How Fractional Engineering Teams Save Small Companies Time and Money

By Chris Reynolds

March 3, 2024

● 3 minutes read

Share this post

In today’s fast-moving tech landscape, small businesses are often caught in a dilemma. On one hand, they need to leverage cutting-edge technology to stay competitive. On the other, the high cost of employing full-time, top-tier engineering talent can be prohibitively expensive, particularly when the requirement for such expertise does not necessitate a full-time commitment. This challenge has led many to settle for less than optimal solutions or to stretch their resources thin in an attempt to cover all bases. However, there’s a strategic solution that addresses this issue head-on: Fractional Engineering Teams.

Breaking Down the Barriers to Top-Tier Talent

Fractional Engineering Teams offer a novel approach by providing small businesses access to a pool of expert engineers across a variety of domains, including Solutions Architecture, Platform Engineering, DevOps, and Data Science, without the commitment of full-time salaries. This model is similar to the well-established concept of Fractional CFOs or bookkeepers, but it extends into the realm of engineering, allowing businesses to engage with specialists precisely when needed.

The beauty of this model lies in its flexibility and cost-effectiveness. Businesses can scale their engineering capabilities up or down based on current needs, ensuring that they only pay for the expertise they need, when they need it. This not only optimizes resource allocation but also eliminates the financial strain of maintaining a full-time, specialized staff that may not be fully utilized.

Beyond Cost Savings: Strategic Partnerships and Continuity

The advantages of Fractional Engineering Teams extend far beyond budgetary relief. Unlike piecemeal arrangements with individual freelancers, engaging with a Fractional Engineering Team ensures continuity of service and a deep, strategic understanding of your business needs. This strategic partnership model mitigates the common pitfalls associated with freelance engagements, such as the time-consuming onboarding for each new project and the risk of losing institutional knowledge when a freelancer moves on.

A Fractional Engineering Team, with its collective expertise and structured management, becomes intimately familiar with the intricacies of your operations. This allows the team to not only address immediate technical needs but also to offer strategic insights and recommendations, ensuring that technology decisions are aligned with business goals. This collaborative approach enables small businesses to leverage technology as a tool for innovation and competitive advantage, rather than as a constant operational challenge.

A New Paradigm for Tech-Driven Growth

The emergence of Fractional Engineering Teams creates a new opportunity for small businesses trying to navigate the complex terrain of technology and innovation. This model isn’t just about offering flexible access to engineering talent; it represents a fundamental shift in how small enterprises can strategically leverage technology to achieve their goals. Without the weight of traditional employment models, small businesses can now tap into a reservoir of specialized skills, applying them precisely and efficiently to projects that drive growth and competitiveness.

This approach allows businesses to dynamically scale their tech capabilities in response to evolving needs and opportunities, ensuring that technological advancement is no longer an exclusive advantage of large corporations. It’s about creating an environment where businesses can thrive through agility, innovation, and strategic foresight, embracing technology as a key driver for success.

Embrace the Future with Fractional Engineering Teams

The landscape of business technology is continually changing, and small businesses need a strategy that allows them to adapt quickly and efficiently. Fractional Engineering Teams represent a transformative solution, breaking down the barriers to accessing top-tier engineering talent and enabling small businesses to thrive in the digital age.

As we move forward, the question for small business executives is no longer whether they can afford to invest in the best technology and talent, but whether they can afford not to. With Fractional Engineering Teams, the answer is clear: Now, they can—and they must, to ensure their business not only survives but flourishes in the modern marketplace.

Let's Work Together To Empower Your Tech Success.

OUR CLIENT

Don’t just take our word for it

Challenge

Zeera Mental Health, a VC-funded startup, lost a few members of their engineering team following a market pivot from B2C to B2B. They needed a team to manage all of their urgent technical needs.

Solution

When Zeera partnered with us, they chose our Catalyst package. Our team quickly integrated with Zeera’s operations, providing a seamless transition and ensuring uninterrupted service delivery. We help manage the engineering team and provide CTO-level consulting to the management team.

The Surton team have been brilliant partners from day one. They jumped in very quickly to manage all of our technical needs and are able to operate both autonomously and in tight coordination with our other business functions.

With very limited handover, the Surton team was able to maintain continuity in all of our engineering processes and also seamlessly deliver customer specific enhancement work on tight timelines.

Challenge

Paperplanes is a tech-enabled direct mail marketing firm. They needed a flexible and cost-effective AWS expert to ensure the smooth operation of their platform without the overhead of a full-time, in-house tech team.

Solution

Paperplanes purchased our Guardian Package, where we monitor their entire AWS Infrastructure 24/7. We do basic upgrades and are available whenever they need consulting.

Surton was an absolute pleasure to deal with. They completely understood what we wanted to achieve, and they delivered a truly fantastic deliverable, bang on time.

The skills needed to do what they do for us is what we would have to hire 1 senior or 2 mid-level developers to achieve.

Challenge

VCA is 20-year-old software company that had very outdated infrastructure. Their software was had some critical upgrades that would have caused a broad-outage if not updated quickly.

Solution

We successfully moved nearly 40 servers from a data center in Texas into Microsoft Azure Cloud and kept everything running smoothly. Afterword, we trained their developers so that similar upgrades could be managed by the internal team in the future.

Surton is a team of highly collaborative and adaptive experts who know how to get things done.

They take the time to deeply understand the customer needs and meticulously map out a path to addressing those needs while maintaining clarity and alignment with all stakeholders.

Get In Touch

500 7th Ave
8th Floor
New York, NY 10018