SixFiftyThree Consulting LLC provides fractional CDO services to small and mid-sized businesses across northern Illinois. Senior data leadership, available now, without the full-time hire.
A fractional CDO provides the strategic data leadership a business needs on a part-time or project basis, setting data standards, aligning technology with business goals, building reporting infrastructure, and making sure the right people have the right information. The engagement is scoped to what the business actually needs, not to what a full-time hire would justify.
A fractional CDO is the person who makes data decisions stop being made by whoever built the first spreadsheet. They own the data function: setting standards, cleaning up the infrastructure, and making sure leadership has accurate information to act on. You need one when leadership can't agree on a single number. When the company has outgrown its reporting tools but no one is leading the transition. When data strategy shows up on the quarterly agenda and gets bumped every single time. That's not a priority problem. That's a leadership gap.
Operating without data leadership has a real cost, and it compounds. Decisions get made on conflicting reports because two departments pull from different sources. Technology gets purchased without a plan for how it connects to anything else. The team runs three different versions of the same metric, and no one can say which one is right. None of this is a crisis on any given Tuesday. Over a year, it adds up to real money left on the table and real time burned on work that doesn't move the business forward. That's the problem SixFiftyThree Consulting LLC was built to solve for businesses across Lake County.
The engagement starts with a structured conversation about your current data environment. We map what data exists, where it lives, who owns it, and what decisions it currently fails to support. The output is a clear picture of the gap between what the business has today and what it needs.
Not every data problem deserves the same urgency. We focus the engagement on the issues with the largest commercial impact. You get a ranked list of what to fix and why, ordered by what puts money back on the table fastest.
This is where SixFiftyThree does the actual work. That might mean cleaning up data infrastructure, building dashboards your leadership team will actually use, leading a technology selection process, or writing the data governance policy the business has needed for two years.
After the initial deliverables are done, many clients keep us on a fractional basis for ongoing data strategy. We're available when decisions need to be made and not sitting idle between them.
Every engagement is scoped to the specific situation. What drives complexity is straightforward: the current state of the data matters a lot. Clean and centralized is a very different starting point than siloed and inconsistent across three systems. The number of business problems the engagement needs to address matters. Whether existing technology can support the work, or whether platform choices need to be revisited, matters. And the size and data literacy of the internal team shapes how much of the work we carry versus how much we hand off. None of that is complicated to assess, it just takes an honest conversation.
A full-time chief data officer at a mid-sized business carries a compensation package, salary, benefits, sometimes equity, that most small and regional businesses can't justify unless data strategy is a board-level priority every single week of the year. A fractional engagement is scoped to what the business actually needs today: a defined number of hours per month, a specific set of deliverables, and a clear exit condition when the work is done. That's not a lesser version of data leadership. It's the right economic model for a business at this stage.
Book a scoping callA fractional CDO is responsible for the data layer of your business, the standards, the infrastructure, the reporting, and the decisions that depend on all three. A business consultant advises on strategy. A fractional CDO builds the data foundation that makes strategy executable. The difference is ownership: we carry the data function, not just an opinion about it.
Engagement intensity varies by what the business needs. Early engagements tend to be heavier. There is more ground to cover when data infrastructure is starting from a low base. Ongoing advisory relationships are lighter. The right starting point is a scoping conversation where we assess what your business actually needs before proposing anything.
No. Most of the businesses we work with come to us precisely because their data is not clean. Assessing the current state of your data is part of the discovery process. It is where every engagement begins. You do not need to solve the problem before asking for help with it.
At the end of a defined engagement, you own everything we built: the frameworks, the dashboards, the documentation. Some clients move into an ongoing advisory relationship. Others use the deliverables independently and return when the next problem surfaces. There is no lock-in. The goal is to leave you in a better position than we found you.
Every inquiry gets a reply, usually within one business day. Bring your biggest data problem and we will work backwards from there to figure out what the right engagement looks like for your business.
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