Twenty years of extensions.
Then the market went quiet.

The situation before

Twenty years in tech. Long engagements. One of them ran for years, renewed again and again. Ryan was good at the work, and the work kept coming back to him. He never had to go and look for it.

Then early 2024 arrived. The tech market went quiet. Ryan finished a successful interim engagement and nothing came next. By late May he had been between contracts for three and a half months.

He was not sitting still. He was writing on LinkedIn and sending outbound. The writing built his name with other technology leaders. It did not reach the people who buy.

“What my content has done so far is it sort of built my awareness and credibility within my peer group, which has led to referrals and inbound leads. But there’s no inbound leads from LinkedIn, from buyers.”

The outbound had “not yielded any fruit yet”. Looking back a few months later, he named the assumption underneath all of it.

“I always had that mindset, oh, something else will come up, because I’ve had 20 years of a very buoyant tech market.”

The diagnosis

None of it was about effort. Ryan was doing plenty. The problem was what the effort was pointed at, and who it was written for.

The language was his, not the buyer’s. His profile described problems the way a CTO would describe them. The people who hire an interim CTO are usually CEOs. Dan put it plainly in an early session.

“When I look at your symptoms statements, they are clearly Ryan’s symptoms. Are they things your CEO would understand? Yes. Is that how they would describe it? Probably not.”

The title was working against him. “Product-minded CTO” meant something to other CTOs. It meant nothing to the CEO holding the budget. Ryan had half suspected this already: “I’m selling the service, not the title.” He dropped it within the week.

He was resisting a niche. He had heard the advice before and pushed back on it, because narrowing felt like losing options.

“I was sort of niche resistant… My feeling was that, okay, if I niche down, I’m going to take opportunity off the table.”

And underneath all three, the mindset. Ryan had spent years as a long-term contractor, looking for the next three-day-a-week role for six months. He saw it himself a few sessions in, looking back at two opportunities that had not landed.

“I think had I have led with a, well, let me come in and do an assessment, that may have gone differently.”

What the work actually looked like

The first instruction was simple. Write regularly on LinkedIn about the customer’s pain and how to solve it, not about Ryan.

“I received my first lead in week one in direct response to a post. They did not ‘like’ or leave comments… they connected and sent a DM requesting a discovery call that same day.”

The opportunity that mattered came from a CTO Ryan had worked with a decade earlier. A Series A business, growing fast, with an engineering leadership gap to fill.

Ryan did not send a CV or a day rate. He sent a proposal deck with no fee in it. The deck played their pain back to them and showed what would happen if it was left alone. When the client floated a low number early, the coaching was about holding position without losing the relationship. Find an ally inside the business. Build the pitch with them, not at them.

Ryan had learned when a price belongs in the conversation.

“At that early stage I’ve not earned the right, even if someone’s asking for it. I’ve not earned the credibility and the trust to give a figure.”

He met the CEO, the head of product and the head of people. They had read his rebuilt profile before they walked in, and it spoke to their problems. The CTO had to put three or four options in front of his leadership team.

“How many do you think created pitch decks and went to the level of detail? No one.”

He started with the new client in June 2024, five weeks in. He described the change in two sentences.

“I came into the formula, no work, came out, and yeah. I’ve got the problem you want to have. I’ve got too much work.”

The interim trap

This is the part most case studies leave out.

The engagement went well. It was also full time, and it left no room for anything else. The content stopped. When the work ended, Ryan was back where he started, and he could see the pattern clearly.

“The vibe I got at the last client was like, you’re here because we’re in a lot of pain. As soon as that pain goes away, you’re gone.”

So in 2025 he came back and did the foundations again, properly this time. A new ICP: not the CEO, but the CTO of a mid-market scale-up, with Ryan “seen as an extension of them, a partner for them to help achieve their goals.”

“This ICP exercise, I think, has been quite a game changer for me going through it the second time.”

In 2026, between engagements again, he built for the gaps rather than just filling them. He started a roundtable for CTOs to compare notes on AI, with no selling. Ten CTOs signed up in two days. He shared his writing in a CTO community he had sat quietly in for years, and four people came forward in his DMs.

The result

Ryan shifted his positioning towards AI transformation. He was honest with himself about what that usually means.

“We both know that for many organisations this really means finishing their data, digital and agile transformations! But hey, if they’re buying AI…”

He built a portfolio deck around case studies and outcomes, tight to his ICP. No title appeared anywhere in the deck. Then he published an article on leading change in the age of AI.

Thirty minutes later, a PE fund sent a DM: “Let’s chat.”

In discovery, they asked what he made of what they had described. He remembered something Dan had told him: be you, don’t be generic. So he told them the truth.

“You’re not ready to be an AI-native organisation. If you want to regain your market lead, you need to fix the foundations first. Then we move to AI.”

“That line was either going to win or lose me the gig,” he wrote. “Turns out they agreed!”

In August 2026 Ryan signed a six-month transformation engagement with the fund, working with one of their portfolio companies. Getting into a fund was something he had been working towards.

In his own words

“The Fractional Formula is the gift that keeps on giving.”

“The support didn’t end after six weeks. I’ve benefited from three major updates to the programme, been welcomed back into new cohorts whenever I’ve wanted to revisit topics, and I’ve always been able to hop on a video call with Dan when I’ve needed advice.”

“Looking back, Fractional Formula wasn’t an investment in finding my next contract. It was an investment in building a sustainable independent career, and Dan has continued to support that journey every step of the way.”

Who this is for

Ryan’s story belongs to the senior operator whose career has run on extensions, referrals and a strong market. The work was always good. It always came back. Until it did not.

If your next engagement depends on the last one being renewed, you are not running a practice. You are waiting for one. Most people at Ryan’s level know this quietly for a long time before they act on it.

The first close is not the finish line. The foundations are what carry you through the gap after it, and the one after that.