Meet the Team

Chris Cheesman

Founder

First things first

I'm a dad to two amazing girls, Elsie and Ada, and husband to Jess... who keeps everything running far better than I ever could, including our fractional community

Portsmouth born. Nearly nine years living and working in Melbourne. Back in the UK since 2020 and building something I'm genuinely proud of

I'm one of those people who has always been interested in other people

What they're building. What drives them. What their business actually looks like underneath the surface. That curiosity started young... my family created opportunities to talk to new people before I even knew what networking was. Looking back, those early conversations shaped everything that followed

What followed was a career spent close to people and the businesses they're building. Global corporates, privately owned family businesses, founders at every stage of the journey. I've held multi-million pound sales budgets, run P&Ls, led teams, and recruited across most global regions

That experience matters because when I'm sitting across from a founder talking about a critical hire or a leadership gap that's slowing everything down... I've been close enough to that pressure to understand what it actually feels like

Not just as a recruiter watching from the outside

As someone who's been in the room when the stakes were high

Why SisuPeople.

Most recruitment is transactional. Someone sends a CV, keeps their fingers crossed, and moves on to the next brief

That's never been how I work

SisuPeople. was built around what I've always called proper recruitment... getting deep into a business, understanding its trajectory, its culture, its pressure points, and finding the people who'll still be the right hire twelve months later

We work with founders and leadership teams... the stage where every hire carries disproportionate weight. Where a wrong decision in a key seat can slow everything. Where the right person at the right moment can genuinely change the arc of the business

Why SisuScale.

The longer I spent close to scaling businesses, the more I saw the same pattern

Founders who were under-peopled around the problems they were trying to solve

Not under-resourced in terms of budget or ambition. Just without the right experienced operator in the room at the moment they needed one most... and not yet ready to commit to a permanent C-suite hire to fix it

SisuScale. was built to close that gap

But not in the way most fractional platforms do it

We didn't build a directory. We built a community. Operators who know each other, trust each other, meet regularly and genuinely collaborate. Who refer honestly and know when someone else in the community would be a better fit for the next part of the journey

That trust isn't something you can manufacture overnight

It's taken time to build and it's the thing that makes SisuScale. work when a founder needs to move fast

Jess Cheesman

Community Lead

Jess plays a key role with our Fractional Community. If you need help, she is the best place to start!! Having worked in and around Recruitment & Executive Search in the UK and Australia for a number of years, Jess supports our Fractional Talent Community with anything they need and connects dots with our clients