Fractional COO Leadership for Firms Scaling Intentionally

A coach helps you think. A consultant delivers recommendations that you carry out. A fractional COO does the work with you. My engagements are hands-on operational leadership, which means I am inside your business building systems, leading department heads, and holding accountability alongside you. I bring the strategic lens of a management consultant and the practical experience of an operator, but the deliverable is not a report. The deliverable is a business that runs better and hours of work taken off your plate. 

The clearest signal is when the day-to-day is running the business rather than the business running through you. You may already have an operations manager who carries out the day-to-day well, but the strategic layer usually falls back on the CEO, on top of everything else. Fractional leadership gives you an executive-level operations partner who owns that strategic layer, guides your operations team on execution, and takes the higher-order operational thinking off your plate. 

I also work with founders who are on the edge of a growth moment and want to build the operational foundation before scale exposes every crack. The best way to scale sustainably is to build the systems proactively! 

I work across the full operational stack: team structure and hiring, systems and processes, tech and tooling, financial operations, client experience, Human Resources, marketing operations, leadership rhythms, and strategic planning. The Founder or CEO casts the vision, and I ensure it happens.

I work with growing businesses that are ready to be intentional about operations. My clients tend to be founders and CEOs of service businesses and professional firms, generally in the $2M to $20M revenue range, and between 20-100 employees or contractors. The common thread across all of them is a leader who is passionate about the work but stretched thin on the operational side.

For teams smaller than this, Uplift offers a full-service operational partnership right-sized for smaller businesses that still need dedicated ongoing leadership.

Uplift is an AI-augmented practice, which means I use AI to make your business processes faster, cleaner, and more scalable wherever it makes sense. That could mean building a custom AI Executive Assistant, automating client onboarding, or setting up workflows that route work automatically instead of relying on someone remembering. AI is not the goal and will never replace anything that's important to you. Operational clarity is the goal, and AI is one of the tools I use to get there.

Every engagement starts with a conversation about your business, your goals, and where you need operational leadership most. From there, we align on scope, priorities, and cadence, and I step in as part of your leadership team the way any senior hire would. The cost is a flat monthly retainer depending on the complexity of your business and time needed.

Most of my work is done remotely, but I am happy to be onsite for workshops, key leadership meetings, or team trainings when it makes sense. Most engagements are long-term because operational leadership is ongoing work rather than a one-time project, and engagements are flexible contracts with no fixed term. The partnership continues for as long as it serves your business.