The invisible cost
When a business loses a senior commercial person, the conversation is usually about the recruitment cost, the handover risk and the time to productivity of the replacement. What rarely gets calculated is the cost of the gap itself: the pipeline that decays, the relationships that go cold, the opportunities missed or taken by a competitor during the period when no one is actively running the commercial function.
That cost is invisible because it shows up as revenue not generated rather than money spent. It never appears on a P&L. But it is real, and for most professional services businesses it is significantly larger than the transition costs that do appear.
What happens during a commercial gap
Pipeline decays faster than most founders expect. A warm opportunity that is not followed up within two weeks moves from warm to uncertain. Within a month it has likely progressed to a competitor or been deprioritised by the prospect. A pipeline that looks healthy in a spreadsheet can be functionally empty within sixty days of active commercial management stopping.
Relationships drift on a similar timeline. Contacts being actively developed revert to neutral once the deliberate attention stops. The relationships do not disappear, but the warmth that makes them commercially useful does.
The compounding effect is the part that is hardest to see in real time. A missed opportunity in month one is not just one piece of revenue. It is the client relationship that would have generated introductions, the reference that would have opened a door, the case study that would have supported the next pitch.
Putting numbers to it
For a professional services business with an average client value of £25,000 and a typical sales cycle of three months, a six-month commercial gap might cost two or three new client relationships. That is £50,000 to £75,000 in first-year revenue, before lifetime value is applied.
The rough calculation: take the number of months the commercial function has been running below capacity, multiply by the number of new client relationships you would expect in a healthy commercial month, and multiply by average client lifetime value. The number is usually uncomfortable.
Why fractional is faster than a permanent hire
A permanent commercial hire takes three to four months to recruit, one to two months to onboard, and three to six months to reach full productivity. That is eight months minimum before the gap is genuinely closed.
A fractional engagement produces commercial output from the first month. The cost of continuing the gap for eight months while a permanent hire is recruited and settles in is, for most businesses, significantly higher than the cost of a fractional engagement that starts immediately.