Fractional leadership

I work as a fractional leader. That means I’m embedded in your team a few days a month, carrying real responsibility for the outcomes rather than writing you a report and heading off. I lead in two areas that turn out to be more connected than they first look - operations and community.

Since 2020 I’ve led Mautic, the open source marketing automation project, through a corporate acquisition, a spin-out to independence, a governance overhaul and a financial recovery - work that lands squarely in both. I’m currently the fractional Director of Operations at Mercury Consortium. That’s the hands-on experience I’d bring to your organisation.

What a fractional leader gives you

Some organisations need experienced leadership, but not - or not yet - a full-time director in the seat. Maybe you’re between hires, growing faster than your structures can keep up with, or carrying a level of responsibility that has outgrown the person holding it without anyone quite noticing.

A fractional leader gives you that senior experience part-time and ongoing - accountable for real outcomes, part of how your team actually works, and at a fraction of the cost and commitment of a full-time hire. It isn’t advice lobbed in from the outside, it’s leadership from inside the team, for the days a month you actually need it.

Who I work with

• Open source projects and foundations growing up, and running into the tricky bits that come with getting bigger.
• Startups and scale-ups that need operational or community leadership before they can justify a full-time hire.
• Mission-driven organisations, membership bodies and charities building or running a community, or steadying their operations.

I’m especially drawn to organisations working towards privacy, digital sovereignty and real alternatives to proprietary tools. If you’re trying to show that a values-led organisation can hold its own against better-funded competition without dropping its principles along the way, we’ll probably get on well.

Operations

The nuts and bolts of how an organisation actually runs.

• Governance and decision-making - building or refactoring structures that fit your size and stage, and moving from informal leadership to processes that hold, without losing what makes you you.
• Financial sustainability - revenue models, funding pathways and membership structures. I’ve built these from scratch, and patched them up when they’ve broken.
• Strategic planning, restructuring and recovery - making the hard calls and steadying things through change and crisis. I led Mautic through acquisition, spin-out and financial recovery.

Community

This side is about the people an organisation depends on.

• Growth and retention - attracting contributors or members is one thing, keeping them around and heading off burnout is quite another, and I’ve spent a lot of time on both.
• Health and conflict resolution - addressing tensions before they turn destructive, and building the kind of governance that handles disagreement well.
• Marketing and positioning - helping you say what you’re actually for and reach the people who’ll care, with particular strength in privacy- and sovereignty-led positioning.

A specialism - open source

Much of my deepest experience is in open source specifically - the particular puzzles of community-built software, foundation governance, and keeping a project alive when it belongs to everyone and no one. I’ve written more about that side of things on my open source consulting page.

How I work

My practice as a Buddhist shapes how I work, in pretty down-to-earth ways. A lot of it comes back to interdependence (everything’s connected to everything else) and skilful means (working with things as they are, not as you wish they were). In practice that means I start from your actual situation, I look at the whole picture rather than picking off isolated problems, and I look for pragmatic solutions that respect your constraints while still moving you towards what you care about.

I don’t have a one-size-fits-all framework to sell you, and I’d be a bit wary of anyone who does - what works for a team of fifty rarely works unchanged for a team of five hundred. I start by understanding your particular context, then build approaches that fit it.

We usually start with a short piece of discovery so I understand where you are, then settle into a regular rhythm - a set number of days a month, shaped around where you need me most. Because this is embedded leadership and not one-off advice, I work to a minimum term of six months - long enough to really understand your context, make some change, and see it hold.

Experience and background

I’ve led Mautic since 2020, through some of the toughest stretches in its history, and I’m currently the fractional Director of Operations at Mercury Consortium. Before Mautic I served on the Joomla Community Leadership Team, and I’ve worked in open source and community building for over eighteen years. I’m also a trustee of Breathworks, a charity teaching mindfulness for living with pain and illness, where I bring web, marketing and governance experience to the board.

So when we talk about governance, sustainability or community, I’m speaking from direct experience rather than something I read in a case study.

Let’s talk

If you’re weighing up whether a fractional leader could help - or you already know the shape of what you need - drop me a line with a bit about your organisation and what you’re working on. I’d love to hear what you’re wrestling with, and I’ll tell you straight whether I think I’m a good fit!