One of Nina Sodhi’s most priceless memories is taking her son on a trip around the world during his summer vacation. The two traveled east until they hit the international date line. When their 55-day voyage ended, it was time for her son to go back to school and for Sodhi to go back to work.
Sodhi is a fractional CFO. She is part of a wave of mothers who find fractional work a better fit than full-time jobs while raising a young child. She does part of a full-time job for part of the pay, often for multiple companies simultaneously.
Fractional work’s popularity is rising at a time when the relationship between corporate America and working mothers seems unusually strained. Moms feel crushed by the childcare crisis, skyrocketing costs, conflicts between work and kids’ schedules, and perpetual pressure. Meanwhile, companies contend with volatility from war, tariffs, and AI. Mothers need relief. Companies can’t give any.
Fractional work can help both sides.
For companies, fractional work solves several problems. First, because a fractional worker does part of a full-time job, they often cost less than a full-time employee in cash compensation, and benefits are typically not offered to fractional workers. Second, fractional roles are temporary by design, so they tend to be variable costs instead of fixed. This cushions companies in case of a downturn. Third, fractional workers tend to be experienced and entrepreneurial, needing little oversight to deliver quality output. Companies use fractional talent to cover for a growing business unit or an employee on leave, while recruiting the right full-time candidate, or to retain departing employees part-time.
How Fractional Work Helps Mothers
I asked three mothers of young children why they prefer fractional work over full-time. Their responses revealed three key benefits.
1. Time
The mothers unanimously agreed fractional work gave them freedom over their time that no other job could. Sodhi explained, “I get to fully control my calendar and [be] available for school pickup, field trips, [and] homework help.” Because clients don’t expect her full availability, she rarely cancels commitments for her child, and can also carve out time for herself.
Beyond scheduling meetings, fractional work also helps with parental leave. Neeharika Bhartiya, a fractional sales leader, negotiated her maternity leave with each client individually, instead of being locked into a single company’s policy. Bhartiya was pleasantly surprised to find that many clients chose to work around her schedule.
As the child grows up, fractional roles let mothers fine-tune their workloads depending on whether their family needs more income or more parental time. Whereas traditional employment forces a binary choice between working full-time or not at all, fractional workers can adjust their load on a client and project level anytime. This flexibility allowed Sodhi to schedule a big strategic sprint to end in June, at the midyear point. She then took the rest of the summer off to travel around the world with her son during his vacation. That worked well for Sodhi’s client, who was ready for another strategic sprint when she returned in September.
2. Money
All three mothers emphasized that they earned more as fractional workers than in full-time jobs. As Marie Rachelle, a fractional digital marketing architect, wrote: “Higher hourly earning potential allows me to buy back time for my family without sacrificing professional impact.”
Compared with the salary in her last full-time role, Neeharika Bhartiya found that fractional work pays her three times as much per hour on a cash basis from her multiple clients. After factoring in the cost of benefits, fractional work still pays more than double her previous full-time role. Some fractionals, like Sodhi also receive equity in the form of adviser shares, so they have upside in the companies they are building.
3. Better work
The mothers I interviewed agreed: The actual substance of the work also improved when they went fractional. There were three reasons. First, as a fractional, you have more choice. You decide which clients to work with, and what work is in scope for each client. Second, because your client-facing hours are limited, so is the amount of internal process. Rachelle explained, “In a traditional nine-to-five, your schedule is dictated by corporate theater or someone else’s urgency. Fractional work allows me to own every minute.” Sodhi agreed that after going fractional she can “focus on high impact work” instead of having her days stuffed with meetings. Fractional work also represents a transition from being an employee to running your own business. For Rachelle, the entrepreneurial element is priceless. She wrote: “In today’s market, full-time is often an illusion of security. Most employees are at-will. I’d rather bet on my own ability to build than on a corporation’s ability to keep my role funded.”
Limitations of Fractional Work
Fractional work has many advantages for mothers, but it also involves serious trade-offs. Health insurance, income predictability, and paid time off prompt many mothers to favor full-time employment. But for more entrepreneurial mothers, fractional work offers possibilities full-time jobs cannot. As Marie Rachelle put it, “while the logistical ‘cons,’ like taxes and insurance, are real, they are solvable puzzles. You can’t ‘solve’ for a lack of agency in a rigid corporate structure.”
Advice for Going Fractional
My interviewees had three pieces of advice for mothers considering a transition from full-time work to fractional.
First, it takes time to get product/market fit. Nearly four years passed before Sodhi found the fractional niche that delivered the “highest impact, highest income, and highest satisfaction,” as she put it. Once you have this fit, Sodhi wrote, you can easily articulate what problem you solve and find clients who need your help.
Second, Bhartiya cautioned new fractional workers to think carefully about pricing their work at a recurring rate (which leads to stable monthly revenue for you) as opposed to a one-off or variable rate (which might be an easier sell to cash-strapped companies). Either way, every fractional experiences both feast and famine. Sodhi reminded fractionals not to take a famine personally. It is part of the process.
Last, in perhaps a fitting move for a CFO, Sodhi urged mothers “to be money focused” in building their fractional business. “If it feels funny to be ‘money hungry’ for yourself (which is a weird but true issue with us mothers so let’s just say it out loud), then be money focused for your kids, your mortgage, and your retirement,” she wrote.
The decision to work fractionally instead of full-time is personal. But one theme emerged from these interviews that made a real difference to the mothers. Changing the rhythm of their workdays allowed them to show up differently in the rest of their lives.
Bhartiya explained it to me like this: Each week, there are a limited number of hours that a parent can allocate to work versus other responsibilities. Fractional roles relieve pressure through their flexibility. “There’s a shock absorbency in me to handle [motherhood] in a way that felt a lot more brittle when I had set hours, meetings back-to-back, and a ton of deadlines all the time,” she said. After going fractional, she told me with a smile, “I get to be the less stressed parent.”