On this page, CRO means Chief Revenue Officer (CRO): the executive accountable for sales, pipeline and forecast. Chief Risk Officer, Chief Restructuring Officer, Conversion Rate Optimization and Contract Research Organization are unrelated uses of the same three letters.
A fractional Chief Revenue Officer is a senior revenue executive who runs your sales, pipeline and forecast part-time, typically one to three days per week, under a retainer of six to twelve months. You get an operator who has carried a number before, without the cost, the equity and the hiring risk of a full-time Chief Revenue Officer.
I am Andre Magrini and I live and work in the Chicago area. From 2019 to 2022 I took the Ag Growth International Brazil operation from roughly $35M to more than $150M in revenue, moving from National Sales Manager to General Manager. From 2022 to 2025 I ran the United States and Canada as Director for North America, selling through dealers and OEM accounts and directly into feedlots. About 48 leaders sat inside the structure I was responsible for.
Why a Chicago-based revenue leader, specifically
This is a practical argument, not civic pride. Three things follow from the address, and each of them costs or saves you real money.
Central time covers the entire continent inside business hours
At 9:00 in Chicago it is 10:00 in New York and 7:00 in Los Angeles. At 16:00 in Chicago it is 17:00 in New York and 14:00 in Los Angeles. One working day reaches both coasts, plus Toronto, Calgary and Monterrey, without anyone taking a call at an unreasonable hour. A revenue leader on the west coast loses the first three hours of the eastern day, every day, and in a channel business those hours are when dealers actually answer the phone.
The same clock reaches Brazil
Chicago sits two to three hours behind Brazil depending on the season, because Brazil no longer observes daylight saving time and Chicago does. That is a workable overlap: a Sao Paulo executive team and a Chicago revenue leader share most of the working day. From the Pacific coast the same gap is four to five hours, which in practice means one shared hour and a lot of decisions that wait until tomorrow.
This matters if your revenue depends on both markets, which it does for any Latin American company selling into the United States and for any United States company running suppliers or operations in South America. The US market entry page covers that work in detail. O’Hare also runs nonstop overnight service to Sao Paulo, which turns a Brazil trip into two working days rather than four.
Chicago is a two-hour flight from most of North American industry
O’Hare and Midway together reach nearly every mid-size industrial market in the United States and Canada with a direct flight, and a large share of them inside two hours. In a business where the deal is decided in a plant, a yard or a dealership, the cost of being in the room is a scheduling question rather than a travel budget question. That is a different operating reality from running an industrial channel out of a coastal city.
The Chicago agriculture and food corridor
Chicago is the commercial capital of American agriculture and food, and almost nobody selling fractional revenue leadership here uses it.
Corn, soybean, wheat, live cattle and lean hog futures are priced at CME Group in the Loop, which means the prices that set your customers’ willingness to spend are set a few blocks from where I work. The city and its collar counties hold the headquarters or major operations of a large share of American food and agribusiness: ADM in Chicago, Conagra Brands and Mondelez in the Loop and River North, McDonald’s in the West Loop, Kraft Heinz in the city, Ingredion in Westchester and CF Industries in Deerfield. Deere and Company sits in Moline, at the western edge of the state. The stockyards that made this a meatpacking city are gone, and the commercial infrastructure they created is not.
The trade calendar follows the same logic. McCormick Place hosts the National Restaurant Association Show and PACK EXPO in its Chicago years, IFT FIRST brings the food science and ingredient world here, and the Farm Progress Show alternates between Decatur, Illinois and Boone, Iowa, both inside a day’s drive. For a food, ingredient, equipment or agtech company, a very large fraction of a year’s pipeline can be created within 200 miles of this address.
My operating history is inside that corridor rather than adjacent to it: grain handling, storage and processing equipment sold through dealers and OEM accounts, feed processing sold into feedlots, and Vice Chair of the Marketing and Communications Committee at the American Feed Industry Association. The full sector view is on the agtech and agribusiness page.
