Fractional Chief Operating Officer
Business operations consulting for small businesses
Coordinate the chaos.
You started your business because you're exceptional at what you do. Running a business is a different skill — one nobody handed you a playbook for.
Now the work is there, the clients are there, and somewhere along the way the wheels started coming off behind the scenes.
Ops Czar fixes the operational mess that's costing you clients, time, and credibility — the tools, the processes, the website, the custom software you wish someone would build.
Is This You?
Tuesday is supposed to be your most productive day.
Instead you're still digging out from the weekend. Emails you haven't seen in four days. A client who texted six hours ago. Someone who called and you meant to call back.
There's no source of truth. Just email threads that fork and lose context, files named whatever made sense in the moment, decisions made in a text message that now live nowhere. No file naming conventions. No document repository. No way to see at a glance what's due, who owns it, or whether it's getting done.
Scheduling a meeting with more than two people kicks off a thread. “I can do 3pm Tuesday.” “Can’t do that, how about Friday?” Three days later nobody's confirmed anything.
Money slips through too. A subcontractor sends a bill that needs to get passed to the client. It sits. You forget. Now it's your problem.
Passwords are on a sticky note. The hardware hasn't been updated in three years. Your emails are landing in spam and you don't know it. You're running the whole operation on a personal Gmail address because setting up a real one always felt like something you'd get to later.
You know every project because it all lives in your head. That works fine until you hire someone, take on one more client than you can handle, or just have a bad week. Then things fall through cracks you didn't know were there.
You're not disorganized. You're running a business the way nobody told you not to.
It's usually one (or more) of these three things.
Fix the foundation
The tools are wrong, or the right tools are set up wrong, or there are no tools at all. Google Workspace replaces the personal Gmail and brings your files, email, and calendar into one place your whole team can use. Slack ends the email threads. Notion gives you the source of truth you've never had. I scope it, price it flat, and set it up properly.
Build what doesn't exist
This is where most consultants stop and I keep going. The app you wish someone would build — the one that connects two systems that don't talk, automates the thing someone does by hand every week, or handles a workflow so specific that no off-the-shelf software has ever touched it. I build those. Custom software and AI agent development at a fraction of what an agency would charge. I know because I used to run one.
Look like what you are
Your website probably isn't doing you any favors. I build custom sites from scratch — no templates, no CMS to learn, no platform dependency. Just a site that reflects the quality of work you actually do. Built fast, maintained by me, updated when you need it.
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.
Why right now
AI is the web standards moment for business operations.
In the early 2000s, I built a pioneering digital design studio around web standards — a movement that changed how websites were made. Before that, building for the web meant building multiple versions for multiple browsers. Web standards made that go away, and the agencies that understood it early had a real advantage.
AI feels exactly like that moment. The small businesses that figure out AI automation now won't just save time. They'll be structurally different from the ones that wait. Most have no idea what's actually possible — not the ChatGPT party tricks, but real AI agent implementation that eliminates whole categories of manual work. That gap is what Ops Czar exists to close.
Who's behind this
One person. Thirty-five years of doing this.
Ops Czar is run by Greg Hoy. Greg spent twelve years as president and owner of Happy Cog, a pioneering digital agency he sold in 2018. He also co-founded Bureau of Digital, a community for agency owners and practitioners that was acquired in 2016. He's been a designer, writer, marketer, and operations consultant for 35 years.
Since then, he's run operations and marketing for a brand design agency and a digital marketing agency, and co-published a 128-year-old community newspaper through a full sale — hands-on experience turning around the operations of businesses that couldn't be more different from each other.
Ops Czar is how he works with small to medium-sized businesses that need serious help without a full agency's overhead, timeline, or shenanigans.
Clients I've worked with
Ready to get sorted?
Tell me about your situation.
I'll be in touch within two business days.