This is an Open Coffee for Fractionals session — part of my coaching practice.
In this 20th and final Open Coffee session, we had a strong mix of new and familiar voices: Chris Hilton, Jim Grey, Michael Berris, Noel Putaansuu, and me. We dug into what it really means to build a fractional practice, how to structure offers, and where the pitfalls show up when you drift into agency models.
We got into:
No slides. No pitches. No agenda. Just honest conversation.
📅 Recorded September 15, 2025
🎙️ Hosted by David Raistrick
This is an Open Coffee for Fractionals session — part of my coaching practice.
Chris Hilton brought in a live dilemma: when a founder friend wants you full-time but you’re only willing to engage fractionally, how do you make it work?
We compared notes on retainers, boundaries, and the risks of equity-heavy compensation, while also detouring into business acquisitions, old cars, and the politics of refrigerants.
We got into:
No slides. No pitches. No agenda. Just honest conversation.
📅 Recorded September 8, 2025
🎙️ Hosted by David Raistrick
This is an Open Coffee for Fractionals session — part of my coaching practice.
Noel Putaansuu joined this session just before heading into a job interview. We compared buying a business versus getting a job, and dug into what it means to keep the lights on while still trying to build something bigger.
We talked about the lag on publishing Open Coffee episodes, batching content, and why LinkedIn Live isn’t worth the headache. Noel walked through his clean energy project, SAFE notes, and the search for a lead investor. We ended up in DevOps land: on-call culture, cowboy fixes, hero syndrome, and the strange red flags that show up in interviews.
We got into:
No slides. No pitches. No agenda. Just honest conversation.
📅 Recorded September 1, 2025
🎙️ Hosted by David Raistrick
This is an Open Coffee for Fractionals session — part of my coaching practice.
Michael Payne joined me for a Monday catch-up, where we compared notes on buying businesses, bidding on local chamber RFPs, and how AI is reshaping the work of fractionals.
We dug into how AI can empower rather than replace us — from drafting proposals and building lightweight SDLCs to quickly ramping up on new industries. Along the way, we also talked scams, old tech still hanging around, and the economics of big-tech hiring and layoffs.
We got into:
No slides. No pitches. No agenda. Just honest conversation.
📅 Recorded August 25, 2025
🎙️ Hosted by David Raistrick
This is an Open Coffee for Fractionals session — part of my coaching practice.
Michael Payne shared where he’s been focusing lately — getting more intentional about local networking, Rotary, and building visibility as he gets ready to launch his book, Beyond the Commit: The Human Side of Software Development. Preorder: https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Commit-Software-Development-English-ebook/dp/B0FP4239CD (available October 6, 2025)
From there we went wide. Fractional roles, DevOps tools, wood stove smoke sensors, HVAC systems, and how every business is now both a tech and a data business. It was one of those conversations where the connections kept surprising us.
We got into:
No slides. No pitches. No agenda. Just honest conversation.
📅 Recorded August 18, 2025
🎙️ Hosted by David Raistrick
This is an Open Coffee for Fractionals session — part of my coaching practice.
Chris Hilton joined this session as he considered stepping into the fractional CTO path. Kevin Knoepp and Diego Woitasen brought in their own perspectives from private equity portfolio work and consulting.
The conversation moved from DevOps history into the real challenges of building a fractional business: positioning, pricing, politics, and people.
We got into:
No slides. No pitches. No agenda. Just honest conversation.
📅 Recorded August 11, 2025
🎙️ Hosted by David Raistrick
This is an Open Coffee for Fractionals session — part of my coaching practice.
We started with Thomas Smith joining from his truck — peaceful, quiet, and ready to talk shop. That led straight into a deep dive on why shell scripts break developers’ brains, the difference between command languages and programming languages, and why determinism in infrastructure is mostly a myth.
From there, Michael Payne walked through turning a dev contract into a local fractional CTO role, and the pros and cons of offering small-town IT services as a lead-in to higher-value fractional work.
We got into:
No slides. No pitches. No agenda. Just honest conversation.
📅 Recorded August 4, 2025
🎙️ Hosted by David Raistrick
This is an Open Coffee for Fractionals session — part of my coaching practice.
Livio Zanardo jumped in mid-gaming break to share how his fractional practice has gone from quiet to bursting — enough that a waiting list might be next. We talked through picking the high-value work, parking the low-value stuff, and how calling yourself “fractional” makes strategic sales easier.
Stephen Lauck drew a hard line between strategy and delivery — why mixing them can bury the real work — and made the case that most companies don’t need a DevOps army, just a couple of great people to build and run the pipelines.
Michael Payne told a cautionary tale about a 30-person infrastructure team that couldn’t ship in over a year, and how that inability to deliver sank the project.
We got into:
No slides. No pitches. No agenda. Just honest conversation.
