Fractional Positioning For BE Startups

A CTO said “that’s exactly us” four minutes into the call. The pitch was a description of his company.

Belgian SMEs adopted cloud infrastructure fast: 34% run core systems in the cloud, and among funded scaleups it’s effectively everyone. The data layer lagged behind. Lifted-and-shifted databases, a warehouse trial someone started and abandoned, dashboards nobody fully trusts.

That gap became my positioning.

On a call last quarter with a CTO, I skipped the generic architect pitch and described his situation: cloud-mature, data-immature, first data hire imminent, nobody senior to point the stack at the next funding round.

He said “that’s exactly us”. The engagement started 3 weeks later.

The lesson I keep relearning: specificity converts. “I do data architecture” competes with every consultancy in Flanders. “I set up the data foundation for cloud-mature Belgian scaleups before their first data hire” competes with almost nobody.

Fractional fits this segment for a structural reason: they need the senior call 2 days a week, long before they can justify a full-time Head of Data. That’s the gap I fill.

What would the one-sentence description of your company’s data gap sound like?