Is a fractional Head of Growth worth it?

When it is worth it

A fractional Head of Growth is a senior growth operator working for you a day or two a week instead of full-time. It is worth it when three things are true: you have real revenue or usage flowing, nobody senior owns the growth number, and you cannot yet justify $200k+ all-in for a full-time hire. That describes most Australian companies between roughly 5 and 30 people, which is why the model has taken off here.

I do this job now, so discount accordingly, but my conviction predates my incentive: having a fractional CMO and a fractional Head of Growth covers everything a business at that stage needs, with specialist contractors underneath for execution. The coordination cost is real, but it is smaller than the salary gap until the company is genuinely mid-sized. Most companies reach for a full-time Head of Growth about a year too early or a year too late, and fractional is precisely the hedge against calling that timing wrong.

When it is not worth it

Do not hire one, fractional or otherwise, before product-market fit. A growth person cannot fix a product people do not retain on, and paying for strategy while your activation is broken buys you beautifully prioritised experiments on a leaky bucket. Once your product is habit-forming, then and only then does growth work compound.

Also skip it if what you actually need is hands. The honest test is whether you have a growth system that needs an owner, or a growth task that needs a doer. If your problem is one channel, hire a specialist for that channel, an SEO consultant, a paid media contractor, and save the strategy layer. The distinction is the same one that separates a Head of Growth from a CMO, one level down.

What the engagement actually looks like

The version of this I run: come in, build the growth engine and the team to run it, and hand it over. In practice that means being the IC on the highest-leverage tasks early, building SMS nurture flows, launching a new front door, standing up affiliate programs, while writing the playbook a future full-time hire inherits. The measure of a good fractional engagement is that it ends: either the engine runs itself or the company has grown into the full-time hire.

Week to week it is a strategy session, a channel review with real numbers, and a decision cadence where experiments graduate to business-as-usual or die. My process is to keep the team informed with weekly numbers so that call is made on evidence, not enthusiasm. My month-by-month cadence for a new engagement is on the first 90 days page.

On cost, a serious fractional engagement runs a few thousand dollars a month against $200k+ all-in for a full-time hire. The full band comparison is on the salary page. If you decide you want the full-time version instead, here is how to run that search, and here is the shortlist of who is actually good in Australia. For what the role covers either way, start with what a Head of Growth actually does.

One adjacent read before you decide: what a growth strategy actually contains, because the fractional model works precisely when there is a strategy worth owning two days a week.

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