Who I work with here
Chicago revenue is industrial, distributed and relationship-led far more than it is venture-backed software. The companies where this engagement fits, by sector:
- Food, beverage and ingredients in the city and the western suburbs, with long qualification cycles and technical buyers
- Agriculture, agtech and equipment across the collar counties and downstate Illinois, selling through dealers and cooperatives
- Industrial manufacturing and distribution in the Elk Grove Village, Itasca, Addison and Aurora corridors, where the channel is the revenue system
- Logistics, packaging and materials handling along I-55 and I-80 and around the Joliet and Elwood intermodal terminals
- B2B technology and services in the West Loop, Fulton Market and River North, selling into the industrial base rather than into other software companies
- Family-held and private equity-owned mid-market companies anywhere in the metro, at the point where founder-led selling has stopped scaling
How we meet
Local buying is decided on logistics, so here is the logistics.
- In person, weekly, for clients in the metro. One scheduled day per week on site as the default, and the pipeline review happens in the room rather than on a call
- Travel radius at no additional cost: the six-county Chicago metro plus northwest Indiana and southeast Wisconsin. Beyond that, travel is billed at cost and pre-approved by you
- Out-of-state clients are welcome. The default is one or two on-site blocks per month, planned around your review cadence and your customer events, with the rest of the work done remotely on your clock
- Customer visits count as work, not as extras. If your revenue is decided in plants, yards and dealerships, a revenue leader who never leaves the office is diagnosing from a spreadsheet
- Airports: O’Hare and Midway, which is why an out-of-state engagement here is scheduling rather than logistics
What a Chicago engagement costs
Most firms in this category will not answer that question. Of the nine sites ranking on page one of Google for “fractional CRO” in August 2026, seven publish no dollar figure at all, and one has a FAQ literally titled “How much does a fractional CRO cost?” that answers without a number. Here is the market data, with sources.
| Company revenue | Monthly range | Median |
|---|---|---|
| $3M to $10M ARR | $10,000 to $18,000 | $12,000 |
| $10M to $25M ARR | $15,000 to $25,000 | $18,000 |
| $25M to $50M ARR | $20,000 to $35,000 | $25,000 |
| Engagement shape | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Advisory only, no execution | $2,500 to $6,000 per month |
| Embedded, one day per week | $8,000 to $15,000 per month |
| Embedded, two days per week | $14,000 to $25,000 per month |
| Interim, three or more days per week | $22,000 to $40,000 per month |
How that lands in Chicago specifically. The published benchmarks are built mostly from B2B software portfolios. Chicago mid-market industrial, food and agriculture companies typically buy the one-day-per-week embedded shape rather than the interim shape, because the revenue system needs building while an existing team keeps running it. That puts the common local engagement between $10,000 and $18,000 per month with a six-month minimum, and travel inside the metro included. A company with an empty revenue seat and a live quarter buys the interim shape instead, and it costs more because it is more days.
Compare either number to the alternative. A full-time Chief Revenue Officer in the United States runs roughly $230,000 base and $295,000 to $320,000 fully loaded before equity, and across more than 1,000 real assignments Vendux reports an average fractional monthly fee of $11,732 at an average hourly rate of $225 in 2025, with an average assignment length of 9.7 months at 14.6 hours per week and 88 percent of engagements structured as retainers.
That comparison has a second half that rarely appears in the business case. Harvard Business Review put average Chief Revenue Officer tenure at 25 months, among the shortest in the C-suite, and found that 62 percent of companies see growth flatten or decline in the year following a CRO transition. Full detail on the cost page.
