Fractional COO for companies outgrowing their headcount
When everything routes through you, we take the operations seat for part of the week.
How much of the week runs through you?
Four numbers. It shows how much work is sitting still, waiting on you.
Anything that stops until you answer.
From asked to answered, not time spent.
Your own time.
Ones a deputy could follow without you.
Work sitting still, every week
0
Your share of it
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A second opinion
Want the first three taken off you?
We reply within one business day.
Not sure the bottleneck is the owner at all? The business health check scores six areas and names which one is holding the others in place.
What this usually leads to
The queue behind one person gets shorter two ways: write the rules down so that permission is not needed, which is business documents, and take steps out of the path, which is process automation. Fractional operations is who does both when nobody internal has the week to spare.
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You are the bottleneck and you know it. A fractional, part-time COO takes approvals, vendors and handoffs off your desk for part of the week, writes down how it runs, and hands it to someone on your team.
Is it a fit?
Ceiling
The company stops growing at the size of one calendar, and it is yours.
Handover
There is a date the work goes back to your team, agreed before anything starts.
Shape
Part of a week, not a seat. A full time hire is a different decision at a different cost.
What the engagement includes
Ownership of delivery
One person accountable for the work getting out the door, on the dates you agreed with your customers.
Vendor and contractor management
Sourcing, onboarding, briefs, quality control, and payment schedules for the people doing the work.
Documented workflows
Every recurring process written down, assigned, and measured, so it survives someone leaving.
Reporting you will read
A weekly written update with numbers, blockers, and decisions needed from you.
Workflows we take over
Fractional means we own real workflows end to end, not that we attend your meetings.
What a fractional operator does with the time
Senior operations capacity on a defined piece of work, run in your systems on a set rhythm. Not an adviser producing recommendations for somebody else to implement.
It suits one situation: the founder is still the operations department, the business has outgrown that, and a full senior hire is premature or six months away.
See alsobookkeeper, accountant, or fractional CFO hire an assistant or automate the task a retainer or a project hiring and talent executive assistance a fractional chief of staff delegation split
On whether the seat is needed yet, hire somebody or fix the system separates volume from friction.
How it runs
Diagnose, build, run.
How engagements are set up
Scoped per engagement before work starts. Most fractional arrangements run monthly against an agreed scope and a set number of hours.
- Scope
- Agreed before work starts
- First call
- 20 minutes
- Reply time
- 1 business day
What changes in the first month
Three things you notice.
Decisions stop waiting on you
Approvals, vendors, hiring, escalations have an owner who is not you.
Handoffs hold
Sales to delivery to billing, each seam owned, nothing dropped between them.
Vendors held to a number
Contracts, renewals and scope with one owner for the spend.
The engagement starts with one workflow taken over and run properly, measured in hours and dollars. It expands only when the numbers say it should.
Questions we get
How is this different from consulting?
The engagement is scoped to a deliverable rather than to a seat. The work happens in your systems, with your team, and the measure is whether the business runs better rather than whether the analysis was correct.
How much time do you spend?
Enough to own the outcomes agreed, on a defined rhythm rather than on call. Most arrangements settle into a regular weekly pattern with a monthly review, which is predictable for both sides.
When is it too early for this?
When the business is small enough that the founder can hold everything, and the constraint is demand rather than delivery. Adding operational structure to a business that needs customers is solving the wrong problem.
Do we still need a full time chief operating officer?
Often, and this makes that hire much more likely to work. Six months of documented operating reality tells you exactly what the role needs to be, which is far cheaper than discovering it through a mis-hire.
More questions? Operations leadership, answered Read the guide: How to fix your operations all areas
Read next
How this runs, every question we get, and the work that usually sits next to it.
Shaheer leads the work, with engineers, writers, filers and analysts behind him. C-suite operations for a San Francisco AI company, Six Sigma on the process side, Anthropic certified on the Model Context Protocol, ten years across eight industries. See what we have built