Fractional COO
Founder-led companies · Fairhope, AL & remote
Your company has outgrown the way you run it, and your job has to change with it. I take the day-to-day operations off your plate, build a leadership team that can carry the load, and hand the reins to them, working inside your business one day a week or every other week until it runs without you in every room.
A steady weekly rhythm, then a clean handoff to your own leadership team, or to a full-time leader when you're ready for one.
Industries Where I've Run the Operating Side
Every company outgrows the way its founder runs it, and it happens more than once. The first time is when there are too many people for you to check in with each one. Again when the company is chasing work bigger than it is, and the plan has to come from a smaller room. Each time, approvals, stuck handoffs and hard conversations keep landing on your desk, and good people wait for you instead of deciding. You catch up in the evenings and plan vacations around the business. The fix is changing your role on purpose: building a leadership team that can carry the operating side, so the company keeps moving when you are out of the room.
Most founders recognize themselves in one of these.
Your day starts with a walk around to everyone running a job, to hear what happened since yesterday. The updates come back thin because people know you'll ask again tomorrow. And when you offer advice, it lands as an order, so the people who are supposed to own the work stop owning it.
You know every name, and people bring their problems straight to you. That worked when the whole company fit in one room. Now the plans that matter have to come from a smaller group, and the people who joined a small company feel left out of decisions they used to hear about first. Left alone, that turns into a culture problem.
You're out of the day-to-day, and you know the business well. But long-time people still bring their issues to you one at a time, and you settle them without anyone else knowing what was decided. People have leadership titles without the authority to hire, pay or promote, so everything finds its way back to your desk.
Your team brings you questions they could answer themselves, and nobody is quite sure who owns what.
Who owns whatThe leadership meeting is a status report, and the real decisions wait until you are in the room.
The weekly leadership meetingYou find out how the business is doing by asking around, and January's priorities are a blur by spring.
The numbers & quarterly prioritiesThe role that no longer fits and the hire that is a year overdue are still sitting on your list.
The people decisionsWork falls between departments, and the reports and handoffs depend on the one person who knows how.
The systems underneathYour most skilled people lose whole days to checks and reports that a tool could handle in minutes, and nobody has had time to build it.
Tools built for the work, AI includedMost founders have tried some of this already: a manager hired to take the load, a new system the team was supposed to live in, a planning day that produced a good list, and a lot of long weeks. Each of those was a reasonable move, and each fixed a piece. What usually goes missing is someone whose job is to keep every piece running, week after week, until your team owns it.
Built for founder-led construction, manufacturing and field service companies at the point where the founder's role has to change, usually between $2 million and $35 million in revenue.
The Operating Partner Check asks twenty questions about how your week and your company actually work: the decisions that land on you, who owns the major functions, the numbers you trust, and whether you are ready to hand the day-to-day to someone else. You get a plain-language read on where the business is solid, where it is straining, and what your own time spent on the wrong work is worth.
Your role can change once the work it was holding has somewhere else to go. These are the five places it goes, built with your team and run until they own them.
Every function gets one name. And the titles come with the authority to act, so a manager who owns a function can make the call instead of walking it to your office. People know what they own, you know who to ask, and the gaps show up on paper before they show up in the work. Once the names are on paper, the questions that used to come to you start going to the people who own the answers. Everything else on this list depends on it, so it comes first.
I run it. Same day, same agenda, the numbers first, then the issues that are actually stuck, solved in the room and assigned before anyone leaves. Within a few weeks the meeting stops being a status report and starts being where decisions get made without you. A meeting where nobody owns anything when it ends is an awareness check. This one ends with a name beside every open item.
A short set of numbers the team trusts, reviewed every week, and a few priorities per quarter that everyone can name. You see the business at a glance instead of by asking around, and the team knows what matters this quarter without asking you.