📅 Recorded July 28, 2025
🎙️ Hosted by David Raistrick.
This is an Open Coffee for Fractionals session — part of my coaching practice.
Ying Wang joined after a two-week grind chasing a timeout bug in DigitalOcean. The fix turned into a Michelin-star dinner for the engineer who stuck it out. She’s interim CTO for a mortgage tech startup, deep in B2B SaaS, and thinking about when to niche further — and when to shift from a single full-time client to a true fractional portfolio.
Matt DiBerardino came in mid-career transition, looking to figure out what “fractional” really means and how it overlaps with consulting. We dug into definitions, positioning, and why the label matters when you’re trying to be found.
We got into:
Noel Putaansuu brought live data from his smoke-measurement system — graphs for opacity and color shift — and the question of whether extra measurements matter when scientists only care about one. We talked about signal vs noise, what data actually gets used, and how you translate technical readings into customer-level value.
No slides. No pitches. No agenda. Just honest conversation.
📅 Recorded July 21, 2025
🎙️ Hosted by David Raistrick.
This is an Open Coffee for Fractionals session — part of my coaching practice.
Noel Putaansuu is a fire investigator, engineer, and inventor — building smart, wireless systems to help wood stoves burn cleaner than new. He’s got patents, prototypes, working sensors, and field testers — but he’s still solo.
This call turned into a go-to-market jam session: how to find the right partner, what a fractional CEO actually does, and why talking to chimney sweeps might matter more than raising VC.
Livio Zanardo helped frame the real ask — and connected the dots between regulated markets, retrofit demand, and business partnerships that actually work.
We got into:
No slides. No pitches. No agenda. Just honest conversation.
📅 Recorded July 14, 2025
🎙️ Hosted by David Raistrick
Join a future session | Explore the For Fractionals community
This is an Open Coffee for Fractionals session — part of my coaching practice.
Ben Mills talked through building his fractional CFO practice — from early referrals to cold outreach and content experiments. He shared how a single lucky LinkedIn Navigator DM turned into a client, and how he tracks everything to learn what works.
Diego Woitasen reflected on shifting from agency owner to solo consultant — and how a Kubernetes post from five years ago closed his biggest deal. We dug into long-tail content, building writing habits, and how fractional credibility shows up over time.
We got into:
No slides. No pitches. No agenda. Just honest conversation.
📅 Recorded July 7, 2025
🎙️ Hosted by David Raistrick
Join a future session | Explore the For Fractionals community
This is an Open Coffee for Fractionals session — part of my coaching practice.
Michael Payne joined for the first time and shared what it’s like going from consulting architect to fractional CTO — mostly solo, mostly govtech, mostly East Texas.
Adam White came in hot with a new positioning experiment: Technical Waste Management. His pitch? Let your best engineers build — I’ll clean up everything else.
Stephen Lauck mapped the CTO spectrum into three types: the fixer, the tech lead, and the customer-facing business mind.
We got into:
No slides. No pitches. No agenda. Just honest conversation.
📅 Recorded June 30, 2025
🎙️ Hosted by David Raistrick
Join a future session | Explore the For Fractionals community
This is an Open Coffee for Fractionals session — part of my coaching practice.
This one went deep on delivery models, retainers, and how different Fractionals think about packaging value — from finance to DevOps and everything in between.
Jim Grey just landed his first fractional gig and walked us through the process — from outreach to proposal to finally realizing: “I like building things and fixing things — but not running them forever.”
Ben Mills shared his shift from 25 years in public accounting to fractional CFO work — and how he now avoids time tracking entirely. His engagements focus on oversight, cash flow, and being the person the CEO actually talks to.
Stephen Lauck described a delivery-led DevOps model that blends software, team upskilling, and delivery artifacts — with pricing in the $15–20K/month range. His big win: skip the full-time hire and let us train your team with safety rails.
We got into pricing structures: onboarding fees, flat monthly retainers, and what happens when you remove hours from the conversation entirely.
Daniel Afonso talked about the gap between the content we want to make — and the content buyers actually connect with.
And we kept circling back to a core thread: The business outcome is usually money. Everything else is just flipping bits until you get there.
Also featuring:
📅 Recorded June 23, 2025
🎙️ Hosted by David Raistrick
Join a future session | Explore the For Fractionals community
This is an Open Coffee for Fractionals session — part of my coaching practice.
Noel Putaansuu joined us to talk about measuring smoke opacity, fine particulates, and what it’s like running a fractional business where you’re the engineer, the scientist, the marketer — and the only one who understands the chart.
Stephen Lauck cut straight to it: fractional work isn’t about technical hurdles — it’s about human ones. Internal politics. Indecision. Fear of making the wrong move. His advice? Flip a coin, pick a path, and iterate.
