Virtual CIO (vCIO) Consulting
Virtual CIO consulting
Executive technology leadership on a fractional basis. One person owns the roadmap and the budget and deals with the vendors, including the awkward conversation with the provider who’s been coasting. It’s a monthly retainer, a fraction of a full-time hire.
Why companies call at this stage
Somewhere past the first few dozen employees, technology decisions get too expensive to leave to whoever has a free afternoon. Which platform to standardize on, how much to spend on the laptop refresh, whether the MSP’s quote is fair. A full-time CIO to answer those is expensive, and usually premature.
A virtual CIO gives you that judgment on a retainer. We sit with your leadership team and turn the business plan into a technology plan. Then we hold the vendors to what they promised and make sure the plan gets executed, by your team or by us or by another provider.
What a vCIO engagement covers
- IT strategy and a 12-month roadmap that lines up with the business plan
- Budget planning, plus a second opinion on any vendor quote
- Vendor management, from SLA enforcement through to scoring an RFP
- Compliance and security planning ahead of an audit or a cyber-insurance renewal
- Policies and documentation standards your internal team will follow
- Business continuity and disaster-recovery planning
- Training plans for staff, and mentoring for whoever runs IT internally
- Quarterly business reviews with a progress report
- On-call access for decisions that can't wait
From first call to first quarterly review
01 Discovery
Business goals, what's in place today, what you spend, and what leadership is worried about.
02 Health Check & Audit
A documented baseline: infrastructure and security posture, the software stack, the vendors, the compliance gaps.
03 Roadmap and budget
Initiatives in priority order, each with a cost and an owner and the business outcome it's meant to serve.
04 Monthly cadence
Monthly sessions and vendor oversight, with decisions handled in between and a quarterly review with your executives.
Where the line is
Included
- Strategy, budgets, governance, vendor oversight
- Reporting your leadership can read, and a second opinion on any decision
- Coordinating the execution, whoever ends up doing it
Not included
- Hands-on engineering and helpdesk (that's Speed and Flow)
- Legal review of contracts (we read them alongside your counsel, we don't replace them)
- Guarantees about vendors we don't control
vCIO questions
Is this the same as a fractional CTO?
In practice, for most of the companies we work with, it’s the same job. Some use ‘CTO’ for product-facing technology and ‘CIO’ for internal systems. If your product needs its own engineering leader, we’ll say so early.
Can the vCIO oversee our existing MSP?
That’s one of the more common reasons people start. We read the contract and measure what’s delivered against the SLA. From there it’s either a repaired relationship or a clean RFP.
What does it cost relative to a hire?
A fractional engagement is a monthly retainer sized to how often you need us. Our article on virtual CIOs walks through how to compare that with a full-time salary.
Put a technology leader in the room.
Start with a strategy call, or read the guide on when a virtual CIO pays for itself.