Provincial funding across Nova Scotia has been cut significantly. Most organizations’ budgets are tighter than they were a year ago. And somewhere in the mix, there’s a gap: a function that’s under-resourced, a role that’s been quietly piling onto someone else’s plate, or a capability the team has never really had but has gotten away without.
The conversation usually goes something like this: “We know we need help with X. But we can’t afford to hire right now.”
That’s an understandable response. But it also conflates the problem with the solution.
The assumption built into “we can’t afford to hire” is frequently that solving the problem requires adding a full-time employee. But the problem doesn’t ask how it gets solved, it just asks that it be solved.
This isn’t unique to nonprofits. The same pattern shows up in SMEs navigating a tightening economy. Owner-operators pulling back on spending will often absorb a functional gap rather than fill it, treating inaction as the conservative choice when it usually isn’t. A marketing function running on fumes or an operations role distributed across people who were already stretched thin tends to compound. The cost just doesn’t arrive as a single line item.
The core problem is in the assumption that the options are binary: hire full-time, or don’t solve the problem. But the binary would only make sense if hiring was the only way to bring expertise into an organization.
A controller brought in on a fractional basis for 12 to 15 hours a week isn’t a consolation prize for organizations that can’t afford a full-time finance lead. It’s a different structure for accessing the same expertise.
In fact, most organizations already access senior expertise on a non-FTE basis: the lawyer on retainer, the IT contractor who comes in for specific projects, the accountant who isn’t on the payroll but knows your books inside out – fractional, project and contract professionals you may already be using yourself.
The hidden org chart already exists. The question is whether it extends past the lawyer and the accountant to the gaps and roles that are currently being carried by the wrong people.
For Atlantic Canadian nonprofits specifically, the math on this has shifted. While government funding has decreased, the mandate hasn’t. Programs keep running; staff still need to be managed; funders still want solid reporting. If anything, the need for strong financial oversight and operational discipline increases when resources shrink instead of decreasing.
A $2 million nonprofit that’s been told to do more with less can’t afford to leave its finance function on autopilot. And it probably can’t budget a $120,000 salary for a Controller either. But 15 hours a week of experienced financial leadership? That’s a different number.
“…most organizations already access senior expertise on a non-FTE basis: the lawyer on retainer, the IT contractor who comes in for specific projects, the accountant who isn’t on the payroll but knows your books inside out…”
The same logic applies to the entrepreneur who’s been carrying the operations function personally because “we’re not big enough to justify a hire.” There’s a threshold where that stops being scrappy and starts being a drag on growth. That line usually comes earlier than the entrepreneur realizes.
When the right person steps into that role, even for 15 hours a week, the first thing that changes is usually clarity. Someone owns it. Decisions that were getting quietly deferred start getting made. The work that was sitting on the ED’s or CEO’s desk at 10pm goes somewhere it belongs. That’s not an argument for fractional work as a concept. It’s just what happens when a gap gets filled by the right person instead of distributed to the wrong ones.
The organizations that figure this out have pivoted from “can we afford to bring someone in?” to “what is this gap actually costing us?” That’s a different calculation, and usually a more honest one.
If the funding has shrunk, or the economy has made growth harder, the answer isn’t to leave the problem in place. It’s to solve it differently.
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