Fractional
communications director.

A senior partner at A&C acts as your communications director. They sit at your table, not at arm's length sending over deliverables. They own the thinking: where the brand is going, what the messaging should be, where the budget should go and what to stop doing.

This is the same judgement a larger company would hire in at director level. The difference is that you share it rather than carry it alone, and you get our wider team behind it rather than one person doing everything.

A director-level hire in-house is a six-figure commitment before you count recruitment, the wait and the risk of getting it wrong. Most growing businesses do not have a role that size to fill yet, but they do have decisions that need someone of that calibre to make them. This is the way to get the second without paying for the first.

We built this for two kinds of organisation that tend to have the same problem from opposite directions.

The first is the funded, scaling company, typically in fintech or financial services and at the point where communications have outgrown whoever is holding them together. The marketing is happening, but nobody senior is steering it. The website says one thing, the sales team says another, and decisions about spend get made by whoever shouts loudest. What is missing is not effort. It is someone with the seniority to decide what matters and the authority to make it stick.

The second is the NGO or foundation, where the cause is clear but the voice keeps getting pulled apart. Trustees want one thing, funders expect another, and the appeal that has to land before the end of the financial year is being written by whoever has a free afternoon. A communications director on retainer takes that weight off the leadership team and holds the voice steady, so the supporter who reads the newsletter and the funder who reads the bid recognise the same organisation.

In both cases the test is the same. If your communications have outgrown whoever is currently holding them together, but a full-time director is more than you need or can justify, this is the engagement for you.

We work on retainer, from £5,000 a month with a six-month minimum. Communications is not a one-off project, and the value of a director compounds, so a short engagement would not do either of us justice.

Every engagement starts with a discovery phase. We learn the organisation, the audience and where the communications are actually leaking value. Discovery usually turns up the same kind of thing: a website that describes a business it stopped being two years ago, three different versions of what the organisation does depending on who you ask, money going into channels nobody can show a return on. Often the most useful decision in the first month is not what to start but what to stop. If we are not the right fit, we will tell you plainly and early.

From there, the work can be shaped around what you need most.

• On retainer, with the director steering the whole communications function over time.
• On a defined campaign, where the director leads a specific push from strategy through to delivery.
• On a project, where you need senior leadership for one piece of work rather than the standing function.

Your director is the constant. Behind them sits A&C's wider team, brought in as the work demands it, so you are never relying on a single person's bandwidth.

You get director-level judgement, applied to your organisation, week in and week out. That means the strategy is set by someone who has done it before, the brand stays consistent everywhere your customers and supporters meet it and the money you spend on communications is held to account.

You also get the rest of A&C. When the work calls for design, digital, advertising or delivery, your director draws on the team rather than sending you off to find another supplier. The thinking and the getting it done live in the same place.

And you get all of it now, sized to your organisation, from £5,000 a month. The seniority arrives this month, not after the six months it takes to recruit and the six more it takes a new director to find their feet.

A director decides where the marketing should go. Some organisations need more than that decided for them. They need the marketing actually made, shipped and reported on, every month, not steering they still have to find people to act on.

For them we run the Outsourced Marketing Team. It gives the SME a team that owns the whole function, strategy, content, media and reporting, with the spend discipline to match, from £10,000 a month. It is the right engagement when what you are short of is the doing as well as the direction, not just a senior head to set the course.

If you are not sure which is the right fit, that is exactly the kind of thing the first conversation is for.