How Do You Fix a Business That Depends Too Heavily on Its Founder?
If your business can’t decide, sell, or deliver without you, sort what waits on you into decisions, relationships, and know-how, then hand each off with written limits.
Fractional Chief Operating Officer
Operations consulting for agencies and service-based businesses
You're good at the work. That was never the problem. The problem is everything underneath it: the scoping that leaks margin, the process that lives in one person's head, the tools that were set up in a hurry three years ago and never touched again.
I fix that. Sometimes it's how the work gets delivered. Sometimes it's how the business runs. Usually it's both, because they were never really separate.
What does a fractional COO actually do?Read the guideFix how you deliver work
Scope, staffing, estimates, utilization, contracts, and the handoffs where margin disappears.
Is this you?Fix how you run your business
Owner dependency, disconnected tools, undocumented process, and the chaos that comes with them.
Is this you?Bring in a fractional COO
Senior operations leadership, one to two days a week, without the full-time hire.
What it looks likeIs This You?
Tuesday is supposed to be your most productive day.
Instead you're dealing with one of these. Probably more than one.
If you deliver work to clients
- Your utilization number looks fine but your margin is shrinking every quarter.
- Discovery always goes over. You've accepted this as normal.
- Your contracts protect the client. They don't protect you.
- Your best people are the least billable because everyone needs them in every meeting.
- You have a project manager and you're still the one holding everything together.
If you run the business
- Everything runs through you because there's no system that works without you in it.
- Files live everywhere and nowhere. No one can find anything.
- Something slips financially, a subcontractor bill, an unbilled hour, and it sits until it's your problem.
- You made money on paper this quarter but can't point to where it went.
- You've been meaning to fix all of this for two years.
You're not disorganized. You're running a business the way nobody told you not to.
The Work
It's usually one of these six things. Often more than one.
Delivery
01
Project definition and scoping
Agree on what you're building before anyone estimates it. The roadmap both sides own, so the contract holds up when the project gets complicated.
02
Resource planning and utilization
Find the real number, not the one your tool shows you. Staff against actual capacity instead of gut feel.
03
Contracts and estimating
Vague where it should be, airtight where it has to be. Estimates built on hours, delivered fixed-fee, with a tripwire before things go sideways.
Operations
04
Fix the foundation
Google Workspace, Slack, a real source of truth. Set up properly, migrated without losing anything, managed so it stays that way.
05
Build what doesn't exist
The app that connects two systems that don't talk, or automates the thing someone does by hand every week. Custom software at a fraction of agency cost. I know, because I ran one.
06
Write it down
The process that only works because one person remembers the exceptions isn't a process. Documented and handed off, so the business runs without you standing next to it.
How to hire me
Two ways in.
Start with an outcome
- The Operations Diagnosis See how work really runs, where it breaks, and what to fix first. 30 days$7,500–$12,500
- The Margin Audit Find which clients, contracts, or roles are eating your margin. 2 weeks$4,500
- The Second Business Give your new venture its own operating systems, decision rules, and scorecard. 60 days$9,500
Fixed fee, set length, a deliverable you can hold up in a partners meeting.
See the packages →Or bring in a fractional COO
A fractional COO is what you hire when the business needs senior operations leadership and doesn't need it forty hours a week. I embed one to two days a week, diagnose first, fix second, and stay long enough to see whether the fixes held.
The first 90 days are the rebuild. After that, most engagements shift to a lighter cadence. The first phase runs $8,000 to $14,000 a month; the ongoing one runs $3,000 to $6,000. If that's more than the business can carry right now, a scoped project from the services menu is usually the better fit, and I'll tell you so.
How the engagement works →8
Case Study
A community center. Eight integrations. One person.
The Park Avenue Community Center located in the Philadelphia suburbs is a nonprofit organization that runs classes, events, facility rentals, and a donation program. The center's first site ran on Squarespace, which, while easy to maintain by staff, was laborious to maintain. Staff recreated every class listing every season by hand, then sent people off to a separate platform to actually sign up. Donations, events, and communications all lived in separate tools that had no idea the others existed.
I built them a custom platform that pulls class data automatically, sells tickets, processes donations, manages newsletter subscribers, handles job applications, and gives staff a complete back office to run the whole thing without touching code. Eight live integrations. AI-generated content. Fully secured and deployed.
One person built it. No agency. No dev team. Ten years ago at my agency, this was a $250,000 project. It isn't anymore.
Reference
Service business metrics, defined.
Thirty-two metrics for agencies, studios, and consultancies. The formula, what it measures, where people get it wrong, and the healthy range on a meter. Free two-page cheat sheet.
Read the reference →Writing
I write about this stuff. Weekly.
What Causes Project-Margin Leakage in Creative Agencies?
Agency margin leaks out of projects in four places: light estimates, unpriced scope, unbilled hours, and the wrong staffing mix. Here’s how to find yours.
Nobody Likes Timesheets. Keep Them Anyway.
Fixed fee, hourly, or value priced, your cost is still hours. Why the income statement can't tell you what a project cost, what twelve years of tracking showed me, and four rules that make the data worth keeping.
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Who's behind this
One person. Thirty-five years of doing this.
Ops Czar is Greg Hoy. Twelve years as president and owner of Happy Cog, a pioneering digital agency he sold in 2018. Co-founder of Bureau of Digital, a community for agency owners, acquired in 2016. Since then, operations for a brand design studio and a creative agency, and a 128-year-old newspaper co-published through a full sale.
Ops Czar is how he works with businesses that need serious operational help without a full agency's overhead, timeline, or shenanigans.
Full storyClients I've worked with
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