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Hicomply Case Study

Hicomply

scales its revenue engine with ScaleWise fractional CRO leadership.

ScaleWise provided fractional CRO support to restructure Hicomply’s GTM function, rebuild its sales engine, and set the company on a trajectory of higher quality growth.

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Business type

SaaS scale-up, Information Security Compliance

Solution type

Interim/ Fractional

Size of commercial team

7

Company stage

Series A

Hicomply is a fast-growing, leading SaaS platform helping organisations automate their security compliance and risk management processes. With strong product-market fit, a huge addressable market and a growing client base, Hicomply is poised to capitalise on a huge TAM across multiple sectors.

 

Despite their strong early growth, the team faced execution challenges in its go-to-market strategy, particularly in how it structured and scaled its revenue functions to reach the next stage of growth.

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Hicomply Need

Hicomply had successfully reached seven-digit ARR and built its initial GTM function.

However, to unlock the next stage of growth, the business needed to optimise its revenue engine and ease pressure on Ed, the CEO, who was still overseeing investor relationships, marketing, sales, and customer success.

 

The leadership team recognised the need for:

 

  • A proven CRO who could accelerate execution and coach the commercial team.
  • Someone with experience scaling SaaS businesses from product-market-fit to go-to-market-fit .
  • A solution that avoided the high cost and risk of a mis-hire in a permanent CRO role.

Scaling Story

Hicomply engaged ScaleWise to source a fractional CRO who could quickly embed into the business and transform the GTM engine.

 

Working closely with the board, investors, and executive team, we ran a structured process that gathered insights from every key stakeholder to define the CRO brief. Following this initial stage, Hicomply received a strong shortlist of four qualified candidates within a week.

 

The chosen CRO, Mark Edgeworth, joined the business within three weeks and immediately identified critical gaps in demand generation and sales development. Mark restructured the GTM function so that Marketing could focus on demand generation and early pipeline creation, and Account Executives could focus on closing well-qualified deals

 

Alongside this, a new Sales Development function was established to nurture opportunities, and Customer Success was empowered to grow and expand existing accounts.

 

This new structure aligned the team across the customer journey and created a framework for sustainable and scalable revenue growth.

ScaleWise Impact

The Hicomply team saw the impact immediately. Within just one week, Ed and the team had a shortlist of four quality CRO candidates, a process that would normally take months. Within 3 weeks, the chosen CRO had joined the business and started having an impact.

 

The fractional CRO, Mark, quickly evaluated the performance of the team and rebuilt Hicomply’s GTM organisation. He established dedicated demand generation and sales development functions, restructured AE and CS roles to align with individual strengths, and introduced proven frameworks and metrics to manage the entire customer journey more effectively.

 

These changes translated quickly into tangible commercial results. Hicomply began securing higher-value customers with longer-term contracts, and even delivered its best month of new sales in 18 months within weeks of Mark’s arrival.

 

Perhaps most importantly, the CRO’s cultural fit and impact led to his transition into the full-time CEO role. This allowed Ed to move into a board position, ultimately strengthening the business’s leadership capacity and setting Hicomply up for its next phase of growth.

Edwin Bartlett

Founder, Investor & Board Member, Hicomply

“We would recommend ScaleWise to other businesses, mainly because we got the leader we needed and he’s doing a great job. The process de-risked the whole challenge of building our revenue function. The opportunity cost of doing it differently and it not working is just not a world we wanted to be in, and ScaleWise helped us avoid that.”

 

Mark Edgeworth

CEO (and former fractional CRO), Hicomply

“I’ve worked with ScaleWise from day one of my fractional journey, and the relationship has become very deep and very personal. They take the time to really understand the client brief, which means by the time I’m introduced, it’s already a strong fit. I know they represent me in the way I want to be represented, and I trust them completely to deliver for both me and the business.”

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Frequently Asked Questions

Think of it as head-renting instead of head-hunting. Rather than spending time and money trying to hire a full-time leader, Interim & Fractional leadership involves hiring leaders on either a short-term or part-time basis usually to carry out a specific purpose. They are experienced senior-level operators that can be parachuted into your company on short notice to drive high-performance in particular aspects of your business.

Unlike a coach or a consultant, Interim & Fractional leaders are hands-on doers whose remit is to get stuck in and get things done. For more information, check out our: Definitive guide to Interim & Fractional Leadership.