The conversations that have been waiting: the role that no longer fits, the hire that should have happened a year ago, the leader who is ready for more. I have them with you and follow them through, so they stop sitting on your list. Sometimes the leader you've been meaning to hire is already on the payroll. At one construction company, the person who stepped up to lead delivery was a project manager who had been doing that work for years on his own jobs. Growth sometimes means putting someone new above a leader who has been with you for years, or moving someone into a role that fits them better. I tell you up front what that friction looks like, and I carry most of it so it doesn't land on your desk.
Handoffs, reporting, intake, the data behind the scorecard. That includes the rules most growing companies never write down: who can approve what, and up to how much. Managers can act without escalating every purchase, and nobody spends without a limit. When the fix is a scorecard that fills itself, an intake check that flags missing information before it turns into a late shipment, or a review that used to take a QA person most of a day, I build it myself, AI included. At a Gulf Coast industrial manufacturer, an AI drawing review I built checks a batch of 15 or more drawings in about 20 minutes instead of eight hours, and final approval of client drawings went from two weeks to two days.
A founder nothing could move without, an on-time number nobody believed, a drawing check that ate most of a day, technology cost nobody could see, and a firm with four ways of delivering. Each story ends with what the leader stopped having to do.
At a construction company doing about $2.5 million a year, nothing moved unless the founder was in the room, and the people who should have been growing into leaders never got the chance to decide. One offsite, clear ownership, and a project manager promoted to lead delivery changed that. Within 90 days a delivery playbook was running every job, and the rapid-fire escalations had become a weekly report.
Read the full story →On-time delivery was reported at 68 percent and nobody trusted it. Fifteen people from six functions mapped order-to-ship in one room, the data got cleaned up, and the true number reached roughly 90 percent in two months and 97 after the quality work. Sales took ownership of it.
Read the full story →Client drawings kept coming back for a standard the client expected. Earlier vetting at the front of sales, plus an AI review I built that checks a batch of 15 or more drawings in 20 minutes instead of eight hours, took final approval from two weeks to two days.
Read the full story →A family-owned claims firm whose field workforce flexed from 1,000 to 3,000 adjusters with storm demand was paying for technology as if it never changed size. Consolidating overlapping vendors and putting one owner on every contract took $2.8 million a year out of recurring cost, validated by finance.
Read the full story →At a founder-led services firm, every delivery center ran its own way, so every client judged the whole company by one project. One shared way of delivering carried the firm from 160 people to about a thousand, with more than 100 engagements running at once on one framework and one reporting rhythm.
Read the full story →
I've spent my career right next to the founder or CEO, taking ownership of whichever part of the business was straining under growth.
I ran technology for a family-owned claims firm supporting up to 3,000 field adjusters every storm season. Then I spent nine years running service delivery, reporting to the CEO, first as one of four center directors and then as VP of Service Delivery, while that firm grew from $20 million to $150 million and from 160 people to about a thousand across four acquisitions. Most recently I was brought into a $50 million founder-era manufacturer to build the operating structure it had never had.
Across every one of those companies, the breaking point looked the same: growth outran the old way of making decisions, handoffs between teams started slipping, and everything hard ended up back on the owner's desk. Because I came up through both operations and technology, I don't separate the leadership work from the systems underneath it. I'm comfortable carrying the friction of an overdue people decision in the morning and building the automated scorecard or AI workflow your team needs that afternoon.
I've also done this from the outside, which is how I work now. Two years ago, a construction company doing about $2.5 million a year brought me in when nothing moved unless the founder was in the room. Within 90 days a delivery playbook was running every job under one of the company's own project managers, and the founder got back more than ten hours a week.
Now I do that work directly for founders who are ready to get out of every room, one day a week or every other week, from Fairhope, Alabama and remote, until their own team carries the load.
It starts with you. In our first conversations I'm listening for how your role works today: where decisions find you, who you trust with what, and how ready you are to let other people carry part of the load. Then I get inside the business: your meetings, the numbers, the work and the people who do it. The loudest problem often has a quieter one underneath it. At one manufacturer, nobody trusted a 68 percent on-time number, and the first real finding was that the data feeding it had problems. You leave this stage with a plain read on where the weight sits and what to fix first.