Adam White took that advice and used Claude to generate a lead gen playbook — then actually started messaging people he’d been putting off. AI as fractional accountability buddy? Maybe.
We ended on a core truth: authenticity sells. Don’t water yourself down. Don’t over-edit. Clients buy you — not your AI-polished LinkedIn twin.
No slides. No pitches. No agenda. Just honest conversation.
📅 Recorded June 16, 2025
🎙️ Hosted by David Raistrick
Join a future session | Explore the For Fractionals community
This is an Open Coffee for Fractionals session — part of my coaching practice.
This one got deep into the business of being Fractional:
Stephen Lauck and Sam Taggart swapped war stories about Zoom chaos, Teams pain, and what tool sprawl does to delivery flow.
Adam White shared his path from full-time to fractional to full-time again — and back — plus the existential dread of pitching live to other CTOs.
Meena Narsinghani broke down the challenge of straddling product and engineering — and how AI agents are already reshaping backlog grooming and user story generation.
Karl Schmidt brought back a report from Vancouver's Web Summit: AI is the question everyone’s asking — even if no one has answers yet.
We talked about selling advisory vs delivery, and how most clients still don’t understand what fractional is — or how to engage us. The line between contractor and peer is blurry, and structuring these relationships takes real work.
Also covered:
📅 Recorded June 2, 2025
🎙️ Hosted by David Raistrick
Join a future session | Explore the For Fractionals community
This is an Open Coffee for Fractionals session — part of my coaching practice.
This session went long and deep — and hit a lot of notes on what it actually means to run a fractional business.
Karl Schmidt, Lukas Czerwinski, Sam Taggart, Travis Russi, and Russ Waddell all joined. We talked about:
No slides. No pitches. No agenda. Just honest conversation.
📅 Recorded May 19, 2025
🎙️ Hosted by David Raistrick
Join a future session | Explore the For Fractionals community
This is an Open Coffee for Fractionals session — part of my coaching practice.
In this session, I talked with Daniel Afonso about what it’s like to be a fractional ops person trapped in a broken full-time environment — and what it takes to build a business around automating infrastructure.
We dug into:
Daniel’s trying to shift from payroll into a new vertical — and we talked through what it takes to pick a niche, build a POV, and actually get attention from the right people.
📅 Recorded May 12, 2025
🎙️ Hosted by David Raistrick
🎧 Guest: Daniel Afonso
Join a future session | Explore the For Fractionals community
This is an Open Coffee for Fractionals session — part of my coaching practice.
Livio Zanardo kicked this one off with a classic: “None of this happened until I started calling myself a fractional CTO.” The positioning shift that launched a bunch of new work.
We followed that thread all the way through pricing, nonprofits, fixed-fee framing, and how hard it is to back out of hourly once it’s in the room.
Then Adam White dropped a live demo of using Claude Code to generate a full production-ready website in a couple hours — SonarCloud checks, test coverage, design system and all. Not hypothetical. Not a toy. Real code, shipping soon.
Stephen Lauck and I pushed on that edge — if anyone can build anything now, where does the actual value live? (Spoiler: it’s not in scaffolding.)
The real job might be moving toward the producer seat: orchestrating meaning, outcomes, and connections. Especially when tools can generate endless sugar with no nutrition.
Other things we hit:
Participants: David Raistrick, Stephen Lauck, Adam White, Livio Zanardo, Diego Woitasen, Karan Krishnani
📅 Recorded June 9, 2025
🎙️ Hosted by David Raistrick
Join a future session | Explore the For Fractionals community
This is an Open Coffee for Fractionals session — part of my coaching practice.
Brian Ng, Karl Schmidt, and Jan Nala Thundi joined me for this one.
Karl was heading into Web Summit and dreading the small talk. We flipped it: what if it’s just a listening tour?
Brian shared how his post-Meta reconnection work has hinged on low-pressure follow-ups and long-tail relationships. Jan dropped signal from the UK finance market — fractional roles are underpaid, misunderstood, and rarely packaged well.
We got into:
No slides. No pitches. No agenda. Just honest conversation.
📅 Recorded May 26, 2025
🎙️ Hosted by David Raistrick
Join a future session | Explore the For Fractionals community
This is an Open Coffee for Fractionals session — part of my coaching practice.
Brian Ng was the very first guest at Open Coffee for Fractionals.
We talked about what it’s like to go from Director at Meta to solo fractional — and how weird it feels to sell yourself for the first time.
Brian's building his practice now: mentoring founders, advising startups, and figuring out what he doesn’t want to do — all while reconnecting with his network and exploring what kind of fractional CTO work actually fits.
We got into:
No script. No slides. Just honest conversation.
📅 Recorded May 5, 2025
🎙️ Hosted by David Raistrick
Join a future session | Explore the For Fractionals community
