Leadership on demand: How fractional C-suite are adding value to GCC’s SMEs
Rhys Holding and Sam Loyd, co-founders of Fractional, talk to Gulf Business about how on-demand C-suite leadership is helping the UAE’s fast-growing SMEs scale without the cost of a permanent hire
11 August, 2026
TT
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For a growing company, the traditional route to building a leadership team, recruiting a permanent chief financial officer (CFO), chief operating officer (COO) or marketing chief (CMO), can be costly, slow, and, when the need is tied to a single challenge, unnecessary.
A different model is gaining ground. Fractional leadership puts experienced executives to work with companies on a part-time or project basis, bringing senior expertise without adding permanently to the payroll.
The approach is well established in mature international markets. What is new is its momentum in the GCC, where business formation is accelerating, senior talent is relocating in numbers and companies are hunting for more flexible ways to scale. For Rhys Holding and Sam Loyd, co-founders of Fractional, the region has reached an inflexion point.
Why now
“The UAE and the wider GCC have hit a specific convergence point,” says Loyd. “Business formation is increasing, especially SMEs that are growing at a rapid pace and are primed for fractional C-suite leadership, right as on-demand leadership becomes the global norm rather than the exception. That’s not a trend; it’s a structural shift in how businesses want to engage senior talent and how talent wants to work.” Saudi Arabia’s emergence as a global market, he adds, gives the region “the scale of companies needed to support a genuine fractional ecosystem.”
Underpinning the shift is a movement of people. “Senior executives are relocating to the GCC for the lifestyle it offers and increasingly choosing fractional careers over full-time roles, giving them the flexibility and ability to work across various sectors and challenges, instead of being confined to one role,” Loyd says. Post-pandemic, he argues, the most future-facing businesses now see part-time senior roles “here to stay as a way to de-risk scaling a business. Put those forces together, and the model has everything it needs to take off here.”
Filling the gap
Fractional’s role, Holding says, is “to bring a proven solution to a market that hasn’t had access to it before”, and his conviction is partly personal. “Having built, run and sold an SME myself, I’ve experienced this gap from the inside,” he says. The scale of the opportunity is hard to miss: In January, the UAE Ministry of Economy and Tourism reported that the country had more than 1.4 million registered companies, with 250,000 added in 2025 alone.
“Growth creates pressure. Leadership gaps appear. Costs climb. Founders find themselves making executive-level decisions without executive-level support, “Holding adds.
Fractional’s answer is a vetted bench. “We curate and vet a collective of more than 350 C-suite executives across every function, many with Fortune 500 experience, matching each SME with the executive best suited to its stage, sector and challenge,” Holding explains. “We built that curation specifically for the GCC and its SMEs, right down to the commercial structure of every engagement.”
Crucially, he says, the company does not simply make an introduction and walk away. “Every engagement is set up with the support, structure and governance needed so that both the SME and the fractional executive are fully supported for success. We manage the scope and the commercial terms, so a founder can bring in exactly the seniority they need, for exactly as long as they need it.”
So how does a founder know the moment has arrived? For Holding, some triggers are obvious. “A funding round. A new market entry. A leadership gap during maternity or long-term leave. A defined project with a start and end date,” he says. “In practice, founders are often making executive-level decisions across every part of the business, often without executive-level support around them.”
The more revealing signal is subtler. “It’s when a founder becomes too pivotal to their own business, where every decision, big or small, has to pass through them,” Holding says. “It’s not always a conscious choice. Many founders want support and don’t know where to find it, because they haven’t yet built a network of people who can provide it. A fractional executive gives them that — impartial support that works in favour of the business.”
The mistakes that cost
The most expensive error, in Holding’s experience, is founders overestimating their own reach. “The most common mistake is founders believing they can do it all themselves, or that their own experience is enough for a challenge they haven’t faced before. That belief is costly,” he says. “Opportunity cost builds up while a founder learns on the job, and in some sectors, the reputational cost builds alongside it.”
The counterweight is experience that has already been tested. “Fractional gives SMEs access to C-suite executives who have built their experience across the full spectrum of business conditions, from periods of rapid growth, fundraising and market expansion, to global disruption, restructurings and transformation,” Holding says. “These are executives who have already solved the exact problem a founder is facing for the first time.” And because the model is flexible, businesses are not locked into a single profile. “The CFO who helped raise a first round isn’t necessarily the right CFO for the next one, and fractional lets you switch in the experience a business needs at that specific moment, without the complexity of letting someone go.”
