Some founders have never run a business before. They know the product well and they are a builder, or they know the customer group and they are good on sales, but running the business is the problem. That is the gap a fractional COO fills. I come in and do that work so that things keep ticking over and stay organised, and the founder can get back to the part they are good at.
What the role covers
Fractional COO, chief sales officer, chief commercial officer: it does not matter much what acronym goes next to it. I become part of the team and deliver. At Trivega, a cybersecurity startup where I was fractional COO, I ran the weekly progress updates, oversaw everyone's work, developed the ideal customer profiles and the go-to-market strategy and implemented them, worked on pricing, went out and found the target hires, sat in on the interviews, negotiated salaries and equity, and took part in the investor meetings. It is not coaching. It is hands-on delivery, inside the company, two to three days a week.
The first thing I do is agree with the founder where they want to be in the next 90 days and beyond. From there we design how to get there: what needs to change, what needs to be true, what needs to be brought in, and what needs to stop. Then I run the week with them. Every piece of work gets an owner and a target, and we review it together every week until the rhythm holds on its own.
The signs you need one
The clearest sign is a backlog. Actions stack up and things stop happening. The weekly meeting turns into frustration, friction and sometimes a bit of finger pointing. Usually the founder still has too much control and has not delegated the responsibility, or they have delegated it on paper but not let go in practice. As you grow you cannot do everything yourself. There are not enough hours in a day, and being confident enough to let go is hard.
The second sign is a founder who is simply better at something else. If you are a technical founder and you want to stay on the technical side, get a strong operator next to you to handle the people side and the running of the business. If you are the best salesperson in the company, the business needs you selling, not chasing invoices and writing job descriptions.
What it is not
I am direct about what I find. It is better to tear off the plaster: this is not going to work, we need to change it, and we need to do it now. The big, ugly changes get made first, not last, so that the rest of the plan is built on solid ground.
I am also open about being temporary. A fractional COO is not a permanent hire. The people you need at the start are not always the people you need two years later, and that applies to me too. The job is to build the operating rhythm, put the right people in the right seats and hand it over. If you still need me full time after a year, I have done the job badly.
How it usually starts
Most of my fractional work starts with coaching the founder through the plan, then stepping inside to run it alongside them. Where the whole business needs looking at first, we start with Stop Being the Bottleneck: four weeks on the as-is and the to-be, agreed with the founder and the leadership team, then the implementation. The fractional role is the implementation.
If that sounds like where you are, the fractional COO page explains how it works. Scope and days are agreed on a call.