PROGRO
Every growing company reaches a point where gut instinct isn’t enough. You need dashboards, tracking, and proper reporting. The instinctive response? Hire a full-time data analyst.
But here’s the catch: hiring full-time is costly, slow, and often doesn’t fit the real needs of scaling teams. Many companies don’t need 40 hours a week of data work — they need expertise on tap, when and where it matters most.
That’s where fractional analytics support comes in.
The Cost of Full-Time Hires
- A mid-level data analyst in the UK costs:
- £75k–£100k salary
- 30% overhead (benefits, pension, taxes)
- Recruitment fees and onboarding time
- 👉 That’s easily £90k+ annually, and often for someone who spends half their week firefighting bad tracking.
- The risk: if you’re still evolving your product and funnels, your analyst will spend more time fixing definitions than delivering insights.
Why Most Teams Don’t Need 40 Hours of Analytics a Week
- For scale-ups and mid-market companies, data needs come in spikes:
- New feature launch → need fresh tracking setup
- Board meeting → need metrics packaged clearly
- Campaign analysis → need funnel + attribution work
- 👉 In between, things are quieter. A full-time hire sits under-utilised.
The Case for Fractional Analytics
- A fractional analyst (or team) gives you:
- Flexibility: Scale up/down as needs change.
- Breadth of skills: One retainer = access to analytics engineers, product analysts, and data consultants.
- Speed: Immediate availability — no 3-month hiring cycle.
- Cost-efficiency: A fraction of the £80k+ burden of a full-time hire.
When Does Full-Time Make Sense?
- To be clear: full-time hires aren’t 'wrong' — they’re just not always the first step.
- Hire full-time when:
- You have complex data pipelines needing daily ownership.
- Your company is 300+ people with multiple squads demanding constant analytics support.
- You already have a dedicated data stack (warehouse, dbt, BI tools) that needs a steward.
- For most others? Fractional is the better bridge.
Hiring full-time is a commitment. Going fractional gives you flexible expertise, at the right price, at the right time. For most scaling teams, it’s the smart way to get analytics foundations right without burning the budget.
Curious if fractional analytics is right for your stage? Book a discovery call and let’s figure it out.