Where mature markets eased into fractional leadership over years, Holding believes the UAE can move faster. “What’s different here versus more mature fractional markets is the speed and availability of senior-level talent,” he says. “The UAE is a fast, dynamic market and when the fractional model is applied properly, that speed makes it even more valuable, because SMEs need a flexible, scalable solution to navigate a business environment moving this quickly. Where more mature markets adopted fractional leadership gradually, the UAE has the chance to adopt it at the same pace the rest of the economy is moving.”
AI and the next five years
Loyd sees artificial intelligence reshaping executive hiring in two directions. “We’d expect executive hiring to keep unbundling and be outcome-focused,” he says. “Businesses will stop asking ‘do we need a full-time hire?’ and start asking ‘what specific outcome do we need right now, and who has already delivered it?'”
The second shift is about capacity. “The fractional model has always championed providing senior talent to SMEs that might not need a full-time hire or be able to afford one,” Loyd says. “With the ever-increasing capability of AI, and its prevalence, we see in the next five years a change where some fractionals may be able to provide full-time productivity but in a fractional capacity. The net efficiency and productivity gains of AI support this transition.”
Why executives are opting in
The pull is being felt on the other side of the table too, and Loyd says it is about more than flexibility. “It’s variety. In a traditional corporate role, you’re predominantly exposed to one business, one sector, and one set of problems associated with that business and sector. As a fractional executive, you might work across adjacent industries in the same year, and that breadth of exposure over five years can be broader than five years inside a single company.”
That, he adds, is what keeps senior operators engaged. “What’s driving experienced executives towards fractional work is the chance to keep solving new problems, rather than managing the same business indefinitely. Fractional gives SMEs access to C-suite executives who have already navigated the moments that define a business, and for the executives themselves, that variety is exactly what keeps them engaged.”
Defining success
For a model that bills itself on outcomes, measurement has to be built in from the outset. “This has to be defined before an engagement starts,” says Holding. “Every engagement is backed by a proposal and a statement of work that sets out the deliverables up front, so success isn’t subjective; it’s commercial. Because this is a B2B arrangement rather than employment, that structure has to exist.”
The measure of success, he says, follows the reason for the engagement. “If a CFO comes in to raise a funding round, the outcome is the round. If a CFO comes in to replace an ERP system, the outcome is a system that’s live and working.” Speed is part of the value: “Deployment happens within weeks of the initial brief, and because engagements scale up or down as priorities shift, an SME is never carrying more leadership than it actually needs. A successful engagement is one where the outcomes set out at the start are the outcomes delivered at the end.”
The spread of engagements, Holding says, tells its own story. “Our engagements to date span a genuinely broad mix of sectors and CXO designations. Demand for fractional leadership isn’t concentrated in one industry. It shows up wherever a business is scaling faster than its leadership bench.”
Looking ahead, he points to national priorities as natural growth areas. “The sectors the UAE is actively investing in nationally, including AI, food security and manufacturing, are natural growth areas for the model, simply because they’ll need experienced leadership faster than they can hire it full-time.” Private-equity and venture-backed companies, he adds, are “traditional partners of the fractional model, and we see large growth opportunities in this area. The answer is that adoption is still broad and early, and that’s a good sign for the model in the long run.”
Complement, not replacement
For all their conviction, both founders are clear that fractional leadership is not a substitute for permanent hiring.
“Fractional works alongside full-time hiring rather than competing with it, and the appetite for it reflects that: demand for senior interim and fractional leadership has accelerated sharply, giving SMEs leverage they wouldn’t otherwise have,” Holding says. “There’s a point where a business, particularly as it scales into a larger enterprise, genuinely needs a full-time CFO or COO, and fractional isn’t in competition with that decision. It’s what gets a business to the point where it can make that decision properly, with the right structure already in place.”
That, ultimately, is the future he expects. “We’d expect fractional to become a mainstream part of workforce strategy, but as a complement to hiring, sitting alongside it rather than replacing it.”
