My Fractional CTO career is a roller coaster

Hey,

I'm Sergio Pereira, and this is the Remote Work newsletter 👋

Last week I wrote about the growth of the Product Engineer role, and how Software Engineers can reap the opportunities that come with this market trend.

Today I'll tell you about my Fractional CTO career, and the ups and downs that come with it. As I wrote many times, a freelance career is a fine balance between two extremes:

• Anxiety from having no clients.

• Burn out from having too many clients.

It's a famine or feast type of career. Gotta adapt to the bumpy nature of income.

I'm now lucky enough to have "too many" clients. And since I haven't yet learned to say "No", I'm finding creative ways to take more clients without burning out. More on that in a second.

The very reason why I have a tough time declining paying clients is because I still vividly remember all the times when I had no clients at all. Or when I had one client but was too afraid to lose it. Anxiety is real, and in retrospect the most memorable times of my Fractional CTO career have been these lows where I struggled to make ends meet. It was famine back then and it sucked big time.

Now it's a different time. It's absolute feast, I'm having new clients left and right. It's like all the efforts I seeded over the years with my network and my online content have suddenly reached harvest season at the same time.

You might have noticed that I haven't posted much content on X and Linkedin recently. It's a bug, not a feature. I'm swamped and simply have no bandwidth for social media right now, I'll resume content creation ASAP, which is something I enjoy doing.

I'm incredibly lucky to have a significant number of clients finding me and wanting to hire me, but I don't have the bandwidth to work as a Fractional CTO for all of them. However I try really hard to do it, since each new client is an opportunity to learn about a new industry, new client segments, new technologies, etc etc. Make no mistake, I work for profit of course, but there's a lot more incentive to take a client, beyond the money.

Most of these clients come to me through my content or warm intros from network, they want to work with me, so I'm building a network of fellow CTOs, Software Engineers, and QAs. This way I can take more clients opportunities and delegate parts of the work to people in my network who are kick starting their own Fractional career.

I started trying this approach last year, and with the growing demand I'm getting these days I'm definitely enjoying to share the work and the income with fellow remote workers who can extend my own capabilities.

Bringing people to work with me on client opportunities has allowed me to reap the growing opportunity of building fixed scope projects for startups, which I wasn't taking solo for lack of bandwidth. I'm fully accountable for the hiring, so I mostly hire remote anywhere. And I'm quite transparent with the budget splits and client dynamics, I don't want to run an agency with lots of people on the payroll, but I do want to share opportunities that I'd otherwise decline for lack of bandwidth.

So, now when I receive a new client request my decision tree is:

1 If I have enough bandwidth, then I take the client on a normal Fractional CTO engagement.

2 If I lack the bandwidth but I like the client, then I assemble a small team to service the client.

3 If I lack the bandwidth and can't (or don't want to) service the client at all, then I refer the client to someone else in my network with a warm intro.

So, if you're interested in joining this adhoc network of Fractional CTOs and Software Engineers, or if you'd like me to refer clients to you. Simply reply to this newsletter with your CV/Linkedin and some context. I'm traveling over the extended weekend, but I'll reply to everyone next week.

I'm feeling very fortunate at the moment, and I'm keen to continue sharing my luck with fellow remote workers who can help me help more startups succeed.

Thanks for reading this newsletter until the end. You can read all past editions here. Make sure to share it with your friends and colleagues so they can read it too.

See you next Friday,

Sergio Pereira, 
Startup CTO & Remote Work Lover