Services
Engaged together as a full operating partnership, or singly for a specific problem. Each begins by understanding how your work actually moves — then changes it on the evidence.
How to read this page
These four services are not a menu of unrelated products. They are four ways into a single discipline — making operations hold their shape as a company grows. The work I do is the same underneath: I find where the operating model is straining, change it on the evidence, and leave something your own team can run. What differs is the way in. One company needs an operating partner to own the whole model for a while; another needs a hard, honest read on quality; a third needs a specific process re-engineered; a fourth needs to see and steer its numbers. The right entry point is whichever matches the problem you can actually feel.
So the most useful way to read what follows is by symptom rather than by service name. If the business cannot move without the founder in every decision, start with the Fractional COO engagement. If you cannot prove how good your work is, start with a Business Excellence audit. If a process has quietly become slow and full of rework, start with process transformation. If leadership is steering on numbers it does not trust, start with operations governance. You do not have to choose perfectly. Almost every engagement opens with a short diagnostic precisely so the choice is made on evidence, not on a guess — and so the order of work is right.
How the work is done
Why I work as an operator, not a consultant
The distinction matters more than it sounds. A consultant studies a problem and hands you a recommendation; you are left to implement it. An operator owns the implementation and stays accountable for whether it holds. Every one of these services is built on the second model. I sit inside the leadership team, make the calls I am given the authority to make, and remain on the hook for the result. The deliverable is a running system, not a document that describes one. That is also why the work is priced and structured the way it is — for outcomes, over a defined arc, with a clean handover at the end.
Every engagement starts by measuring reality
I do not redesign the process the SOP describes; I redesign the one that is actually run. The documented version is tidy. The real one is full of workarounds people invented to get the job done despite the design. So the first weeks of any engagement are diagnosis — I sit in the meetings, read the numbers, and trace how work genuinely moves from sale to delivery to cash before I change anything. An operator who reorganises in week one is guessing. The output of that diagnosis is a clear map of where decisions stall, where quality is at risk, and where the next failure under scale will occur — which is what makes the redesign that follows obvious rather than contentious.
The diagnostic is deliberately low-commitment
Almost every engagement opens with a short, fixed-fee diagnostic, and that is by design. It lets you see the quality of the thinking and the fit of the working relationship before committing to anything larger. It produces a written read on the operating model and a recommendation you can act on whether or not we continue together. Sometimes the honest recommendation is that you need a permanent hire, or that the timing is wrong, and I will say so. A diagnostic that only ever concludes “hire me for more” is a sales tool, not an assessment. This one is built to give you a defensible answer either way.
The aim is always capability you keep
The test of every engagement is the same: could a capable team, or an incoming full-time executive, pick up what was installed and run it without me? If the answer is no, the work is not finished. So whatever the service, the artefacts matter as much as the months — a documented operating cadence, an ownership map for each critical process, a scorecard with every metric defined, the gates and playbooks for the work that carries the most risk. I would rather leave your team able to run the next transformation themselves than leave behind a dependency. A good engagement is one you can step away from cleanly.
When the honest answer is no
Trust is built by saying no clearly. If what you need is a whole function built and led full-time, a fractional engagement will under-serve you — hire the permanent leader. If the gap is purely staffing, a strong hire is the cheaper fix. If leadership is not willing to grant real decision authority, no operating partner can succeed; the role becomes an expensive observer. And if a process is genuinely low-volume and bespoke, heavy re-engineering is over-engineering. I would rather lose an engagement than take one that cannot work, because the only reputation worth having in this work is for telling the truth about what will and will not help.
Questions before you choose
The questions founders and operators ask most often when deciding which engagement is right, and how it would actually run.
Start from the symptom, not the service. If the founder has become the operating bottleneck, that points to a Fractional COO engagement. If quality is asserted rather than measured, it points to a Business Excellence audit. If a specific process has grown slow and full of rework, it is process transformation. If leadership is steering on numbers it does not trust or that arrive too late, it is operations governance. Most companies recognise themselves in more than one, which is why almost every engagement opens with a short diagnostic — it tells both of us which problem to solve first, and in what order.
Either works. Three of the four are routinely run on their own — a quality audit, a process transformation, or an operations governance build can each stand alone and deliver a defined outcome. The Fractional COO engagement is the one that usually contains the others, because owning the operating model means touching quality, process and governance together. The honest answer at the diagnostic is often that you need one of them now and another later, sequenced rather than bundled. I would rather scope the engagement to the problem in front of us than sell the largest version of it.
They are four faces of one discipline: making operations hold under scale. The Fractional COO role is the whole operating model — cadence, ownership, quality and governance owned end to end. The other three are the layers that model is built from. Business Excellence is the quality layer; process transformation is the flow layer; operations governance is the measurement and decision layer. You can install any one of them in isolation, but in a full engagement they reinforce each other — better measurement reveals where quality breaks, and re-engineered flow is what a governance cadence then holds in place.
Almost every engagement opens with a fixed-fee diagnostic — a short, low-commitment window that produces a written read on the operating model and a clear recommendation. If we continue, the work moves to a monthly retainer scaled to cadence and scope, never billed by the hour. Pricing by the hour rewards slowness; a retainer rewards the outcome. A standalone audit or a single process transformation is scoped to a defined window with a measurable target instead. The fee reflects the seniority of the work, and it is deliberately a fraction of a full-time executive package because the time is fractional, not the discipline.
Through it, always. None of these services is about installing a parallel power centre. A Fractional COO works through your existing managers, making ownership clearer and removing the ambiguity that slows good people down. An audit reviews the system, not the individuals. A transformation leaves your team able to run the next one. The aim is a team that is clearer and stronger when I leave, not one that has been worked around. The measure of a good engagement is that your own people can run what was installed without me in the room.
Most often companies between roughly fifty and five hundred people that are operations-heavy — delivery, services, production, media or multi-site — and have outgrown improvisation. Smaller than that, a strong operations hire or the founder’s own attention is usually enough. Much larger, and the complexity tends to justify a permanent executive bench. The deciding factor is not the headcount but whether the operating model has stopped scaling cleanly. The individual services flex more widely: a quality audit or a governance build can help a larger enterprise that has the scale but not the system.
A Fractional COO engagement usually runs six to twelve months and is designed to end — the goal is to install the operating model and then hand it to your team or to a full-time COO you are now ready to hire. The standalone services are shorter and more contained: a quality audit runs over a defined window of a few weeks, and a focused process transformation over a few months. In every case the design goal is the same — leave something durable that your own people can hold, rather than a dependency that quietly requires me to keep coming back.
We agree the measures up front and review them on a fixed cadence. For a Fractional COO engagement that is usually decision latency, delivery throughput and a quality score. For an audit it is a defensible quality baseline you can track quarter on quarter. For a transformation it is a cycle-time or rework number proven against a control. For governance it is a scorecard the leadership team genuinely steers by. The point is that progress is visible and measured rather than asserted — you should feel the change early and be able to see it in the numbers, not take it on faith.
Not sure which fits