The role you wish you could hire
Most startups can’t afford — or don’t need — a full-time CTO in the early days. But they still need someone to make key architecture decisions, guide hiring, manage delivery, and act as a partner to the founder.
Greg Hluska Consulting provides fractional CTO services to fill that gap. You’ll get deep technical experience, product instinct, and startup strategy without giving up equity or burning your entire budget.
Not just code — company building
You can hire a senior dev to write code, find low priced consultants on websites like Fiverr or Upwork, or even rent a whole army of AI agents and set them loose on your ideas. Those are all great ways to build companies and they're all valid solutions to a problem. But they aren't the only way and they aren't the right way for every company.
Some companies need a little more guidance. They need someone who can help them figure out what and how to build. Someone with a varied background and a lot of experience. That's where Greg Hluska comes in. He traces his career back to doing tech support for dial up internet shortly after Windows 95 hit the mainstream. That lead to work in accounting systems and that brutal Y2K era that will forever make Office Space more documentary than comedy. And that lead to a degree in marketing, then more time in the trenches, building products, support products, building companies, succeeding, failing, learning a lot and even having the requisite heart attack in his late thirties.
Go for walks, be able to do deadlifts and be able to run vigourously for twenty minutes. If you gain nothing else from this, gain that. If it's difficult for you, that's great because it means you're getting stronger. And when you learn how to slowly build up your body, you're 99.9% of the way to knowing how to build up a company. Neither is (or should be) about heroic efforts, they're about consistent efforts, daily improvement and short term goals that are built with long term thinking.
The deal
Greg Hluska doesn't join your company as a co-founder, he doesn't take equity and he won't make a mess of your cap table. He likes dollars, not points, percentages, crypto, theoretical millions or exposure. He bills by the hour though prefers to work on a weekly rate because when he fills out a timesheet, the line between existential dread, joy and invoicing are a little too thin for comfort.
Some of the best projects last for two months and others last up to six. But as a general rule, if it's going to last for more than a year, you need something different than a fractional CTO who bills by the hour.
Why? Because after a year, you'll have outgrown the scope of a fractional CTO. The biggest drawback to hiring a fractional CTO is switching cost. By design, you're not a fractional CTO's only client. They will often work on a mix of their own things plus at least one other client. It's nothing personal and doesn't mean they're not invested in your project, it's just that the money, it's not unlimited.
I'll use myself as an example. My rates aren't cheap, but my child isn't either. And you know, my bank has never responded well to when I've asked if I could pay my credit card bills with good intentions. So I have to have multiple clients and multiple projects on the go or my life doesn't work. It's nothing personal and, I wish I was obscenely wealthy so I didn't have to make choices like this, but I do.
This is relevant to you because of context switching. I can't be off in some silo and need to be involved in day by day, but it takes me a little while to make sure that I've made the contextual transition and can make a decision on the correct map. So if we work together and you send me an email at 2pm, my first reply will usually need that I need about an hour to get back up to speed. It's actually the opposite of a lack of interest, but that won't make sense to you until you're a fractional CTO too.
After about a year, if I've been successful in helping you build, you need instantaneous responses to those sorts of 2pm issues. You're simply at a scale where even if you're not being billed for that hour, you can't afford to wait. My method won't work.
Some clients need a few weeks of help. Some need a few months. Most are looking for high-touch guidance during a critical period: pre-MVP, post-launch, or just before a key hire. You set the cadence and we'll figure out the right deliverables together. All services are optional, but remarkably bad jokes are inevitable.
The method
It starts with a conversation about your idea, your vision, your team, your goals and the things that keep you awake at night. Greg will actually ask you "What keeps you awake at night?" and dig deep into your answer using his own experiences as conversational touch points. That's an important part of the process because fundamentally, if he's already solved a problem once he can likely solve it for you in a really cheap, already tested way.
Then it comes down to stage and scale. Maybe you need help building your MVP, or maybe you need help building out a team to build a product that you have traction on. Maybe you need help with scale or maybe you need help with a specific bug that you can't even figure out how to start figuring out. There are a myriad of potential problems, but with Greg, a few parts of his method are non negotiable.
Unless you are very early stage and Greg is the only developer on your team, it is a very bad thing if he is the most productive developer on your team. It is good if he is the most experienced, but very bad if he is the most productive developer on a team that exists. If someone who works a fraction of part time is more productive than people who work full time, that's the biggest problem you have.
If you've launched, Greg needs some kind of insight into customers. It's best if he can spend a day or two doing tech support, customer success or working within sales and marketing teams. In general, every hour working with a paying customer who is having a problem is worth about twenty hours reading good slide decks.
The best workflow is one where we find problems, create solutions and meet regularly. Greg prefers working himself out of a job via mentoring and providing the kind of high level strategic guidance that you can use to replace him internally. The most successful projects are ones where he is originally scheduled for six months, but you don't need him after three because he's helped you build a company that is more efficient without him.
Finally, hands on work is great and Greg loves to write code. But when he writes code as a fractional CTO, he's focused on working himself out of a job. Meaning, he will try to make himself unnecessary by empowering others. In software, the best way to empower others is to make sure they can run your code, test your code and understand your code. That requires time in tooling and documentation. It's like how if a company wants to be remote first, the founders have to build that culture by writing down both what they do and the thought process behind it. If a fractional CTO wants to build a powerful company, they have to build that culture by writing down what they did and the thought process behind it.
The little things
Greg is based out of Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. He has a very flexible schedule but prefers to travel as little as possible. He can work with you in whatever time zone you are in, though he's almost fifty so the first week of a dramatically different time zone is a little like being hungover. It's the same with travel. When you're in your early twenties, business travel is exciting and memorable. When you're in your late forties, business travel is sad, confusing and memorable.
If meetings are technical, he will suggest computers and screen sharing. If they are tactical, he will suggest walks and headphones, etc. In startups, the most interesting things happen in the 90 minutes after a walk or a meal. A lot of it comes down to putting yourself in a position to catch the lightning and walks are a proven way. If we're in the same city, meals will be another option. If you're in Regina, you get a large discount.
It's also really important to have fun, build interesting things and learn from each other. In good relationships, I learn more than I teach and when we talk about it later, you'll say the same thing. And finally, nobody ever has to know that we worked together unless you tell them. Take all the credit, but assign all the blame to me. That's the secret catch to the fractional CTO deal. You get all the benefits of being the CTO with the ripcord of not having to be that person until it's been proven to work.
Let's talk
Greg is allergic to LinkedIn and social media in general so unless you know him or someone who knows him, your best bet is to contact him through this website .