Articles

At £3-30m revenue, most scaling businesses already have someone doing "the CTO job." They're just not called that, and they're not being paid or supported to do it properly.

Usually it's the most sen...

As a scaling business starts building out technology leadership, the four titles get used almost interchangeably, and that's a problem, because they're not the same job.

Get the wrong one first, or e...

Somewhere between £8m and £30m in revenue, most businesses hit the same wall. Sales keep growing, headcount keeps growing, but technology stops keeping pace, and everything downstream of it starts to ...

If you asked a room full of technology leaders when a growing company's stack starts to strain, most would point to roughly the same band: somewhere between £5m and £20m in revenue. Not because of a s...

Most founders don't ask whether they need a CTO. They ask it after a board member asks an awkward question they can't answer, or after a due diligence process finds something nobody flagged in time. B...

Hiring a full-time CTO at this stage of a business is a significant commitment made before you have much evidence it's the right one. Recruitment alone typically runs months. The salary, bonus and equ...

Most fractional CTO providers place one thing: a fractional CTO. That's a reasonable model, and for a lot of engagements it's all a business needs. But it has a structural limitation. The moment a cli...

E-commerce and marketplace businesses carry a set of technology pressures that don't map neatly onto generic CTO advice. Traffic and transaction volume aren't steady, they spike hard around specific t...

Most scaling businesses ask "do we need a CTO?" when the honest answer is "we need a CIO, we just don't have the vocabulary for it yet." The two roles get confused constantly (a CTO owns the product y...

Most mid-market businesses don't set out to build a fragmented technology function. It happens gradually. You bring in a contractor to fix a security gap before a client audit. A few months later you ...

The fractional CFO is by now a familiar figure in UK mid-market businesses. A scaling company that isn't ready for a full-time finance director, but has outgrown what a bookkeeper or a part-qualified ...

There is a comforting story being sold to a lot of scaling businesses right now: adopt AI and your productivity problem, your cost problem, your growth problem gets easier. It is a story about a tool,...