Fractional CTO Services - North Star IT
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Fractional CTO

Senior tech leadership
without the full-time hire.

For funded startups, scaling SMBs, and family businesses with a technical product. A few hours a week of senior CTO time: architecture, hiring, vendor management, build-vs-buy calls, and board reporting in a language non-technical execs can act on.

What's included

Everything you need, none of the upsell.

Real deliverables, with the boundaries written down. So you know what you're paying for and what counts as extra.

Architecture

The decisions that compound.

Stack choice, hosting, database, observability, security. The bets you make now decide what your team does for years.

Hiring

Job specs through reference checks.

Engineering interviews, scorecards, and reference calls. So you hire signal, not just whoever applied first.

Vendor

Negotiate from a position of know.

We've seen the contracts and the gotchas. We negotiate with you instead of just for you.

Board Reporting

Tech in business language.

Quarterly board updates that show progress, risk, and spend in terms your non-technical board members can absorb.

How it works

The order we work in.

A clear sequence so you can budget time, money, and risk against the work.

Step 01

Embed.

Two-week immersion. Stand-ups, code reviews, vendor calls. Get the lay of the land.

Step 02

Plan.

30/60/90 day plan with the top three things that will move the needle. Approved by founder.

Step 03

Operate.

Weekly cadence with the team plus monthly with founders. Quarterly board prep.

Step 04

Scale.

Hire in the gaps. Hand off ownership cleanly. We're not trying to be permanent.

Get a quote on fractional cto.

Tell us a bit about your environment and we'll come back with a scoped proposal in two business days. No obligation, no pressure.

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