When should you hire a fractional CRO, and when should you not?
| Your situation | What to do |
|---|---|
| Under $3M, founder still closing every deal | Do not hire. Keep selling. You have not found the motion yet |
| $3M to $30M, founder-led selling has stalled | Fractional CRO. This is the window |
| Your VP of Sales just left and the quarter is live | Interim CRO, three or more days per week |
| The board has lost confidence in the forecast | Fractional CRO, starting with forecast governance |
| Above $50M with a working process | Hire full-time. You need someone in the building every day |
| Company in genuine crisis | Do not hire fractional. A crisis needs full attention |
This is not a fit if
- You want outsourced prospecting, a commission-only closer, or a sales training workshop
- You want advice without anyone internally owning the decisions. A fractional leader multiplies an owner and cannot replace one
- You need a Chicago address on a document rather than a revenue operator in the room
- Your product has not been bought by anyone yet. That is a product problem and geography does not solve it
- Your business is pure inside-sales software with no channel and no physical component. Someone whose whole career is that motion will beat me, and I will tell you so
What about the argument that fractional leadership does not work?
It is a fair argument and it has a well-known source. Jason Lemkin of SaaStr has written that a fractional VP of Sales almost never works, because the person is not living the company every day and is patching rather than building a system. Any board member who has read SaaStr will raise it.
Lemkin also named the two conditions under which he has seen it work: the fractional leader commits real time and owns the number, or the engagement explicitly includes finding and closing the full-time successor. I agree with both, so I write them into the engagement instead of arguing against them. If the right outcome is that you hire a full-time Chief Revenue Officer in nine months, then recruiting that person is part of my scope.
How the engagement actually runs
Most pages in this category sell the benefit and never describe the mechanism. Here is the mechanism.
Days 1 to 30. I establish the revenue baseline: ideal customer profile, pipeline stage definitions, forecast method, CRM reality, channel commitment, and the leadership cadence as it exists today rather than as the org chart describes it. The output is a written diagnosis naming the one or two constraints that actually move the number, presented to you and to the board.
Days 31 to 60. Forecast and pipeline governance goes in. Stage definitions get one meaning across marketing, sales and customer success. Decision rights get written down. I sit in the pipeline review every week, in person, not in a follow-up deck.
Days 61 to 90. The cadence runs with your leaders driving it. We measure adoption, conversion quality and forecast movement. Playbooks, dashboards and ownership transfer to your team, because the goal is that the system survives me.
Frequently asked questions
Do you work with companies outside Chicago?
Yes. About half of the work in this category is remote by design, and the on-site portion is planned in blocks. What Chicago buys you even at a distance is central time coverage of the whole continent and a two-hour flight to most industrial markets.
Are you actually based here, or is this a landing page?
I live in the Greater Chicago area and hold a US green card. The in-person cadence described above is the default, not an upsell.
Is a fractional CRO the same as a fractional Chief Revenue Officer?
Yes. The two terms describe the same role. “Fractional CRO” is the shorthand used in job postings and in most searches, and “fractional Chief Revenue Officer” is the spelled-out form used in contracts and board documents.
How long does a typical engagement last?
Nine to ten months is the market average and six months is the common contractual minimum. Roughly 60 percent of fractional engagements run six months or longer. Anything under three months is a project, not a revenue mandate, and it should be priced and scoped as one.
How fast can you start?
Weeks, not months. Across the market, nine in ten engagements close within three months and the average time from first conversation to a placed leader is 26 days. A traditional executive search for the same role takes eight to sixteen weeks before anyone starts.
Do you take equity?
Usually not below $15,000 per month. Where equity appears it is typically 0.1 to 0.5 percent with two-year vesting. Performance bonuses tied to revenue metrics are more common for Chief Revenue Officer engagements than for other fractional roles.
Do you speak Portuguese and Spanish?
Portuguese is my native language, I work in English daily in the North American market, and Spanish is workable for commercial conversation. For a Latin American company building revenue in the United States, that removes a translation layer from every internal conversation.
Start with the constraint
Send me what is breaking. If it is something I can fix, I will tell you how I would approach it. If it is not, I will say so in the first reply.
Related: what a fractional CRO does · agtech and agribusiness · interim CRO
Last updated: August 25, 2026.
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