The Problem Nobody Talks About
Your ERP is 15 years old. Changing anything takes months and requires your historical vendor who charges âŹ150/hour.
Your teams work in Excel. Orders in one file, accounting in another, logistics in a third. Nobody has the same version of the truth.
Your competitors ship features in weeks. Yours take months.
You hire more developers to go faster. You go slower.
Every time you fix a bug, two more appear. In different parts of the system. That shouldnât even be connected.
Your AWS bill doubled. Again. Your CTO or vendor says you need to âoptimize.â You optimize. Itâs still growing.
Senior developers quit after 6 months because theyâre tired of fighting the system instead of building product.
You want to add a new payment provider. âSimple,â you think. Your tech team estimates 3 months. You think theyâre joking. Theyâre not.
The worst part?
Everyone knows something is wrong.
Your CTO and IT team know it.
Your operational managers know it.
Your CFO is starting to ask questions about âIT ROI,â your investors about âtechnical roadmap.â
But nobody can fix it. Because fixing it means stopping. And stopping means falling further behind.
You need someone who can see the whole picture while your team keeps shipping.
Someone whoâs done this before.
Who knows what âgoodâ looks like.
Someone who makes sure every strategic technical decision
(architecture, infrastructure, tooling, team structure, âŠ)
doesnât just fix todayâs fireâbut prevents next quarterâs fires from starting.
Thatâs what a Fractional CTO does.
Technical decisions must serve your business goals - Not fight them.
Let's talk âWhy Your CTO Needs Help (Even If They Wonât Admit It)
Your CTO is good. Maybe great. But theyâre drowning.
Theyâre in back-to-back meetings. Theyâre fixing production incidents. Theyâre hiring. Theyâre firefighting. Theyâre explaining to investors why the roadmap slipped again.
They donât have time to think.
And strategic technology leadership isnât something you do between meetings. Itâs not a weekend project. It requires stepping back, seeing the system as a whole, and making decisions that will matter for years.
Thatâs where a Fractional CTO comes in.
Not to replace your CTO. Not to take over. But to be the external brain that thinks strategically while your internal team executes.
Give your CTO the strategic partner they need
Let's talk âWhat Makes Architecture Work (And What Doesnât)
Most âenterprise architectsâ will sell you a 120-slide PowerPoint deck with boxes and arrows.
Youâll nod politely. Your developers will ignore it. Nothing will change.
Hereâs the truth: architecture isnât about diagrams. Itâs about decisions.
The right architecture starts with one question: What value are we actually delivering?
Not: âWhatâs the coolest tech stack?â Not: âShould we do microservices?â Not: âHow do we scale to a billion users?â
But: âWhat are the core domains of our business, and how do we model them so our tech serves our goals instead of fighting them?â
Get your domain design right, and deployment becomes easy. Scaling becomes predictable. New features donât take 6 months anymore.
Get it wrong, and youâre re-platforming every 18 months while your competitors eat your lunch.
What a Fractional CTO Actually Does
This isnât a consultant who drops a report and disappears.
This is strategic partnership, on a flexible timeline.
Strategic Technology Leadership
We work with you on the decisions that matter:
- Architecture strategy: Where should your system go? Whatâs the 12-month technical vision?
- Build vs. buy decisions: When to use third-party solutions, when to build custom
- Tech stack evolution: What to keep, what to replace, what to modernize
- Team structure: How to organize engineering for speed and autonomy
- Technical roadmap: Aligning tech investments with business goals
Think of it as having a senior technology leader on speed-dial, without the full-time salary.
Architecture & System Design
Your domain design matters. A lot.
If you model your business domains correctly, everything else becomes easier. Deployment. Scaling. New features. Team independence.
Get it wrong, and youâre re-platforming every 18 months while your competitors eat your lunch.
We help you:
- Domain modeling: Breaking your system into clean, bounded contexts
- Event-driven architecture: Making services loosely coupled so changes donât cascade
- Cloud-native patterns: Building for resilience, not just âputting stuff in AWSâ
- Pragmatic modernization: Migrating away from legacy without a big-bang rewrite that never finishes
The goal isnât âperfect architecture.â Itâs architecture that lets you move fast without breaking everything.
