Your company gets an operator. You get your week back.
An operating partner takes on the machinery of your company: the goals and the weekly rhythm, the revenue engine, the customer path, the money and the back office, the people, and the big time-bound pushes.
You keep the two jobs only a founder can do: setting the direction and carrying the relationships with investors and key customers.
This is hands-on work: we build beside you until your team can run it alone.
Six areas come off your plate
Each area to the right is work somebody handles every week. Open the ones you’re still carrying yourself, and learn how we can help.
-
A stuck decision goes to whoever can settle it fastest, and in your company that’s you. People bring you the small calls with the big ones, because there’s nowhere else to take a question. That’s a missing system, and we can build it with you.
We turn the vision into two or three measurable quarterly targets, put every active initiative in one prioritized list with a repeatable way to say no, and run the weekly cadence that holds the team accountable. Routine decisions get owners and dollar thresholds, so the ones that reach you are the few that need you.
-
Founder-led selling holds until it caps at the hours you can give it: you write the messages, you pick the targets, you run the demos. We build the process layer underneath: defined pipeline stages and qualification, a recurring forecast and deal review that catches stalls early, and the follow-up discipline that keeps committed money moving.
When you're ready for more, we go deeper into pricing, packaging, and the CRM. One overhaul we ran pushed contract sizes up 30% and pulled discounting down 8 points. We write it all down as we go, so your next sales hire starts with a playbook that already works.
-
The next hire, the overdue review, the tough conversation that keeps getting rescheduled: all of it waits for you. We build the organization that can execute while you lead: clear ownership for each function, a hiring roadmap in the right order with a scorecard and a repeatable interview for each role, performance management with criteria that make sense on day one, and coaching for your first-time managers. The people work stops waiting for you.
-
You approve the invoices, you sign the renewals, and you're the one who works out how many months of cash are left. We take that job. We keep a cash flow forecast, so you know your runway and your burn. We run a monthly review of the P&L and the cash position. We track unit economics: what a customer costs to win and how long until it pays back. We compare budget to actuals, and we build the materials a board or investor expects, working with the bookkeeper or accountant you already have. The admin comes with it: vendor contracts, the tool stack and what it costs, and the payroll, benefits, and compliance deadlines.
-
The billing question, the late-order complaint, the feature request from the oldest account on the oldest pricing: all of them come to you. We take those, and the bigger job behind them: keeping the customers you already won.
We build an onboarding plan that gets a new customer up and running. We set delivery standards and quality checks that hold without you. We run a support process with owners and response times, so the team solves the small problems and you only hear about the big ones. We track renewals and churn, and review the feedback on a schedule. For software businesses, that includes trial-to-paid conversion. The product itself stays with you, and so does every decision about what to build.
-
Every fundraise, launch, partnership, acquisition, or SOC 2 audit is a second job, and it’s usually yours. We run them as managed programs, each with one owner, a work plan with firm dates, and progress you can check without chasing anyone. For a fundraise, that includes the deck, the financial model, and a data room that's ready before an investor asks.
How fast does the load need to leave your desk?
-
Full operating partner
You hand over the whole operating load at once. We run all six areas end to end, 12 to 15 hours a week.
-
Focused operating partner
The load comes off in stages: we run the areas costing you most, and we guide your team through the rest,
6 to 8 hours a week. -
Operating counterpart
About 3 hours a week: you execute, and we advise, review, and hold you to the plan.
Start with the Diagnose step
Every engagement opens with the Diagnose step, and you can buy it on its own with no retainer attached. We sit with you for 60 to 90 minutes with your numbers in front of us, talk with a couple of your people if that sharpens the picture, and score how the company runs across all six areas on a four-level scale from missing to reliable.
You leave with a scorecard for each area, the gaps ranked by what they’re costing you, and a build order, walked through together on a readout call of 45 to 60 minutes. This is the process that took one founder from an 80-hour week down to 55, with revenue up 45% over the six months it ran.
The fee is $1,500, fixed, and if you sign an engagement within 30 days of the readout, the full amount comes off your first month. The plan is yours either way: run it yourself, or have us run it with you.
By day 90 at the full tier, your team runs the system
Month one is diagnosis and triage: we map the gaps, put out whatever fires are already burning, and set the targets and weekly cadence that drive the next two months.
Month two is the build, in the order the scorecard says: the revenue process, the onboarding path, the numbers, the hiring roadmap.
Month three shifts to handover: we document the system and train your team to run it, whether we stay on or step back. From there, you decide what happens to the engagement: end it, reduce it, keep it, or grow it.
That’s the schedule at the full tier. The smaller tiers do the same work in the same order; it just takes longer.
Where the engagement stops
Product strategy and roadmap stay with you or your product leader. Decisions about what to build shape the company’s identity, and a business that needs help with both is better off with two specialists. If you want the second one, we can introduce you to people we trust.
Hands-on work past the agreed-upon weekly commitment gets scoped and billed separately, with notice before it happens.
Everything we build stays with your team
The cadence, the playbooks, the decision rules: all of it is yours when the engagement ends. We train the people who’ll run each system, write the documentation they’ll use after us, and measure success by how little the company still needs us.
One client’s attrition fell from 35% to 4%, and the reviews and growth paths behind that number belong to their team now.
You get out of the operating weeds and back to the work only a founder can do.
Questions founders ask
-
An operating partner covers the machinery of the business across six areas: goals and the weekly rhythm, revenue operations, people and hiring, finance and the back office, customer onboarding and retention, and major programs like a fundraise or a launch. The tier sets the pace: at full we take everything on at once, and at the smaller two your team carries more while we guide. Product strategy stays with the founder or a product leader.
-
It mostly depends on how quickly you need the load to leave your desk. A full engagement runs 12 to 15 hours a week with direct ownership of operations. A focused engagement runs six to eight. The advisory tier runs about three, where you execute and we guide and review.
-
We meet once a week at a set time, and the rest of the hours flex around the work: a heavy week and a light one even out across the month. We answer email within a day and messages the same business day. If a deadline is at risk, you hear about it early.
-
The full and focused tiers run on a three-month minimum, because systems that stick take about that long to build and hand over. The counterpart runs month to month and can start with a four-week opening term.
-
Sometimes, yes. A full-time operations executive runs about $250K plus benefits and equity, and when the hire is wrong, you spend the next year finding that out and starting over. The fractional model is sized for this stage: set hours, a monthly retainer, and terms that change when the company changes.
-
A full CFO usually arrives around $10M in revenue. Until then the finance work still has to happen, and it’s one of our six areas: the monthly P&L review, the cash flow forecast, the unit economics, and the board reporting, working with the bookkeeper or accountant you already have.