Most articles about fractional leadership carefully avoid the number. Here it is: a fractional commercial leader with us costs €2,000 to €9,800 a month, depending on whether you buy one day a week or four, which is €24,000 to €117,600 over a full year.

The equivalent full-time hire in Finland lands at roughly €142,000 to €197,000 in the first year once you add employer costs and recruitment, and then needs three to six months before it delivers at full strength.

That gap is the whole argument, and everything below is the arithmetic behind it, laid out so you can check it yourself.

Before you read another line, be clear about what this is not. It is not an industry survey and it is not third-party research: I have not polled providers, I have no sample size, and nobody independent has audited any of it.

What you are getting is our own published prices, the salary ranges I actually see in Finnish and Swedish processes, and every assumption written out in the open so you can swap in your own and get a different answer. That is a weaker claim than a survey and a more useful one, because you can check it in an afternoon.

This is also not a definitions piece — for the distinction between the models, see fractional versus interim sales leadership. In one sentence: fractional is a permanent-shaped role bought in days per week, interim is a full-time seat filled for a fixed period.

What a fractional commercial leader costs

These are our own published engagement rates, not an estimate of the market. The per-day rate falls as commitment rises, which surprises people who expect volume to be neutral. It is not: at one day a week I am a visitor reconstructing context every Tuesday, and at four days the context is simply there.

Five days a week is a different product: not a slice of a leader but the whole seat for a defined period, usually with a mandate to rebuild something specific — the shape I describe under interim sales director work in Finland.

These rates are published in full, with a calculator, on our pricing page, where you should run your own scenario rather than trust my rounding.

Method and assumptions: how to read these numbers

This is the section most benchmarks bury or skip, so it comes early here. Everything below the rate table rests on these assumptions, and a benchmark whose numbers do not survive scrutiny is worse than no benchmark at all.

Here is exactly where each figure comes from and which ones you should replace with your own before you decide anything.

• The fractional rates are ours. Det Goda Livet's published engagement rates, not a market average. Other providers charge more and less; I cannot speak for them.

• The salary ranges are observed, not surveyed. These are the ranges I see in Finnish and Swedish commercial leadership roles through recruitment processes, offers and conversations with owners. Not a formal salary survey, and I will not dress one up as one.

• The ×1.51 multiplier is a stated assumption. It covers social costs, pension, insurance and holiday pay. Your real figure depends on your pension provider, collective agreement and bonus structure. Change it and the table changes.

• Recruitment and ramp-up are assumptions too. €15,000–25,000 is typical for a search at this level, and three to six months is fair before a new leader produces at full strength. If your onboarding is genuinely excellent, use three. Most are not.

• Excluded from the full-time column: variable pay, car, equipment, workspace and the cost of a mis-hire. All push the employed figure up; none push it down.

• Every engagement is priced individually. Everything here is an example, not a quote.

If you disagree with a number, change that one and leave the rest. The comparison holds or breaks on the multiplier and the ramp-up assumption, and both are yours to set.

What the full-time alternative actually costs

Most companies compare salary against invoice, and that is the wrong comparison. Salary is roughly two thirds of what an employee costs you, and the hire carries a one-off cost and a productivity lag that never appear on the same budget line.

Put the two tables side by side and the picture is blunt. Three days a week of experienced commercial leadership costs about €82,800 a year; the cheapest full-time sales director here costs about €142,000 in year one, and for the first quarter or two you pay full price for partial output.

Even four days a week comes in under the least expensive full-time option.

What actually drives the rate

The one I would underline is commitment. You are buying continuity, not hours, and continuity is what makes a commercial system compound.

My bias is well known to anyone who has worked with me: repeatable process beats star performers.

Get the data and the tooling right first, then the process, then individual performance. That sequence needs presence.

Engagement shapes, and where the model breaks

A fractional month is not a month of meetings. In mine, roughly half the time goes into the operating rhythm — pipeline reviews, forecast discipline, deal coaching — and the other half into what nobody has had time to fix: the CRM nobody trusts, the pricing never tested, the reporting the board actually needs. What it does not contain is presence for its own sake.

Three situations make this the wrong answer.

