About Chairborn

Built by two people who own the result themselves.

Both of us hold fractional seats today. Chairborn is what we wished had existed when we started: a standard for what a fractional leader owns, and a partner who helps both sides make the seat work.

The founders

Co-founder · Fractional CSO

Martin Fabry

Martin learned to lead at 3M, in eleven years inside a culture Simon Sinek holds up as an example in Leaders Eat Last. He left with a conviction he still applies to every commercial team he takes on: performance belongs to the system people work in far more than to their mood or their talent. Behind a "bad team" there is usually a bad system, and behind "unmotivated people" usually a manager who has not said clearly what he wants.

Since then he has spent seventeen years in international B2B sales, as Chief Sales Officer and board member in growing companies including Be Lenka, selling safety systems, footwear and venue technology in more than thirty markets. That range made him suspicious of templates. The playbook that carries one company into thirty countries can quietly kill the next one, so every seat he takes starts with reading what this market and this team actually need.

He writes on commercial leadership and the succession gap, including for TREND.sk. He works four focused days a week and gives Fridays to mentoring students and young founders, and to the community where he lives.

11 years at 3M
CSO and board member in growing companies, including Be Lenka
More than thirty markets

Co-founder

Vladimír Houba, MBA

Vlado has spent eighteen years leading commercial teams in Central Europe, in startups, scale-ups and corporates, across general management, operations and sales. He ran the Czech and Slovak market for Gemius, led RTB House in the Czech Republic as Executive Director, and since 2016 has run his own consultancy.

He also builds a market from the ground up himself. His company FLITT is the exclusive distributor of Reclimb for Slovakia, Czechia, Hungary and Austria, which keeps him honest about the difference between signing a distribution agreement and creating the demand that makes it worth anything.

As an ICF executive coach and a Gallup-Certified CliftonStrengths Coach, he reads the parts of a company that never show up in the CRM: how decisions flow, how long they wait for the owner, how sales and delivery connect, and how the team actually works. That is usually where he looks first, because that is usually where the result is being held back.

Gemius, Country Manager CZ and SK · RTB House, Executive Director CZ
Founder of his own consultancy (2016) and of FLITT, exclusive Reclimb distributor for SK, CZ, HU and AT
ICF executive coach · Gallup-Certified CliftonStrengths Coach · MBA
Chairman of the Croatian-Czech Chamber of Commerce

Why Chairborn exists

Fractional leadership is a profession. Here, it has not become one yet.

Working in fractional seats taught us where they break. Rarely at the person. They break when the authority never actually moves, when nobody agrees what success looks like until it is too late to reach it, and when a leader hired to decide spends the year advising.

Interim management is well understood in Europe. Fractional leadership is still mostly a word on LinkedIn: no shared standard, no common expectations, and a growing number of senior people using the title while working as consultants. Founders notice, and they are right to be careful.

Chairborn exists to set that standard and hold to it. Every seat owns a result. The result is agreed before the work starts and reviewed regularly.

Why we do this

Because we like to decide.

Both of us have led teams inside large organisations, and both of us hold fractional seats today. The part of the job we enjoy most has always been the same: deciding something and seeing it work. A price that holds. A market that opens. A team that runs well when you are not in the room.

We also kept seeing the same gap. A growing company reaches the point where it needs an experienced leader in sales, finance, marketing or operations long before it can hire one full time. Until then, the owner makes those decisions alone, and learning them on the job is the most expensive way to learn.

Fractional work closes that gap. We sit in the leadership team of growing companies, decide within agreed authority, and own the result. The layers of approval, the meetings about meetings and the reporting for its own sake stay behind. AI now takes over much of the routine and analytical work that used to fill a week, so our days go to decisions and people.

We believe more and more companies will hire this way: they will start from the result they need, and look for the person who has delivered it before. Chairborn is how we make that work well, for owners who need an experienced leader without a full-time hire, and for leaders who want to do this work properly.

We met at an evening at the US Embassy in Bratislava, and have been talking about how companies are led ever since.

Why the two of us

Two lenses on the same company.

Martin reads the commercial side: pipeline, pricing, channels and markets. Vlado reads how decisions flow and how the organisation carries the revenue it wins. Most of the problems founders bring us sit exactly where those two meet, which is why both of us read every review and every seat we design.

There is no account manager and no intake team. Every conversation, with a company or with an executive, starts with one of us.

Both of us also mentor students and first-time managers through The Next Chair.

A chair is more than a title. It is a responsibility, reviewed regularly.

Talk to us

Start with one conversation.

You run a company

Tell us which seat is missing and what result it should own. One of us replies within two working days.

Talk about a seat For companies

You are a senior executive

Thinking about leaving the full-time seat, or already have? Start with the Circle.

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