A fractional healthcare operator is a senior healthcare leader who works with multiple companies part-time, combining C-level strategic judgment with hands-on operational execution across the full product lifecycle — go-to-market, brand management, life cycle management, project management and fractional marketing leadership. Unlike a fractional CMO who advises on marketing strategy, an operator owns the work end to end, from launch plan to last quarter of execution.
A fractional CMO writes the strategy. A fractional healthcare operator writes the strategy and ships it. The distinction matters in healthcare because the gap between a Gantt chart and a launched brand is where most pharma, biotech and medtech projects stall.
Three forces converge. First, biotech funding cycles are tighter than they were in 2021–2023 — Series A teams cannot hire a full-time CMO at €200K plus a launch budget. Second, mid-cap pharma is restructuring brand teams toward leaner pods, leaving named brands without senior owners between two restructures. Third, founders running consumer-health and medtech start-ups need someone who has actually launched a product in the EU regulatory environment, not someone who can describe what a launch looks like.
Each of those needs a different consultant on paper. In practice, the same person — embedded a few days a week, trusted with the keys — solves all three.
The work splits into five recurring scopes. Most engagements combine two or three.
Building or rebuilding the launch architecture: target product profile, segmentation, messaging house, channel mix, KPI tree, and the launch readiness checklist. The deliverable is not a slide deck. It is a launch the team can run.
Owning a brand on behalf of a marketing director who does not have the bandwidth, or an early-stage company that does not yet have a marketing director. This includes positioning, the integrated brand plan, agency briefs, KOL plans, and the quarterly readout cadence.
Defending and growing the value of a brand after launch — line extensions, new indications, geographic expansions, OTC switches, formulation changes, and the regulatory and commercial choreography that makes them land. Stryke owns the LCM track on Cooper's Betadine portfolio, including the work on a second major product and the PMO that holds the cross-functional team accountable.
Cross-functional orchestration when nobody else owns the seam between regulatory, medical, commercial and supply. Operators bring a PMO discipline that internal marketing teams rarely have time to install themselves.
Stepping into a marketing director role part-time — running the team, holding the budget, sitting on the leadership table — for companies between two senior hires or for those who have decided the senior seat does not need to be full-time. Stryke runs full marketing leadership for TechniPharma in this mode.
Stryke's engagements cluster around four customer profiles.
The common thread is not company size. It is the gap between a real operational ambition and the headcount budget available to deliver it.
Strategy houses (BCG, Bain, McKinsey) and pharma-specific shops (Cepton, Alcimed, Smart Pharma) deliver excellent strategy decks. They are not, structurally, accountable for the execution that follows. Their model is project-based, time-boxed, and team-rotated.
A fractional operator inverts the model. The same senior person stays embedded for nine to eighteen months. The deliverable is shipped work — a launch, a relaunch, a re-segmentation — not a final report.
The trade-off is honest: operators do not bring an army of analysts and a slide factory. If a company needs a 200-page market access study with primary research in eight countries, that is consultancy work, not operator work.
Four checks separate operators from polished consultants in operator clothing.
Stryke Consulting was founded by Anabelle Sellame, a former pharmacist turned operator with multi-BU experience at AstraZeneca France, brand and LCM ownership at Cooper, and operating roles at Nootropia and across the digital-health and biotech ecosystem (DoryDoc, DoryGo, DoryCare, ClubOfficine, Vatys, PSH1715, Caleb Ventures). The company is the only consultancy in France combining C-level strategic thinking, hands-on operational execution and a 360° view across the full product lifecycle.
Engagements run between three and eighteen months. A typical engagement starts with a two-week diagnostic, a 90-day plan, and a quarterly readout cadence anchored on three to five KPIs the CEO actually tracks.
Three situations call for a different solution.
A fractional CMO advises on marketing strategy and oversees the marketing function. A fractional healthcare operator does that and owns operational delivery across the full product lifecycle, including LCM, project management, and cross-functional execution outside marketing's scope.
No. Stryke runs engagements for AstraZeneca France (multi-BU marketing strategy) and Cooper (Betadine LCM) alongside Series A biotech work. Mid-cap and large-cap pharma use fractional operators for named-brand ownership, restructure transitions, and PMO leadership.
Yes — that is the central use case. Healthcare operators with EU launch experience navigate EMA, ANSM, EUDAMED and HAS requirements as part of standard practice. The point of hiring an operator is precisely that the regulatory and commercial choreography happens together.
Pharma, biotech, medtech, digital health, consumer health, cosmetics and nutraceuticals. The cross-sector exposure is intentional — operating playbooks transfer across these adjacent markets, and clients benefit from patterns observed in neighbouring sectors.
No. Operators brief and manage agencies. The good ones tighten agency output by writing better briefs and holding agencies accountable to the brand plan. The agencies stay; the operator becomes the client side of the relationship.
If your strategy is clear but execution is stalling, if you are between two senior hires, if you have a brand without an owner, or if your launch is six months away and the readiness gaps are not closing — those are the four trigger signals. Stryke offers a free 60-minute audit to map the gap.
Book a free 60-minute audit with Anabelle: stryke-consulting.fr/book-audit.
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