March 11, 2026
Author: Jason Faber
I recently had the pleasure of joining Evelyn Cools on her podcast Growing Startups to talk about what it really takes to build a sustainable fractional consulting practice, how to position yourself in a noisy market, and why fractional beats full-time for more people than you'd expect.
Watch the entire episode below.
The word "fractional" has become a bit of a buzzword, and Jason is the first to admit it. Job boards post "fractional" roles that are really just part-time contracts. That muddies the water.
Here's how Jason breaks it down:
Freelancers are executors. You already have a strategy; they check off the tasks. Agencies sit at the advisory end — they'll be in your board meetings, pitch decks, and strategy sessions, but the work often passes through layers of account management before anyone touches it. Fractionals occupy the middle: senior-level leadership and execution, embedded directly within the team, owning a channel or function the same way a full-time hire would.
"A lot of freelancers are sitting in a chair outside the room. A fractional has a seat at the table."
— Jason Faber
For Jason, that means owning the full SEO function: setting strategy, executing content and technical work, managing external partners, reporting to leadership, and working cross-functionally with product and engineering. When you hire him, you get him — not a junior coordinator who inherited the account.
Jason breaks this down a bit more in a recent article: What is a Fractional SEO Consultant?
Jason's ICP tends to be post-product-market-fit B2B SaaS companies that have hit traction but haven't yet built out a full marketing team. They've got something to say, they can see the SEO opportunity, but they don't have headcount for a senior full-time hire.
One of his longest-standing clients is a chain of emergency vet clinics with 120 locations across North America. They need hyperlocal SEO at scale — "emergency vet near me" — and a single walk-in customer can be worth $850+ in revenue. It's not B2B SaaS, but the opportunity is huge and the need is specific. That's the pattern: companies that can clearly benefit from organic search but lack the internal expertise to own it.
Jason recently wrote an article outlining when you need to hire a fractional SEO consultant.
Jason's path into consulting wasn't a smooth transition. He was laid off from a Series A startup the morning he was about to go on parental leave. He had one month of severance, a newborn, and a wife on maternity leave. He decided to start consulting.
The first six months were a slog.
He launched a website that listed every service he could offer — SEO, content marketing, product marketing, growth strategy. A contact gave him the feedback that changed everything: "You do everything, so you're nothing to anyone."
After that, Jason focused. He narrowed his positioning to fractional SEO consulting, tapped his LinkedIn connections one by one, and started posting consistently about two things: building a fractional business, and SEO craft.
"Just because you have the consulting business doesn't mean leads will pour in. You need to promote it and make sure people remember you."
— Jason Faber
Nearly every client Jason has landed came through his network or a referral — but that doesn't happen without staying visible. His LinkedIn content strategy isn't elaborate: he posts roughly once a week, alternating between lessons from building his fractional business and concrete SEO insights. No content calendar. No scheduled queue. Just consistency.
The compounding effect is real. One post on growth mindset — tied to completing his first triathlon — outperformed most of his tactical SEO content. A client signed a six-month retainer because someone in their network liked a LinkedIn post that showed up in their feed. The lurkers are everywhere, and they're often the ones who actually hire you.
The strategic takeaway: your content doesn't just need to be good — it needs to keep you top of mind for the exact moment someone is looking for what you do.
Learn more about how Jason lands clients from referrals and his network.
A lot of people assume going fractional is inherently riskier than taking a full-time job. Jason makes a compelling case for the opposite, especially in the startup world.
If you're working in-house and you get laid off, you're at zero. If you lose your biggest fractional client, you're at 70% capacity. You keep going.
There's also more signals. Layoffs in full-time roles often catch people off guard. In fractional work, there's usually a defined end date, a natural scope completion, or gradual signals from a client that the engagement is coming to a close — and you can course-correct before it becomes a crisis.
Jason has had bad-fit fractional engagements. One last spring ended mutually after three months — culturally and operationally, it just wasn't working. Both parties were relieved. His reaction: "Imagine if that was a full-time head of growth role." The stakes would've been completely different.
Jason doesn't sugarcoat it — pricing is one of the hardest parts of fractional work and he still hasn't fully solved it. But he has strong convictions about what doesn't work.
Hourly rates punish expertise. Today, Jason can run an SEO site audit in half the time it used to take him — and it's five times better, because he's built the framework, refined the tooling, and accumulated 15 years of pattern recognition. Charging by the hour would mean charging less for better work. That doesn't make sense.
More practically: high hourly rates scare founders. Present a retainer with clear outcomes and they don't do the math. Present a $300/hr number and the first reaction is "what are you, a lawyer?"
Jason builds packages around the types of work he'll do, not the hours he'll spend. When he's setting up scope internally, he'll estimate hours to get to a rough number — but that number never appears on the client proposal. What appears is the scope: what he owns, what he'll execute, what you'll get.
One approach he learned from a peer: one price, one engagement, no hour tracking. Do whatever it takes to get the job done. Simple and honest.
His practical advice for people starting out: work backward from your income goal. How many retainers, at what monthly rate, would you need to hit that number? That gets you a starting point. Everything after that is test and learn.
Jason's honest answer: not everyone is ready, and that's okay.
If you're fewer than five years into your career and haven't held a leadership role, the fractional model probably won't work in the true sense. Founders hiring fractionally aren't just looking for someone skilled in a craft — they want someone who understands how organizations work, can navigate the CEO/board dynamic, knows how to get engineering buy-in, and can report up to the CMO. That takes time to develop.
His rough benchmark: five to eight years of experience, with meaningful time in leadership or cross-functional roles. One year at a startup counts as three years of conventional work experience — the chaos accelerates everything.
There's also the network question. The longer you've been in your career, the larger and more diverse your network. And the more recognizable the companies on your resume, the easier it is to get in the door. Jason's Shopify experience functions almost like a pre-stamp of approval in early conversations with founders. You can't manufacture that instantly, but you can be intentional about building toward it.
On the personal side: his two-and-a-half-year-old son and training for another Half Ironman this summer. He and his wife remind themselves often that they're in the "good old days" right now — the days they'll miss when their kid is off at college.
On the professional side: two and a half years in, Jason is proud to still be doing this. There were moments where he wondered when to pull the chute and go back in-house. He didn't. Now he has a sustainable business, works with people he respects on problems he finds genuinely interesting, and is actively looking for ways to work fewer hours — not more — by getting more efficient and outsourcing the parts that drain his time.
That's the fractional dream, as he describes it: not to work 60 hours a week, but to own your calendar and choose your work.
Jason Faber is a fractional SEO consultant and growth advisor based in Toronto. You can connect with him on LinkedIn, where he writes regularly about building a fractional business and everything SEO.