1. A role that genuinely requires daily presence, such as a fast-moving field organisation or a company in crisis.

2. A situation where the real work is internal politics, because influence in a divided organisation is built in the corridor and the coffee queue, and a part-time outsider has too little surface area to build it.

3. And a large direct team — more than eight or ten people needing active management — where two days a week leaves everyone under-managed. Then hire, or take full interim, and I will say so before you sign anything.

Finland and Sweden are not the same market

Sweden's interim market is the more mature of the two: established intermediaries, buyers who have used the model before and do not need it explained, and a salary baseline that pulls day rates upward.

The trade-off is distance, because more of the market runs through an agency layer that adds margin and a step between you and the person doing the work. Four differences matter when you are actually buying.

How the engagement is shaped. A Swedish assignment is usually written as a fixed-term consulting assignment with a role description, a start and end date, a defined scope and monthly reporting, and it defaults towards full-time: the standard product is one consultant in one seat, five days a week, for six to twelve months.

Two or three days a week exists but you often have to ask for it. In Finland the default runs the other way. Most of what I sign is one to three days a week on a rolling agreement with a month's notice, with the scope revisited each quarter as the work changes.

Neither is better, but the Swedish shape prices in commitment and the Finnish one prices in flexibility, and if you compare a Finnish two-day quote against a Swedish full-time one you are not comparing the same thing.

What the intermediary does. In Sweden a large share of assignments goes through a broker or a framework agreement, so a bigger company will often tell you it can only buy through its preferred suppliers.

The broker takes a margin, typically well into double digits, and owns the client relationship: you are presented as one profile among several, the client's brief has already been written down by someone else, and the first conversation is a selection interview rather than a diagnosis.

In Finland there is very little of that layer in the mid-market. You are usually in the room with the person who will decide, the brief is still open, and the first meeting changes the definition of the assignment about half the time.

That difference is worth more than the margin, because a scope written by a broker is a scope nobody has argued with.

How transparent the price is. Swedish day rates are common knowledge inside the broker layer and invisible outside it: the client knows what it pays the agency, the consultant knows what the agency pays, and the gap between the two is rarely on the table.

Finnish pricing is less standardised but more often stated directly, and you tend to get a number in the first or second meeting. Very few providers in either country publish anything, which is why our rates are on the pricing page rather than in a proposal template — if you have to ask what something costs, the answer arrives shaped by what the seller thinks you can pay.

Who decides, and how long it takes. A Swedish buying process typically involves the hiring manager, HR and procurement, a management-team alignment step and two or three interviews, and it can run six to ten weeks even when everyone wants the same thing.

A Finnish mid-market process is often the owner or the CEO, two meetings and a start date inside a month. So the practical planning rule is this: budget more lead time for Sweden and more scope-shaping work for Finland. I have written more on how the Finnish side plays out in the Finnish fractional market, and on the mechanics of the market itself in the guide to doing business in Finland.

The case that fits unusually well is a Swedish or Nordic company opening in Finland. You need someone who knows the market, can hire the first sellers and can run the commercial motion from day one — but you lack the volume for a full-time country lead, and a bad first hire in a new market sets you back a year.

Two or three days a week of someone who has done it before beats a full-time hire made on incomplete information, which is the argument I make about the fractional head of sales role across the Nordics.

How to work out what it is worth to you

Stop comparing the invoice to a headcount budget. Compare it to the commercial decision that is currently not being made well, because that is the real alternative.

1. Name the decision. Which market to enter, which segment to drop, what to charge, whether the sales team is a capability problem or a targeting problem.

2. Put a number on it. What does getting it right add over twelve months, and what does getting it wrong cost? Rough is fine; blank is not.

3. Compare that to €51,600 or €82,800. If a year at two or three days a week costs less than a tenth of the decision at stake, the cost question is settled and the argument is about the person, not the price.

4. Then ask the honest question: can this actually be done in two or three days a week? If not, go back to the previous section.

At Guldbrev's Finnish operation, Kultapiste.fi, the question framed that way was whether a €200,000 business could become a real one; it reached €2 million in annual revenue.

That did not come from me being present every day. It came from fixing the data, the process and the pricing in that order.