, leadership gaps, and operational fragmentation begin to slow growth faster than any external factor.
The episode covers what a fractional COO actually does inside a scaling business, why the model is gaining significant traction among founders who have outgrown informal leadership structures, and how businesses with strong ideas and real momentum can resolve the internal friction that holds them back, without the cost, risk, or permanence of a full-time executive hire.
The Problems Wakeman’s Work in Fractional COO Addresses
Wakeman's work as a fractional COO is grounded in a pattern he has observed consistently across growing businesses. The companies that come to him are not failing. They have strong ideas, genuine commercial traction, and founders with the capability and ambition to build something significant. What they have also accumulated, usually without realising it, is a layer of internal dysfunction that has grown alongside the business: unclear ownership, informal systems that no longer scale, management gaps between the founder and the team, and an operational load that has quietly shifted from manageable to unsustainable.
By the time a founder recognises the problem, it is already costing them. In time, in team performance, and often in the founder's own capacity to lead effectively.
Wakeman's approach is to step into that environment, identify where the structural failures are, and build the operational infrastructure that allows the business to function without the founder holding everything together personally.
What a Fractional COO Can Bring to a Growing Business
In the Xraised episode, Wakeman sets out clearly what a fractional COO engagement looks like in practice. It is not a consulting relationship. It is an embedded senior leadership role, scoped around a defined number of days per week, in which the fractional COO takes genuine operational ownership alongside the founding team.
The immediate focus in most engagements is restoring the founder's visibility and control. When a business has grown rapidly through informal coordination, the founder often loses clear sight of what is happening across the organisation. Delegation becomes difficult not because the founder is unwilling to let go, but because the systems and reporting infrastructure that would make delegation safe do not yet exist.
Wakeman's position, developed through direct experience working with founders across a range of industries, is that the right operational infrastructure is what separates founders who scale with confidence from those who scale in a state of constant anxiety. Build the systems first. Delegation becomes straightforward after that.
Why More Founders Are Turning to the Fractional Model
The episode also addresses why the fractional model has grown substantially as a leadership solution for businesses between ten and 150 employees. Full-time executive hires at this stage carry significant cost and risk. The salary commitment is substantial. The onboarding is slow. And a mis-hire at leadership level in a business of this size is not merely a financial problem. It is a cultural and operational one that can take months to resolve.
The fractional model reduces that risk considerably. The engagement can be scoped, tested, and adjusted. The founder retains visibility throughout. And the business accesses experience it could not otherwise afford at its current stage, specifically the experience of having navigated the same scaling challenges before in other contexts.
Wakeman notes that the businesses that benefit most are those with strong foundations and real growth momentum that have simply outpaced their internal structure. The chaos is not a sign the business is broken. It is a sign the business has grown.
Building a Course for the Next Generation of Fractional Executives
Alongside his client work, Wakeman launched a popular structured course in 2025 for senior executives who want to build their own fractional career. As the fractional model becomes more widely adopted across industries, demand for experienced fractional leaders is growing, and so is the number of senior executives exploring the transition for the first time.
The course draws directly on Wakeman's own experience: the mistakes he made in the early stages, the systems and structures he eventually built, and the specific actions that turned his practice around within six weeks of his own crisis point. It covers how to identify ideal clients, develop a clear value proposition, and build a pipeline that generates consistent work rather than relying on the informal network activity that sustains most practices in their early months but rarely holds up over time.
Wakeman's view is that the fractional model is genuinely powerful for both the executives who practise it and the businesses that engage them, but that it requires deliberate practice-building to work. The course is designed to give that structure to executives entering the market, drawing on the same honest, experience-grounded approach that defines Going Fractional as a platform.
A Practitioner Who’s Story Informs His Process, and Now His Teaching
What gives Wakeman's perspective particular credibility in the episode is that he has navigated the fractional transition himself, including its most difficult phases. His own experience leaving a senior corporate role, building a fractional practice, and working through the crisis moment when the pipeline dried up and returning to employment briefly seemed like the rational choice, informs how he talks about the model and the challenges founders face in adopting it.
That direct experience is also central to Going Fractional as a platform, which provides senior executives with the frameworks and support to navigate both the practical and emotional dimensions of the fractional transition.
For senior executives seriously contemplating the fractional path, Wakeman has also made his own story available in full through a free ten-part email series. The series covers why he really left his corporate role, the crisis moment nine months in that nearly sent him back to employment, the five specific actions that brought in clients within six weeks, and what a realistic fractional practice actually looks like day to day.
Simon Wakeman is the founder of Going Fractional and a practising fractional COO working with founders of scaling businesses to resolve operational chaos, build leadership infrastructure, and create the conditions for sustainable growth. He is developing a structured course for senior executives building fractional careers, covering ideal client identification, value proposition development, and pipeline generation. His platform at goingfractional.com provides frameworks and guidance for senior executives navigating the fractional transition. The Fractional Executive Launchpad offers structured support for those making the move. For more information, visit goingfractional.com.
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