Fractional
Taking on ownership, not just building you something
For a small number of businesses, a single project with a fixed delivery date won't cover it. Instead, what's needed is an embedded role, run on an agreed number of days a week or month.
Who this is for
Have you read our case study and wondered if we could do this for you?
You may have readour No Regrets case study or looked at how we think aboutmulti-location digital operations and found yourself wondering whether Millside could take on that role directly for your business, instead of simply building you a website and handing it over.
This is not the primary way we work with most businesses, most of whom simply need a website built and maintained, which is why this remains our key service. That being said, a small number of businesses (those at a particular stage or operating at a particular scale) may feel they need us to work with them more integrally, at which point a fractional engagement may be what's most suitable.
A fractional engagement is a small but highly significant agreement for us to work with you in a way which is more embedded within your day-to-day operations. On this page, we'll take a more in-depth look at what that engagement might entail and how it might work.
How it works
A pre-agreed number of days rather than a list of deliverables
If you were to work with us on a 'fractional arrangement' basis, we would agree a fixed number of days (either a week or month), working in a board-level or Technology Director-style role rather than as an outside supplier delivering a fixed service. The benefit is that what we work on would shift as your business's priorities shift - the same way an internal hire's time would, instead of being fixed in advance by a contract written before anyone knew what the rest of the year had in store.
This role would cover the full digital operation (not just a single channel), including the website, technical SEO, CRM and booking systems, reporting, and paid advertising (if applicable). All of this would work as one connected system, rather than several separate projects run in isolation, made possible by the fact thatsales, marketing and technology are roles that naturally interlink, to the point that they can be managed by one person's skillset.
On advertising
Why ad management is never charged as a percentage of spend
Charging a percentage of advertising spend creates a direct incentive to recommend spending more, regardless of whether that's the right call for the business at that point. We don't work that way. Within a fractional agreement, ad management would be included as part of the same agreed time and cost as everything else, meaning that the question over whether to increase, hold or cut ad spend is dictated by what is right for the business.
The honest answer
How we cover all the responsibilities
This is undoubtedly a lot of work, often carried out by large teams of people, so how do we cover this alone? The first and biggest answer is by having a niche. Work that we have carried out once, within a specific kind of business, becomes work that we can replicate - and make more efficient - the second and third time we carry it out. This is all achieved through bespoke tools and processes that have been built specifically for that particular market, rather than a generic agency workflow.
The second factor is bespoke tooling - including anywhere where AI genuinely does useful work inside that process - is also a part of how we can make this efficiency possible. Understandably, AI tooling can be quite low-trust by default, since everyone these days makes them; however, we believe they play a genuinely useful and vital role in the future of how this work is done, and the detail and success of this is all demonstrated in our case study work.
Having both a niche and bespoke tooling is how we can handle more than the team size would suggest, and it is also why we are very selective about which fractional engagement we take on, since the model only holds up within the kind of business it was built for.
The relationship
An integrated part of your business, not a supplier held at arm's length
A fractional engagement works because it functions as an integral part of the business rather than as an external party being briefed and delivered to. That means sitting in on the conversations that shape decisions before they've been finalised, rather than being handed a finished brief to execute, and it's the same shape of relationship that ran across six years and twelve locations for the studio group behind our flagship case study.
If this sounds like the shape your business needs, let's have a conversation.
No pricing, no fixed scope, no packages here. Just a conversation about whether this is the right fit.