Business practice
Fractional operations.
Hand the operation to someone who owns it, so the running of the firm stops depending on the hours you have left at the end of the day.
The operation is running on you. Not on a system, not on a role, on you, and everyone in the firm knows it.
It is the position most owners reach somewhere between thirty and eighty people. The work that pays runs alongside the work of holding it all together, and the second one has no scheduled time. Initiatives get started and not finished. Decisions queue behind whoever is free. A full time operations hire is the obvious answer and it is also a large fixed cost against a role you have never held, so the decision keeps getting deferred.
The state worth reaching is one where the operation has an owner who is not you. Meetings happen because a cadence exists rather than because a problem grew loud enough. Open initiatives sit on one governed list with dates against them. You still make the decisions, and you stop being the mechanism through which everything moves.
The approach
Own it, govern it, hand it over.
Own the cadence.
A weekly operating rhythm that is run rather than attended. Agenda set, decisions recorded, actions owned and followed up. Most firms at this size do not lack meetings. They lack a meeting where things are actually decided and then tracked.
Govern the roadmap.
Every open initiative on one list, scored, sequenced, and given an owner and a date. Including the ones that should be stopped. Deciding what the firm will not do this quarter is usually worth more than adding another thing it will attempt.
Build the successor.
The engagement is designed to end. Someone inside your firm grows into the seat, with the cadence, the documentation, and the judgement handed over deliberately. A fractional arrangement that becomes permanent by default has failed at its actual job.
Recognise this
The bottleneck has a name and it is yours.
- Decisions wait for you, and you are the reason several of them have waited a month.
- You have started more than one improvement this year and finished none of them.
- Nobody in the firm owns operations, so it belongs to whoever is least busy that week.
- You have considered hiring an operations leader and stalled on the salary or the job description.
- The work that grows the firm happens after hours, because the day belongs to keeping it running.
The seat
What the role actually covers.
Operating cadence
The weekly rhythm designed, run, and owned. Agendas, decisions, and follow through. Run rather than advised on, which is the difference between this and a consulting retainer.
Roadmap governance
Every initiative scored on impact and complexity, sequenced, owned, and reviewed. Including an explicit list of what the firm has decided not to do this quarter.
Process and documentation
The workflows that matter written down and maintained on a cadence, so the firm's knowledge stops living in two people's heads. See process and workflow.
Team structure
Roles, responsibilities, and the handoffs between them. Where accountability is genuinely unclear, it gets named, and naming it is often the whole fix.
Vendor and software review
What you pay for, what you use, and what overlaps. This review commonly funds a meaningful share of the arrangement in its first quarter.
Succession
An internal owner identified and developed from the start, with a handover plan. The objective is a firm that no longer needs the seat filled from outside.
The constraint
One client at a time.
1
Fractional client held at any one time, by design
14+
Years running customer facing and operational teams
The cap is a real constraint rather than a positioning device. A fractional seat spread across four firms is a vendor on a call, not an operations leader in the room.
Related reading.
All insights
Operations
The two-person dependency test
Pick any critical workflow and ask one question. If these two specific people were both unreachable for a week, what happens. If the honest answer is that things quietly stop, you have found the real risk register of your firm, and it does not appear in
Retention
The six questions that find churn before it finds you
Every firm that has lost a client it did not expect to lose has the evidence sitting somewhere in an inbox. The six questions below take about an hour to work through and they will surface the pattern, but only if you are willing to run them against the clients who already
Questions
Asked before, answered plainly.
A consultant advises and leaves the doing to you. This seat does the doing. The cadence is run, the roadmap is maintained, and the follow up happens without you chasing it. If what you want is a second opinion on a decision, a retainer is cheaper and more appropriate, and we will tell you that.
Eventually, yes, and this arrangement is designed to get you there. Most firms at this size cannot yet write an accurate job description for the role because they have never had it. A fractional period produces the cadence, the documentation, and a clear definition of the seat, which makes the eventual hire far more likely to succeed.
We prefer not to, and the reason is protective on both sides. The 30-Day Proof establishes what is actually happening in your operation before anyone commits to an ongoing arrangement. It is a short, bounded way to find out whether this working relationship is right, rather than discovering it three months into a longer commitment.
Because the value of the seat is presence and continuity, and both dissolve when it is divided. A fractional operations leader carrying four firms is scheduling calls, not running an operation. The cap means there is sometimes a wait, and the next available start date is given plainly on the first call.
Planned from the beginning. An internal owner is identified early and developed through the engagement, the cadence and documentation are theirs rather than ours, and the handover is a scheduled process rather than a final meeting. A successful engagement ends with your firm running the operation itself.