Your team gets a rhythm it runs. A weekly leadership meeting on a short agenda, the numbers that matter on one page, one named owner for every function, and the first quarterly priorities, each with one name beside it. I'm inside the business one day a week or every other week, sized to how much needs to move.
Decisions leave your desk one process at a time. The process that pulls you in most often gets written down and handed to an owner, then the next one. Recurring decisions get a named decider, managers grow into real authority, and the people decisions that have been waiting get made. This is where your hours come back.
It holds without you, and without me. I build the tools that keep the work from drifting back to your desk, like a scorecard that fills itself or requests that route to the right person on their own. Your leadership team takes it over, usually nine to twelve months in, and if you decide to hire a full-time leader, they step into a system that already runs. After that, a quarterly check-in shows whether it's holding.
Picture a Tuesday about a year from now. The leadership meeting starts on time whether or not you're in the room. The numbers are on the first page, and nobody asks whether they're right. The two issues that are actually stuck get settled before anyone leaves, each with one name beside it. You read the notes at lunch, and most weeks they ask nothing of you.
The decisions that used to wait for your calendar get made by the people closest to the work. The hire you kept putting off has started. The checks and reports that used to eat your best people's afternoons run on tools built for the job, so those people spend their hours where they're needed.
And your own week has room in it again: for the customers you want to win, for where the company goes next, for the growth you couldn't chase while you were holding everything together, and for a Friday afternoon that belongs to you. You own a company that runs on your judgment, and it no longer needs your hands on every part of it to move.
That's the pattern in the stories above. One founder went from answering issues one after another to reading a weekly report that, most weeks, asked nothing of him. Two others, with delivery off their plates, led the geographic expansion that became a catalyst for their company's growth.
A company that runs like that is also worth more. It's worth more to you every year you own it, and worth more to anyone who might one day buy it, because what they'd be buying keeps working after you step back.
It's a monthly fee, set by the cadence, one day a week or every other week, and by how much needs to move. We'll go through the number plainly on the first call, before anything starts, so you can weigh it against what the current setup is costing you in your own time.
More at the start, while we get inside the business and sort out what you keep and what moves. After that, your regular time is the weekly leadership meeting plus an hour together, just the two of us: weekly for the first month, then every other week. The decisions and the follow-through move to your team.
They do when they help build it. The structure gets built with your team, from their own experience, and the people who step up are often already in the building. At one construction company, the leadership team brought the solutions to the first offsite, and the person who stepped up to lead delivery was a project manager who had been doing that work for years on his own jobs. People follow a plan they helped write.
Most of them grow with it. Trust gets built on results you can both see: a scope of work that holds up, a budget that comes in where it said it would, a project that ships on time. People who show that get more to own. Some are better suited to a different role, and moving them into it is usually a relief for everyone. Now and then someone decides the company they want isn't the one it's becoming, and it's better to know that early. At one company that grew from 160 people to about a thousand, three people promoted from inside to lead their own centers were some of the biggest wins the company had.
Plans tend to stall in the weeks after they're written, when nobody's job is to keep them running. Here, keeping them running is the job. The work happens inside your company on a set cadence, and you can see it early: within a few weeks the leadership meeting stops being a status report. The handoff is designed in from the start, usually over nine to twelve months, so what gets built stays with your team.
You keep the way your company already works, and we build on it. The pieces every well-run company needs are the same whatever you call them: clear owners, a weekly leadership meeting, a short set of numbers, a few priorities each quarter, and the people decisions that keep getting put off. They get built in plain language, around how your team already talks. If you already run on EOS or something like it, the work fits inside it.
Tell me where the business is stuck and what you have already tried, and bring any read you've taken from the self-assessments. I'll ask how decisions move today and where your week goes, and by the end of the call we'll both know whether an operating partner is the right kind of help. Either way, you keep your tool reads and anything useful we work out on the call. If it's a fit, we'll talk about the right first step.
Book 30 minutes