STOP STAFFING. START SOLVING.
By LESLEY HOLMES, Beneath The Gloss
Every Thursday, THE BOARD brings you industry insights from our Members to your inbox.
WHAT IF IT WAS POSSIBLE?
I ask this question to every client who comes to me stuck.
What if it was possible? If you had a magic wand — no limitations, no constraints, no budget excuses — where would you be? What would you build? What problem would finally be solved?
Most leaders haven't let themselves answer that question honestly in a long time. They're so locked into what exists, the org chart, the current team, the roles they can afford to fill, that they've stopped imagining what's actually possible. And in doing so, they're leaving an enormous amount of value on the table.
Here's what I want to challenge: the idea that your full-time team is the ceiling of what your business can do. And that fractional talent is just for filling traditional roles in less time.
THE PROBLEM WITH HOW WE THINK ABOUT TALENT.
When something isn't working, a department underperforming, a brand that's lost its edge, a team that can't break through, the default response is to hire. Post a job. Find someone to fill the role. And maybe that's the right answer. But more often than not, it's not a hiring problem. It's a problem that requires a specific kind of thinking, a specific skill set, or a specific perspective that your current team simply doesn't have. AND may never need it again after it's solved.
We've been trained to think about talent in terms of roles. CMO. Head of Operations. VP of Strategy. But roles are containers. They describe a function. They don't describe a problem. And the most interesting, high-leverage work rarely fits neatly inside a container.
The better question isn't: what role do I need to fill?
It's: what do I actually need to solve? Where am I underoptimized? What opportunity am I missing because I don't have the capability in-house? And who has already solved this exact thing before?
THERE’S A WORLD OF TALENT OUT THERE THAT ISN’T LOOKING FOR A JOB.
There is an extraordinary pool of senior, experienced, battle-tested talent operating outside of traditional employment right now. People who have built brands, scaled companies, turned around struggling teams, and solved the exact problems you're dealing with. They're not on the job market. They're consulting, advising, doing fractional work — and they're choosing it because it lets them do the work they're actually best at.
These are people with 20-plus years of experience who decided they'd rather go deep on the right problems than manage politics in the wrong organization. They come in, see clearly, move fast, and don't need hand-holding. High-level talent you don't have to manage which, if you've ever tried to onboard a senior hire, you know is not nothing.
And most companies have absolutely no idea how to access this talent, because they're still thinking in roles.
THINK DIFFERENTLY ABOUT WHAT’S POSSIBLE.
So back to the magic wand. If you could solve anything, build anything, fix anything, what would it be?
Maybe you have a brand that needs a complete rethink, but you don't need a full-time team to execute it. You need one brilliant strategist for a focused project, and junior people to carry it out.
Maybe you're vetting a new market or new direction, and instead of spending six months deliberating internally, you bring in two or three people who've been there before and do a one-day offsite. The volume of insight and clarity you get from a room of experienced minds in a single day is genuinely staggering. I've seen it change the trajectory of a business.
Maybe you have a department that isn't working and you can't figure out why. This is actually one of my favorite things to do. Two of my last consulting clients came to me with teams that were broken, underperforming in ways they couldn't diagnose. I came in and looked at everything: the people, the structure, the operations, the brand, the pricing. Not just marketing. Everything. Because that's what I do. I have the ability to walk into a room, read the systems and the people quickly, and see straight through to the problem — and then figure out how to fix it. That's one of my superpowers. And everyone in this talent pool has their own version of it.
That's the thing most companies are missing. They're trying to fit extraordinary, specialized people into generic containers. Instead of asking what role someone can fill, ask what they're uniquely wired to do. What have they spent 20 years getting really, really good at? What do they see that others can't? Access that. Use it. You'll get better results in three months than you would from a full-time hire in a year.
Maybe you don't have a crisis at all, but you have an opportunity. A new channel, a new audience, a capability you want to build. You need someone who's built it before to set the foundation, not a full-time hire you're committed to indefinitely.
This is the Swiss army knife of your dreams. Problem solvers. Think-differently people. Senior talent who've seen enough to know what works and what doesn't, and who have no agenda other than solving your problem well.
START WITH THE OPPORTUNITY, NOT THE ROLE.
Stop starting with the role. Start with the problem or the opportunity. Get specific. Where are you stuck? Where is the business underperforming? What capability do you wish you had? What would you build if you had the right person to build it with?
Then go find that person. Not a job description, a person who has solved that specific thing, at that level, in that context. They exist. They're probably not on LinkedIn applying for jobs. But they're out there, and they're looking for the right problem.
The companies that learn to think this way — that treat talent as a flexible, strategic resource rather than a fixed cost — are going to move faster, solve harder problems, and build better things than the ones limiting themselves by thinking everything has to be a traditional role.
Which brings me to WE ARE THE BOARD.
I have never been part of a group of people quite like this. Senior leaders from across industries and around the globe, each with their own hard-won expertise, their own superpower, their own way of seeing. Generous, sharp, and genuinely motivated to help businesses think bigger and move faster. These are people who would love nothing more than to come in, help you solve the problem you've been stuck on, pressure-test the idea you're afraid to bet on, or build the thing you didn't think was possible, so you can stay focused on running your business.
Rethink what fractional means. It's not a part-time C-suite placeholder. It's not a cheaper version of a full-time hire. It's access to some of the most talented, experienced, and driven people in business — deployed exactly where and when you need them most.
What if it was possible? With the right people, it probably is.
You just have to ask the right question.
Lesley Holmes is the founder of Beneath The Gloss and a former CMO who spent 20+ years scaling beauty, wellness, and fashion brands to $250M+. She now works at the intersection of business strategy, brand, and well-being, helping leaders and organizations access the full range of what they're capable of and building communities of connection.
Access to this expertise starts here: www.wearetheboard.co
THE BOARD sits at the intersection of Brand, Business, and Culture—offering fractional leadership, project-based experts, and curated DREAM TEAMS to help you move faster, smarter, and with far less risk. info@theboard.community
