What Is Fractional Communications and Why It Matters To Startups
For early-stage startups and fast-moving SMEs, comms often breaks quietly—across partner decks, investor updates, and meetings that don’t quite align.
In today’s capital-starved environment, fractional communications brings clarity, cohesion, and reputational leverage when it matters most.
Somewhere between Series B prep and your first regional hire, the messaging starts to blur. The company is growing. There are five new investor decks in circulation, three versions of your founder story, and a website that’s still in 2021. Internally, people think they are aligned. Externally, everyone has a different idea of where you are.
You start fielding questions like:
“Wait, are you a platform or a service?”
“Didn’t you just pivot?”
“Why haven’t I heard of you before?”
And it’s not because the work isn’t solid. It’s because comms isn’t keeping pace with the business. At some point, someone suggests getting help. But no one wants to hire a full-time head of comms just yet.
That’s when fractional communications becomes more than a workaround and starts looking like it could be the right model.
what is fractional comms?
A fractional communications leader is an experienced comms practitioner who plugs into your startup or company to provide comms leadership, typically a couple of days a week. The term fractional simply means that you gain access to senior comms leadership for a fraction of the week, and at a fraction of their usual cost.
The idea is simple: instead of hiring a full-time comms lead, you bring in a senior partner who embeds part-time—but deeply. Someone who sits close enough to the founders to understand the business, and far enough from daily operations to bring perspective.
The concept of fractional leadership isn't entirely new—consultants have worked across multiple clients for decades. What's different now is the emergence of executives who function not as external advisors, but as part-time internal leaders with strategic responsibility and accountability.
Take Jennifer Wong, a veteran communications executive who transitioned to fractional work in 2022. Having spent fifteen years climbing the corporate ladder at multinational corporations, she now serves as fractional CCO for four different companies—a biotech startup, a family-owned manufacturing business, a fintech scale-up, and a social enterprise.
"It's not consulting," she clarifies when we meet at her co-working space in Tanjong Pagar. "I'm integrated into their leadership teams, attend board meetings, and own strategic outcomes. The only difference is I'm not there every day, and I'm not exclusive to one company."
This distinction matters more than it might initially appear. Traditional consultants provide advice and recommendations; fractional executives provide leadership and execution. They're accountable for results, embedded in company culture, and invested in long-term success, just without the traditional constraints of exclusive employment.
Why now?
Singapore isn't pioneering this trend in isolation. The fractional executive model has been quietly gaining momentum across developed economies, particularly in markets facing similar challenges around talent costs and economic uncertainty.
In the United States, companies ranging from venture-backed startups to Fortune 500 corporations have embraced fractional leadership as a strategic advantage rather than a cost-cutting measure. Workforce analytics firm Revelio Labs reported in 2025 that fractional executive placements had grown 300% since 2018, with communications and marketing roles leading the growth.
What startups and companies get out of a fractional comms arrangement:
Cost-effective access to senior comms leadership, without full-time overhead or headcount
Senior-level quality of work and output, in just a fraction of a typical work week
Access to comms counsel and execution across any business need
The comms leadership vacuum no one talks about
Startups are disciplined about finance, legal, and ops, but communications leadership is still seen as optional—or worse, interchangeable with marketing. As a result, comms gets fragmented:
The CEO handles investor messaging
Product writes the site copy
Marketing pushes campaigns
A junior hire responds to media
Everyone touches the story, but no one owns it—this is how reputational risk accumulates. Reputation rarely unravels from a single bad message. It frays through dozens of unaligned ones, scattered across partner decks, investor updates, and stakeholder messages, each with slightly different intent.
If you find yourself experiencing any of the below, you will benefit from fractional comms leadership:
You’re about to raise, and your narrative is still not investor-ready
You’re launching in a new market, but haven’t localised positioning
You’re growing fast internally, but culture and messaging are out of sync
You’re under media scrutiny and need more than templated statements
You’re trying to sound like the company you’re becoming—not the one you used to be
You need executive-level comms guidance without a full-time salary
Your company is experiencing rapid growth, change, or transition
Your CEO or CMO needs support turning strategy into messaging
Their seat isn’t within marketing. Communications is meant to be a strategic function that supports every other function across an organisation, from product and tech to customer success and the leadership.
Why fractional comms is relevant for startups now
In Southeast Asia, the appetite for speed has often outweighed the appetite for signal. But that’s changing. In H1 2025, early-stage startup funding across Southeast Asia fell to a six-year low of US$1.1 billion.
Capital isn’t just more expensive, it’s more cautious. Visibility doesn’t mean credibility. And AI is changing how companies show up in public discourse: in search results, LLM answers, citation engines, and media filters.
Comms isn’t a nice-to-have anymore. It’s part of how companies raise, hire, sell, and defend. Fractional comms leadership help early-stage and high-growth companies build narrative readiness in a world where being credible matters as much as being great at what you do, and they do this at an accessible price.
But there's something deeper at play here than just cost savings. According to research by Toptal's State of Fractional Work 2023 report, interim executives typically reach full effectiveness in half the time of permanent hires—a median of 3-4 months compared to 6-9 months for traditional executive onboarding.
This efficiency gain makes sense when you consider the profile of most fractional executives. They tend to be seasoned professionals who have already proven themselves in senior roles and developed pattern recognition across industries. Unlike traditional hires who need time to understand company culture and build relationships, fractional executives bring immediately applicable expertise.
"There's no learning curve," explains Alex Tan, CEO of a medtech firm that hired a fractional Head of Communications last year. "She walked in on day one knowing exactly what needed to be done and how to do it. Within two weeks, she had restructured our entire communications strategy and was already managing a media crisis that would have taken our previous setup months to handle properly."
why fractional leadership can be better than agency support
When Sarah Ng's healthcare startup needed strategic communications support for their Series B fundraising and regulatory engagement, her first instinct was to hire a reputable agency. "Everyone said that's what you do when you need professional communications," she tells me over coffee. "Six months and $180,000 later, I realised we were paying premium rates for junior talent and cookie-cutter strategies."
Sarah's experience mirrors a pattern we’ve seen through our time at agencies and also working with them—companies paying exorbitant agency retainers while receiving work from junior staff operating under senior oversight.
According to industry data, PR and communications agencies can cost $240,000 or more annually while allocating most billable hours to junior-level staff, creating a value arbitrage that many business leaders are only now beginning to question.
ACID’s fractional comms model was designed to move away from the traditional agency model, prioritising client value and quality of output over senior consultant bloat at the top. For lean teams who know messaging matters but can’t justify a full-time senior comms hire, we plug in close to the C-suite, audit your communications priorities, and help you tie strategic communications to business outcomes.
On top of strategic comms support, fractional communications offer other advantages that are incredibly relevant to startups and smaller companies.
They work closely with the leadership to shape strategy before getting their hands dirty executing
Senior comms counsel becomes accessible to startup founders any time they need it, which is often not the case when you’re on an agency retainer
You often pay a fractional comms leader what you would for a mid-level comms hire, but receive higher quality output and senior-level account management, in less time.