Fractional & Interim COO for Services firms
Every industry has its winners and its losers. Both groups are chock-a-block full of industry experts. What separates them isn't industry knowledge — it's the ability to move people from where they are today to where the business needs them to be.
At some point every founder realizes no one is coming to save them. That's usually when we talk
The businesses I work with have typically figured out what they offer and to whom. What they haven't figured out is how to deliver it effectively and profitably as it scales. Doubling revenue meant doubling headcount. That's not sustainable.
The ways you built this business aren't going to be enough to take it where you want it to go. Wherever that is. Maybe it's an exit, maybe it's the next generation, maybe it's just having a life.
If you've become a weak link in your own organization, something has to change. This won't fix itself. Tomorrow will look like today unless you take action. It's not possible for everything to be better and nothing to be different.
The work takes different forms depending on what you need. Sometimes that's an advisory relationship with you — present, direct, focused on what's actually blocking progress. Sometimes it's stepping into an operating role to run something that needs running. Sometimes it's a defined project with a clear endpoint that delivers a new capability.
What determines the form is the problem. Before anything else I want to understand how you built this business, what you're trying to do with it, and what's standing between here and there. The shape of the work follows from that conversation — not the other way around.
Forty years across a dozen industries builds something more useful than expertise in any one of them — it builds pattern recognition. From a $25M specialty food store with 150 employees to a $1.5B global consulting practice across 20+ countries, the underlying problems were the same: people who needed to act in ways they hadn't before, work that needed to move cleanly across the organization, and expectations that were unambiguous about what mattered and what didn't.
You don't have to have it figured out. Motion precedes motivation — the conversation is where clarity starts. No one uninvited is coming to fix this. But one conversation can change all of it.
You already know something has to change. That’s all you need to know to reach out.