Every decision routes through the founder.
Nothing meaningful moves until the founder has looked at it. The calendar is full of approvals that a working structure would have handled without a meeting.
Fractional COO Services | Part-Time Chief Operating Officer | Operating Partners Since 2001
Fractional COO Services
A fractional COO runs the operating side of a company part time. Same ground a full-time COO covers: systems, process, accountability, org structure, and the daily execution that keeps commitments moving. The difference is the commitment. A few days a month against a salary, equity, and a multi-year bet on one hire.
We Unf*ck has done this work since 2001. Ethan Fialkow brings a JD, an MBA, and 25 years of operating experience to every engagement.
When a fractional COO earns the seat
Revenue climbs. Margin stays flat.
Growth is real and the P&L does not show it. Work gets done twice, handoffs leak, and nobody owns the number that would explain where the money went.
The same questions come back every week.
Because nothing is written down, or what is written down does not match how the business runs today. The team asks. The founder answers. Repeat.
Headcount outpaced the structure.
People were hired to relieve pressure. Without seats, owners, and a cadence to hold them, the new hires added coordination cost instead of capacity.
Several initiatives sit half finished.
Started with energy, stalled at the first hard week, replaced by the next idea. The pattern is structural. A fractional COO is the person whose job is to close the loop.
The founder works inside the business, not ahead of it.
Strategy time gets eaten by operations. The role that only the founder can do (direction, relationships, the next bet) is the role that gets the least of their week.
A consultant diagnoses and recommends. A fractional COO holds the operating seat and is accountable for what actually ships.
What Our Fractional COO Services Include
What the engagement covers
The operating side of the company, owned. This is the work a full-time COO would carry, scoped to the days the business actually needs.
Operating cadence.
The meeting rhythm, the scorecard, and a named owner on every number that matters. Weekly, monthly, quarterly, each with a purpose and an output. Cash flow visibility lives here too, so the numbers that drive decisions are reviewed on a schedule instead of discovered in a crisis.
Systems and SOPs.
Written so the team uses them. Documentation that dies in a folder is not a system. We build the process, the decision logic inside it, and the rollout that makes it stick.
Org structure and accountability.
Who owns what, where decisions actually land, and which seats are missing. Most founder-led companies have an org chart that describes people, not outcomes. We fix the chart so it describes the work.
Hiring sequence.
Role definition and the order of hires, built against the structure rather than the panic. The next hire is the one that removes the most founder load per dollar, and that is rarely the one that feels most urgent.
Vendor, tooling, and systems decisions.
What to keep, what to replace, what to stop paying for. Software and vendor sprawl is one of the fastest ways margin disappears in a growing company. We audit it and make the calls.
Execution alongside the team.
We work inside the business. No deck handed over at the end. The measure of the engagement is what changed on the floor, not what was recommended in a document.
How we work
Diagnosis first. We fix what's actually broken, which is usually more than one thing, and almost never what you thought.
The problem is usually upstream.
Decision-making inside a company runs on the limbic system before it runs on logic. The operating problems that look structural usually trace back to how people read risk, ownership, and permission. That is why process alone rarely holds.
We build the structure and the conditions.
A cadence nobody trusts gets skipped. An SOP nobody feels safe following gets worked around. We build the system and the environment that lets people actually use it.
We stay until it holds.
Engagements run until the agreed outcomes are met. We stay on at no additional cost until they are.
What this looks like in practice
Hired to find fraud. Fixed the company instead.
The founder was certain money was walking out the door. The diagnostic found something worse: an operating structure that made the losses inevitable, with nobody owning the numbers that would have caught them.
A $1B brand with a broken back door.
A Swiss watchmaker was bleeding $1.25M a year through three operational gaps nobody had mapped. We closed them for $18,000 and recovered a $395,000 wire.
$5M to $10M, nine years and counting.
GHG Builders sounded like a subcontractor and sold like one. Repositioned, restructured, and run on a cadence that held. Revenue doubled and project size tripled.
Fractional COO services for founder-led companies
The operating seat, owned.
The business does not need another opinion. It needs someone to hold the operating side accountable, build the structure that makes the team faster than the founder, and stay until it works.
Part of a wider operations consulting practice. Start with the diagnostic and we will tell you which one you actually need.
Book a call and let's fix it.
Get StartedFrequently Asked
Questions
What is a fractional COO?
A fractional COO is a chief operating officer who works with a company part time, usually a few days a month, and carries real operational authority rather than an advisory role. The work covers systems, process, org structure, accountability, and execution. Full explanation here.
What does a fractional COO do?
A fractional COO owns the operating side of the business. That means building the meeting cadence and scorecard, defining who owns which outcomes, writing the systems the team runs on, sequencing hires, and working alongside the team to move initiatives from started to finished. A week-by-week breakdown is here.
What does a fractional COO cost?
Fractional COO engagements are typically priced monthly rather than hourly, and the range moves with scope and the number of days committed. Hourly pricing tends to work against the role, since the value sits in ownership of outcomes rather than time logged. How the pricing models compare.
When should a company hire a fractional COO?
The usual signal is a founder who has become the bottleneck on every decision, paired with revenue that grows while margin stays flat. Companies also bring one in after a period of fast hiring, when headcount has outrun the structure meant to support it. The full set of signals, and the ones that mean wait.
How is a fractional COO different from a management consultant?
A consultant diagnoses and recommends. A fractional COO holds the operating seat and is accountable for what actually ships. At We Unf*ck the two are connected: the diagnostic comes first, and the fractional COO engagement is how the fixes get built and held.