NED & fractional roles

NED & fractional roles: what's actually changing

The update...

Two things keep coming up in conversations with clients right now: businesses want board-level oversight without a full-time commitment, and they want senior operational expertise on tap without carrying it on the payroll year-round. 

That's the NED and fractional markets, and both are growing fast across hospitality, food service, leisure and retail.

Fractional roles: from stopgap to standard practice

Fractional leadership used to be what you did when you couldn't afford a full-time hire. That's changed. 

The number of fractional executive positions globally has roughly tripled over the past five years, with restaurants and retail among the sectors seeing the sharpest growth, and analysts expect that curve to keep climbing through 2027. 

In the next year or so, over 30% of midsize businesses will have at least one fractional executive on retainer, which is the point where a hiring workaround turns into standard structure. 

Around 72% of CEOs we have been speaking to say they plan to increase their use of fractional executives over the next year. 

For operators in our sector, the appeal is straightforward...

Fractional CFOs, CMOs, and COOs give you access to someone who has already solved the problem you're facing at another business, at a fraction of the cost and time commitment of a full-time hire.

SMEs use it to get access to experience they couldn't otherwise justify on the books and larger groups are doing something slightly different: bringing in fractional leaders for specific, time-bound work like a systems overhaul, a market entry, or an ESG or digital transformation programme, where the skill is needed intensely for a period and then isn't.

North America still leads the global adoption of fractional NED roles, accounting for over 40% of the market's value and roughly 60% of all fractional executives.

The UK is catching up quickly, and hospitality is one of the sectors leading that shift, partly because margins are tight enough that flexible senior cover makes obvious financial sense, and partly because the pool of experienced operators willing to work this way has grown alongside it.

Non-executive directors: the brief is slightly changing too...

The NED market is evolving in a different but somewhat related direction. 

Traditional NED appointments, an experienced chair or a sector veteran offering governance and gravitas, haven't gone away, but a growing share of the briefs we work on now ask for something more current: people still working in senior executive roles who bring live market, customer or operational insight to the board table, not just oversight from afar. 

We can see that shift playing out in real appointments across UK hospitality this year. 

For example, Tortilla brought in Duncan Garrood as non-executive chair, taking over from Emma Woods after four years on the board and Whitbread added Shelley Roberts as an independent non-executive director. 

Founder-led businesses are a particular growth area for us. A lot of these NED roles end up being as much mentoring as governance: someone who has built and scaled a brand themselves, sitting alongside a founder who's doing it for the first time. 

We're also seeing more demand tied to specific milestones, an IPO, a franchise rollout, an international expansion, where the board needs a particular kind of experience for a defined stretch rather than indefinitely.

What this means if you're hiring, or looking...

If you're a business owner or CEO, the case for fractional and NED talent gets easier to make every year: you get senior capability matched to the actual size of the problem, not the size of a job description. 

If you're a candidate, portfolio careers built from multiple fractional or NED roles are no longer a fallback position, they're a genuinely attractive way to work, and the market for people who can do it well is only getting more competitive.

We're actively recruiting across both areas for hospitality, food service, leisure and retail businesses in the UK and internationally. If you're hiring or exploring a fractional or NED move yourself, get in touch and we'll talk through what's out there.