Interim & Fractional leaders both provide flexible GTM support based on your specific needs. Interim leaders usually work full-time (4-5 days per week) for a set period of time (i.e. 4-6 months) to bridge an ‘interim’ leadership gap. Fractional leaders work a fraction of the time for a fraction of the cost, usually working between 2–4 days per week on a rolling basis. As Interim & Fractional leaders flexibly work between both roles depending on the requirement, we consider them as one leadership solution.
We’ll help you define what you need and produce a detailed role brief with realistic goals. This goes beyond a job description, capturing the specific leader profile required and clear deliverables. Then we’ll produce a shortlist of suitable candidates (based on your needs, culture and leadership style) from our wide network of experienced Interim & Fractional commercial leaders. Finally, we’ll organise interviews to ensure there’s a cultural chemistry and expertise alignment from the outset.

At ScaleWise, all our Interim & Fractional leaders have scaled at least one company (Seed to Series C) in senior GTM roles, usually at VP or C-Suite level in sales, marketing, customer success, partnerships or revenue operations (RevOps). Many have worked with other scale-ups in Interim & Fractional roles too. As such, they’re adept at quickly diagnosing issues, prioritising solutions and having an immediate impact.

Instead of joining with a wide-ranging brief, Interim & Fractional leaders focus on pre-agreed objectives. During the engagement, they will implement and execute a pre-agreed plan, so it’s crucial to agree on these objectives, deadlines and KPIs beforehand. Interim & Fractional leaders can also help interview and onboard their permanent replacement, ensuring they hit the ground running.

For example, the five most common tasks for an Interim & Fractional VP of Sales include restructuring the sales process, devising a coherent commercial strategy with company-wide buy-in, improving sales team performance and advising on sales hires (i.e. SDRs, AEs or even their full-time replacement).

Unlike full-time hiring (which can take up to 6 months), Interim & Fractional leaders are placed within 1–4 weeks and can have an immediate impact. This short time frame is possible thanks to ScaleWise’s unrivalled network of GTM leaders and the idiosyncrasies of the Interim & Fractional model (i.e. they don’t need company-wide onboarding and can dive into pre-agreed tasks straight away).

ScaleWise’s matching process vastly minimises the risk of a bad partnership. However, if the Interim & Fractional leader is not working out, it’s easy to terminate the relationship as there’s no long-term contract (you take out a month-by-month contract with ScaleWise, not the leader).

At ScaleWise, we find the reverse is usually true. Companies either hire their Interim & Fractional leader full-time (this happens in 35% of cases at ScaleWise) or they decide they no longer need support in one area (i.e. sales) and want support in another area (i.e. marketing). With ScaleWise, moving from an Interim & Fractional sales leader to an Interim & Fractional marketing leader is simple.

Interim & Fractional leaders are not hands-off consultants, but highly-experienced commercial leaders who join with a clear mandate and instantly command respect from the team due to their previous experience. Employees respond well to their ‘external’ status as it doesn’t disrupt the internal team dynamic (and avoids office politics) and enables them to objectively make swift strategic decisions (not decisions based on bias or nostalgia).

 

However, it’s important for the leadership team to support the Interim & Fractional leader and make it clear to employees that they have the authority to make changes (it helps if an internal leader introduces an Interim & Fractional leader to all the key divisions within the business at the start).

Our Interim & Fractional leaders turn into permanent employees every 1 in 3 placements. If you’re looking for a leader that will eventually transition to full-time, it’s worth being upfront about this in the matching stage.

Interim & Fractional leaders placed through ScaleWise are contracted to ScaleWise, not your company. That means we can place them quickly and easily without you needing to negotiate payment terms or waste any time setting up contracts and billing relationships with lots of different leaders. It also makes it easier to change GTM support if required (i.e. using an Interim & Fractional Customer Success leader after working with an Interim & Fractional CMO).

Unlike a coach or a consultant, Interim & Fractional leaders are hands-on doers who get stuck in and get things done. At the outset, they will agree working schedules, practices and processes with you, including days of the week, communication channels, check-ins and access to the wider team.

 

For example, a leader might work part-time (i.e. three days’ work spread out across the week to ensure responsiveness to company needs) in a hybrid capacity for a few companies concurrently. No matter the working agreement, though, it’s crucial to schedule frequent catch-ups (i.e. one hour per week) to discuss updates, barriers and progress.

Interim & Fractional leaders are scaling professionals. To get roles, they need a strong catalogue of past successes, positive case studies of their previous Interim & Fractional work, and supportive references. As such, they always commit to the role whole-heartedly.

 

Yet, more importantly, they are motivated by enjoyment. They have often chosen a portfolio career as they love taking on new challenges and sharing their insights to help companies grow, so the more fulfilling the role, the more the Interim & Fractional leader will go above and beyond.

ScaleWise has supported the portfolio companies of top-tier investors​

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