Senior expertise for businesses that have outgrown “figure it out yourself”
If you’ve worked with me at Bradex Business Solutions, you’ll know the businesses I like working with best. Owner-managed. Growing. Past the point where the founder can do everything themselves, but not yet at the size where five senior hires make financial sense.
That gap is real, and I’ve watched enough clients sit in it for long enough that I decided to do something about it. It’s called Fractional Pod, and it’s a new division of Forshaw Associates Limited, the company I founded back in 2004 and still run from Ramsbottom.
This article is the long version: what it is, how it works, and why I think it solves a problem that’s been sitting unaddressed for most of the businesses I speak to.
The gap most growing businesses sit in
Here’s the pattern. A business gets to £1–5 million turnover, sometimes more, on the back of a founder who’s good at the thing the business actually does, the product, the trade, the service. Somewhere along the way, finance starts running on spreadsheets and instinct. Operations depends on the founder remembering everything. Marketing is whatever gets squeezed in between other jobs. Governance is a word that comes up when the accountant mentions it at year-end.
None of that is a criticism. It’s just what happens when a business grows faster than its infrastructure. The trouble starts when the founder realises they need proper senior input, a finance director, an operations lead, someone who actually understands growth and marketing, not just someone running ads and looking at the salary bill for hiring all of that in-house. It doesn’t add up. Not at this stage.
So most businesses do one of two things. They carry on without it, and hope the gaps don’t cost them too much. Or they hire freelancers one at a time, a bookkeeper here, a marketing consultant there who never talk to each other and rarely see the whole picture.
Fractional Pod is built for the businesses that want a third option.
What Fractional Pod actually is
It’s a coordinated team of senior specialists who work with your business on a part-time basis. Between them, they cover what a growing business needs at board level, without the cost of hiring each one full-time.
The word that matters here is coordinated. This isn’t a directory of freelancers you manage separately. I act as pod lead, which means I sit across the whole engagement, make sure the finance specialist, the marketing specialist and the operations specialist are actually working towards the same goals, and give you one point of contact rather than five separate relationships to manage.
The pod currently covers five areas: finance, operations, growth and marketing, business utility cost reduction, and board-level governance. Depending on what your business needs, you might draw on one specialist or several, and that mix can change as your priorities shift — a heavy finance quarter followed by a push on growth, for instance, without having to renegotiate a new contract each time.
Who it’s built for
Owner-managed SMEs and scale-ups, mostly across Greater Manchester and Lancashire, who’ve outgrown ad hoc support but aren’t at the stage of building a full senior team on the payroll. If that’s roughly where your business sits, this is squarely aimed at you.
It’s also worth being honest about who it isn’t for. If you’re a very early-stage business still finding product-market fit, a full pod is probably more structure than you need yet. And if you’re already large enough to justify a full executive team, you likely already have one. The sweet spot is that stretch in between, which in my experience is where a surprising number of otherwise successful businesses get stuck.
How an engagement actually works
I’d rather tell you the mechanics plainly than dress it up.
We start with a conversation about what’s actually going on in your business, not a sales pitch, just an honest look at where the gaps are. From there, I put together a pod suited to what you need, drawing on the specialists relevant to your priorities. Engagements run on a minimum three-month term, which gives enough time for a specialist to understand your business properly and make a real difference, rather than parachuting in for a few weeks and out again. After that, it continues on a rolling basis with four weeks’ notice either way.
Billing is straightforward: standard 30-day invoicing, no surprises. And if, further down the line, you and a specialist decide you’d prefer to work together directly instead of through the pod, that’s fine; there’s an introduction fee that applies, and I’ll talk you through it upfront rather than burying it in small print.
Why fractional, and why now
Fractional working isn’t a new idea; fractional FDs and NEDs have been around for years. What’s changed is that businesses now expect that same flexibility across more functions, not just finance. A growing business rarely needs a full-time CMO, but it often needs senior marketing thinking at certain points in the year. The same goes for operations, and increasingly for the kind of cost scrutiny that comes from someone who actually knows what your utilities and overheads should cost, not just what you’re currently paying.
Fractional Pod exists because I kept seeing Bradex and Forshaw clients need this kind of senior input in bursts, not constantly, and there wasn’t a straightforward way to get it without either overpaying for full-time heads or under-resourcing with disconnected freelancers.
Why this, from me
I’ve spent twenty years working with owner-managed businesses through Forshaw Associates, and longer than that through business coaching. I know what it looks like when a business has outgrown its own back office, and I know how often the people running these businesses don’t have time to go and find, vet, and manage five different specialists on their own. That’s the job I’ve taken on with Fractional Pod: putting the team together, and being the person you call when something needs sorting.
If this sounds like where your business is
Have a look at fractionalpod.co.uk for the full details, or skip straight to a conversation. You can book 15 minutes with me directly, or call me on 0161 751 2320. No obligation, just an honest look at whether a pod makes sense for where your business is right now.
Fractional Pod is a division of Forshaw Associates Limited, established in 2004, Ramsbottom, Greater Manchester.