Ligia Adam, commercial strategist and fractional CMO, shares her transition to fractional leadership, the benefits and challenges of this model, and the future of flexible careers in the age of AI.
Ligia Adam is a commercial strategist specialized in technology and digital transformation, with over 10 years of experience gained at Lenovo, Bitdefender, Digital Nation, and CivicTech România. Recognized in Forbes 30 under 30 Romania, she currently works as a fractional CMO and independent consultant, helping tech companies accelerate their commercial success through integrated business, marcomm, and digital strategy.
Fractional Insider: How was your transition from a traditional career to fractional leadership/consulting?
Ligia Adam: I’ve been doing fractional consulting on and off since 2013, in parallel with a full-time job, only back then it was simply called “consulting” or freelancing. I started by working project-based for several years on UNICEF’s digital fundraising and digital communication campaigns. Later, as my professional experience grew, I diversified my client portfolio and over the years collaborated with companies in tech, digital, and mobile, as well as FMCG and lifestyle. It wasn’t something I actively pursued, but rather collaboration opportunities that came organically, through recommendations, in a nonlinear way, and that helped me grow and gain lateral experience alongside my full-time job, during a period of strong professional momentum. It was remote work that required me to be constantly online, with occasional in-person working meetings, in Romania or abroad, even before remote work became the norm.
So after a professional break of several years, during which I became the mother of two children, and from which I recently returned, I came back to fractional consulting as a smoother transition back into the job market, but also as an exploration of the sustainability of this now-trendy way of working, this time from the perspective of a senior professional. I am still open to a traditional career, ideally in a senior role with strategic autonomy, but for now I prefer to enjoy the advantages of a fractional role, which allows me to practice based on my mix of skills, as opposed to the rigidity that comes with the job description of a traditional role.
Fractional Insider: What attracted you most to this model and what challenges did it bring?
Ligia Adam: The external consultant/specialist model—fractional or project-based—is very attractive from an operational perspective, so to speak. It largely involves direct discussions with founders or first-line executives who need support for simple or more complex commercial development challenges, for which they usually lack specialized internal resources. What attracts me is learning and exposing myself to different types of organizations, whether startups or global corporations or their local subsidiaries, because that exposes me to quite diverse professional challenges from which you learn in a very applied way. From a marketing perspective, the tactics for addressing these challenges are similar, but the communication angle requires careful customization, deep dives into diverse industries, and engaging a muscle of contextualization and perspective-setting that I really enjoy as a mental exercise, but especially in execution. Among the most frequent challenges of a fractional role is also working with limited resources of all kinds (budgets, tools, talent), but the added value is precisely bridging the gap and building bridges or alternatives to successfully overcome these challenges. And the flexibility of time/schedule compared to a full-time role—also a challenge, but with a different flavor—helps you focus on the agreed success indicators.
Fractional Insider: How do you choose the projects and clients you collaborate with?
Ligia Adam: Usually, the main criteria for choosing collaborations are the alignment between a potential partner’s needs and the expertise I bring, the potential impact I could have, and my desire to learn or deepen my knowledge in a certain field or industry. But in the end, a collaboration only happens if there is a match—that is, a values fit—on both sides. There is always this initial exploration phase, usually a more in-depth discussion, followed by a strategy proposal, which once agreed upon is then tested, and if everything aligns, you subsequently become part of the client’s team.
Fractional Insider: Tell us about a moment when you had a major impact as a fractional leader.
Ligia Adam: I’ve helped successfully take many projects to market. For example, I supported the strategic positioning and alignment with international B2B standards of a product that until then had only regional success. Although my involvement was punctual, the suggested direction laid the foundations for a product pivot that led to business growth without major technical or operational effort. For another client, I tripled the number of leads simply through niche-targeted content, while for another the impact meant doubling online orders by refining certain e-commerce functionalities and the communication strategy. In my most recent role, for a cleantech company, the impact of my work translated into a shift from B2B subcontracting through third parties to direct contracting with one of the major real estate developers, with all the associated direct benefits. There were also moments, however, when the major impact I brought was precisely clarifying clients’ unrealistic expectations.
Fractional Insider: What are the main differences between being a full-time executive and a fractional one?
Ligia Adam: As a full-time executive, you acknowledge and have to play by all the internal rules of the organization—related to people, resources, schedule, organizational culture, budgets, processes, procedures—which can all be very energy-consuming, while a fractional has the luxury but also the responsibility to detach or find shortcuts or efficient alternatives that ensure delivery of what was agreed. As a fractional, you are also a project manager, lead, coordinator, and execution owner, as well as a partner, but without the extra fluff that comes with a full-time role. Another practical difference is that as a fractional you juggle two or three clients simultaneously, which for me at the moment means one ongoing client in a fractional CMO role and capacity for one or two additional project-based collaborations. This requires constant context switching between different clients and a lot of discipline in managing your schedule efficiently, but these are muscles that develop over time. I was trained early in my career working in a communication agency with diverse clients, and I think working as a fractional is quite similar in many ways.
