Greg Hoy
The term “fractional” is having a moment, and not in a timeshare kind of way. Essentially, it’s a fancy term for ‘been there, done that’ — expert help for those who aren’t ready to commit to a full-time salary or a risky hire. It’s the seasoned experience you need, without the commitment anxiety.
There are fractional Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs), fractional Chief Executive Officers (CEOs), fractional Chief Operating Officers (COOs, that’s me), even fractional Chief AI Officers (CAIOs). I guess they’re mostly C-suite-ish individuals, or people who have been in the trenches for a long time.
People typically bring on a fractional COO in particular because they’re exhausted. Exhausted by being the only one who remembers to follow up on something, the only one who can mediate a disagreement between two people, the only one who sees the invoice that slipped through the cracks, the only one who realizes recruiting takes way too long and onboarding is throwing someone in the deep end without swimmies. They want a break. What they actually need is a diagnosis. They’re not the same thing.
Let’s break down what actually happens in month one, and why it doesn’t involve any “fixing.”
Week 1: Observation & the “no fixing” rule
The natural reaction when bringing someone on to “fix” your business is to offload the fire and run. That feels right, but it isn’t. Deploying fixes based on a first impression is how you end up fixing the wrong thing, replacing a tool to save time when the root problem was actually an ownership vacuum. A proper diagnosis takes time, and skipping it just guarantees the problem resurfaces later.
The first month is about observing how your business actually works day-to-day versus how you describe it in sales meetings. It means watching three-minute decisions take three days, and identifying everything existing solely in your head. Expect questions and silence for a couple of weeks, not a lack of progress, but deliberate observation.
An audit uncovers way more than you’d believe
A good operations audit typically uncovers a lot more than you expected in the first few weeks. Not necessarily because your business is a mess, but because nobody has ever looked at all of it at once, especially from the outside. You’ve been solving problems as they land on you, one at a time. Nobody has ever stepped back and looked at how they interconnect.
Some of this is things you expect, like two roles that are effectively the same with no one realizing it, or a tool that nobody uses anymore that you’re still paying for, or a process that only works because one particular person knows all the exceptions. Some of it is less intuitive: a bottleneck in your approval process that is quietly slowing down all of your projects, or a communication pattern that is causing confusion that no one has ever traced back to its source.
The goal in month one is not to fix things. It’s to observe all of this, then distill it down to the few things that matter most.
What changes post-diagnosis
Once you know what the problems are, it becomes very concrete, fast. Replacing the tool that was actually costing you time and not saving it. Documenting the process that has only ever existed in your head so somebody else can run it if you head out on PTO for two weeks. Building the system that replaces the sticky note or the personal Gmail account you’ve been meaning to deal with for two years.
This is also where things start to feel a little different from a typical consulting engagement. I’m not going to deliver a report and leave it up to you to implement. I’ll do the work: build the thing, set up the tool, write the process. And I’ll stay close enough afterward to make sure it actually sticks instead of reverting back to the old way within a month.
This is not...
...a strategy deck or an assessment document that tells you what you already suspected and then never hears from you again. It’s not someone who takes over your Slack and starts replying to messages so you feel better for a couple of weeks while nothing actually changes underneath.
The value isn’t in relieving you of pressure for a few weeks. It’s in changing how your business runs, so that six months from now, things aren’t falling through the cracks because you had a bad week and you’re the only person who knows how anything works.
What you need to bring
The first month works best when you’re honest about what’s actually happening versus what you wish was happening. Give real access to your tools, your team, your calendar — how the sausage is made. The diagnosis is only as good as what you let it see.
And expect some discomfort. Asking why a process works the way it does, when the answer is “I don’t know, it’s just how we’ve always done it,” is not a fun moment to be in. It’s usually the moment that matters most.