TL;DR: We help you make the right technical decisions, implement them with your team, and build a roadmap that actually aligns with your business goals.
Hands-On Execution Support
Good strategy dies in PowerPoint if nobody implements it.
So we work with your team:
- Code reviews on critical paths
- Pairing sessions with your senior devs
- ADR (Architecture Decision Records) so decisions donât get lost
- Workshops to align product, engineering, and business
- Technical due diligence support for investors
CTO Coaching & Leadership
Your CTO isnât failing. Theyâre overloaded.
We help them:
- Prioritize technical debt vs. new features
- Communicate tech decisions to non-technical stakeholders
- Build a technical roadmap that aligns with business goals
- Mentor their senior engineers
- Prepare for board meetings and investor updates
This isnât a takeover. Itâs reinforcement.
Want this for your company?
Let's talk âWhy Work With Me
I'm on the ground when it matters.
Strategic thinking happens in calm. Execution happens under pressure.
When you need to step back and design the right architecture, we take the time to think. When that architecture needs defending in a room full of stakeholders, or when a critical decision needs to be made on-site, Iâm there.
Iâm based in the Netherlands and work across Belgium, Luxembourg, Western Germany, and Northern France. Amsterdam, Brussels, Cologne, Lilleâif youâre within 3 hours, I can be there.
Face-to-face matters for the moments that count: workshops, brainstorming sessions, critical architectural decisions, or aligning your entire leadership team around a technical roadmap.
I understand pragmatic European companies.
Youâre capital-efficient. You donât have infinite VC runway to âfigure it out later.â
You need technology that works now and scales laterânot the other way around.
Iâve worked with NS (Dutch Railways), LâOrĂ©al (digital supply chain), Thales (critical systems), and Mazars (IT transformation).
From critical infrastructure to growing SMEs: I know what âpragmaticâ means in tech terms: deliver value today while building foundations for tomorrow.
Who This Is For
This works best if:
- Youâre an established SME (50-500 people) digitalizing your operations and need tech leadership without hiring a full-time CTO
- Your IT is expensive (legacy ERP, Excel everywhere, multiple vendors) and you want to regain control without breaking everything
- Youâre a scale-up (50-200 people) thatâs outgrown its first architecture and tech is becoming a bottleneck
- Youâre a growing start-up (10-50 people) preparing for your next funding round and need strategic tech leadership
- Your CTO is overwhelmed and needs strategic backup to focus on execution
- Youâre entering a new market (Benelux, Germany, France) and need local technology expertise
This doesnât work if:
- Youâre pre-product-market fit and need hands-on development (you need a dev, not strategic counsel)
- You want someone to write all your code (I help your team level up, not replace them)
- You need a full-time employee for day-to-day operations (this is strategic leadership, not operational management)
How It Works
Step 1: Discovery Call (30 min, free)
We talk about your situation. No sales pitch. Just: âIs this actually a fit?â
If not, Iâll tell you. If yes, we move to step 2.
Step 2: Initial Assessment (1-2 weeks)
I dive into your context. Talk to your team. Look at your system, your roadmap, your constraints.
You get a clear report: whatâs broken, whatâs working, what to do next.
Step 3: Ongoing Partnership (Flexible)
Depending on your needs:
- 8-16 hours/month: Strategic guidance, key decisions, architecture reviews
- 2-3 days/month: Hands-on work with your team, pairing, workshops
- Project-based: Specific transformation (e.g., modernizing your architecture, preparing for Series B tech due diligence)
Youâre not locked in. You scale up or down as needed.
The Bottom Line
Your tech should be an accelerator, not an anchor.
If every new feature feels like pushing a boulder uphill, you need strategic help.
If your competitors are moving faster with smaller teams, you need strategic help.
If your CTO looks tired and says âwe need to refactor everything,â you need strategic help.
You canât fix strategic problems with more developers. You fix them with better decisions.
Thatâs what a Fractional CTO does.
Letâs Talk
No 120-slide decks. No enterprise buzzword bingo. Just a conversation about whether this makes sense for your company.
Book a 30-minute callâlet's see if we're a fit
Let's talk âOr email me directly at laurent@exxan.nl.