Although fractional involvement often means availability similar to a full-time role and can extend from project-based into an ongoing role, the major difference, in my view, lies in who you report to, who sees you as a limited resource and a partner. It’s a balancing act between autonomy and accountability, because although both are required, another difference is that from a fractional position you often need to go through a larger internal approval process, compared to a traditional role that has other levers to “skip” steps or obtain internal buy-in.
Fractional Insider: How do you explain the value of a fractional to a skeptical CEO?
Ligia Adam: In short, it’s like a paid trial for access to specialized, senior-level experience. It means seriousness, involvement, responsibility, professionalism, and access to diverse experience and a broader business perspective, from which the value delivered materializes as specialized support in complex projects (for example, one-time or high-level initiatives) and a fresh perspective that adds, removes, or confirms where internal teams have failed to convince.
For example, a few years ago I was contracted on a one-off basis by a gaming studio to define the competitive positioning for an innovative game still in development, positioned at the intersection of two or three industries. A very interesting and challenging project, it involved market research and competitive intelligence across multiple industries. However, skepticism from leadership about choosing and testing a go-to-market direction meant that the game has still not been launched today, after multiple iterations and explorations. So, from my point of view, skepticism usually hides certain fears that are not essentially directly related to the fractional role, even beyond contracting.
Most executives are skeptical about hiring consultants (fractional or external collaborators) because there is this perception—stemming more from language, I think—that a consultant only gives advice and doesn’t actually get their hands dirty, which in my experience is not true. In an initial phase, yes, there is a proposed direction, usually different, bolder, or riskier, for approaching certain projects, but a professional consultant is not there just to give idealistic advice, execute none of what they recommend, avoid accountability for potential failure, or fail to warn about immediate effects such as short-term drops before growth appears (for example, in a classic website or product functionality upgrade). Quite the opposite.
Fractional Insider: What are the most common mistakes companies make when working with fractionals?
Ligia Adam: Not validating the collaboration fit is, I think, the most common mistake. Companies usually end up working with fractionals either organically, through recommendations and others’ experiences, or through cold contracting, and there it’s quite difficult to differentiate between someone who knows how to sell themselves very well and someone who actually brings concrete value.
This fit is very simply validated through an in-depth discussion where something needs to click. If that click doesn’t exist on both sides, the collaboration is usually not very successful. Another frequent mistake is ego. Hiring a fractional means precisely calling on an external source to cover an unmet internal need or skill. There are always internal people who have multitasking or upskilling capabilities in certain areas, but who usually have other responsibilities, and at the beginning of each collaboration a fractional faces the need to prove that calling for extra help was indeed necessary, both to internal teams and to leadership. Until the added value brought by a fractional is proven, the ego of “but couldn’t we have done x ourselves?” can erode the collaborative relationship.
Fractional Insider: How do you see the evolution of this career model in the coming years?
Ligia Adam: I think there have always been people who wear multiple hats, who have varied, complementary, or transferable skills, who have multiple jobs or multiple income streams, who know how to do—and do—several things in parallel. From professionals who work in an industry and teach at universities about that field, to programmers who turned their passion for photography into paid gigs. They are also fractionals. The fractional role is not new at all; it just has a trendier name now, invented and popularized by Artificial Intelligence.
But the evolution from “I do a side gig now and then” to “I work fractional as a professional, I have multiple clients” will probably become increasingly common from now on, especially as it is predicted that with the widespread active use of Artificial Intelligence, the list of actual abilities, skills, and aptitudes will become much more valuable than popular fixed and “secure” roles. And as AI automates many repetitive tasks and is already actively used in creative industries, from writing code to design or content creation, organizations will increasingly need responsible, trustworthy human expertise precisely for strategic thinking, nuance, differentiation, and personalization—exactly what a fractional brings.
Fractional Insider: What advice would you give to a senior professional considering becoming fractional?
Ligia Adam: From my point of view, all senior professionals with multiple and extensive experiences should be open to fractional roles, even if not necessarily exclusively fractional. Work, effort, and results are the main portfolio that recommends you, and your network, strong professional ethics (from respecting NDAs and non-compete clauses, etc.), and the drive to pursue this path are, in my experience, what help someone take the first steps. Alternating with a full-time job is also a good start, if the full-time job allows and accepts it, but transitioning to fractional roles should happen with at least two clients, for greater stability. One last piece of advice: you need to be financially prepared for the first six months, because in fractional mode cash flow is much more unpredictable than in full-time, even if in the long term it can be more rewarding.
What happens next depends, of course, on perseverance, balance in choosing collaborations, flexibility or backup resources in case of periods without collaborations, and luck, but it always helps to highlight the skills that make you professionally valuable.
Ligia Adam’s story clearly reflects the maturation of the fractional model beyond trends and labels.
