You've been quoted for three hires. Hire one line item.
A COO to fix operations. A CTO to build the systems. A marketing lead to make the phone ring.
I do all three jobs, part-time, and I bring staff.
- A COO to fix operations
- A CTO to build the systems
- A marketing lead to make the phone ring
- Together, roughly $700,000 a year before anyone ships
The math you have already run
| Three hires | One line item | |
|---|---|---|
| Operations | COO, $180K–$300K | Included |
| Engineering | Senior engineer or CTO, $200K–$350K | Included |
| Demand | Marketing lead, $120K–$200K | Included |
| Annual commitment | Roughly $700K+ | $12K–$25K a month |
| Time to productive | Six to nine months, three times | Week three |
| If the fit is wrong | Six months and a severance | 30 days' notice |
| Who manages them | You | Nobody |
This isn't an argument about price. It's that hiring one of the three doesn't solve the problem, and hiring all three isn't a realistic move at your size. One engagement covers the whole thing, and you get someone who has run the kind of business you're running.
The three-hire problem
Think about what's in front of your company right now.
For most owners at your size it's a version of the same knot. The numbers live in five places and none of them agree. The team works out of spreadsheets somebody built in 2019 that nobody understands anymore. Marketing spends money and you can't trace a dollar of it to a customer. And the software that would fix any of it doesn't exist to buy, because your business isn't generic enough for someone else to have built it.
Every one of those is an operations problem, an engineering problem and a demand problem wearing the same coat.
Now price the fix. You know what those three people cost. You also know that hiring one of them gets you a third of the way and gives you a new person to manage.
So it waits. That's the three-hire problem, and very few companies your size get through it.
What most fractional help actually is
I want to be fair to the category, because there are good people in it.
But look at what the market sells. Nearly all of it is a marketplace. You describe your problem, they match you with a vetted operator, and the pitch is speed of hire and a fraction of the cost. Every one of them says those same two things.
Notice what's missing. None of them tell you how the work gets done faster. They tell you how the person gets found faster. Those are not the same thing, and the second one stops helping the moment that person is sitting there with the same forty hours as everyone else.
You're not short a person. You're short a department.
What I do, and what it looked like last time
Operations
I read your real data rather than your reporting, find where money and time leak out, then build the thing that stops it. At the vault I'm COO of, leasing, billing, production and shipping ran across four systems and a lot of paper. It's now one platform, and cost is tracked per order against the metal price locked on the day it sold.
Software
The internal platform you need and can't buy. A Naples jewelry retailer had client history in a CRM the sales floor didn't open. Executives now have live performance data across every department without asking anyone to run a report.
Demand
Paid media, organic search, CRM and attribution built as one system. In one of my own companies the ad platform's revenue reporting and the actual books were a long way apart. Rebuilding the measurement was worth more than any campaign I could have run.
The part people forget
I write the plain-language explanation of everything that changed, so you can walk your own team through it without me in the room.
The first ninety days
Then we decide whether to keep going. Either of us can stop with 30 days' notice.
Weeks 1 to 3
I read everything. Your systems, your data, your team's actual workflow rather than the documented one. You get a written diagnosis and one working thing, so you can judge me on output instead of a document.
Weeks 4 to 8
The first build ships. Usually whichever system removes the most manual work, because that's the one your team will actually adopt.
Weeks 9 to 12
Measurement goes in. By the end you should be able to trace a customer back to the thing that produced them, and see real margin rather than revenue.
The objections, answered
If yours isn't here, ask me directly. I answer everything myself.
You're using AI. What am I actually paying for?＋
Judgment, direction and accountability.
AI writes a lot of the code. I set the architecture, I run the review, and I own the result. What that changes is throughput. Every learning from every project goes back into how the whole operation runs, so your build starts from everything the last twelve companies taught us rather than from a blank page. That compounding is what you're buying, and it's not something a single hire can offer you.
You run twelve companies. Will you have time for mine?＋
Yes, and it's a fair thing to ask.
The reason I can hold that many is the way the work is built. My staff carry the day to day and the systems carry a lot of the throughput, which means my time goes to strategy, architecture and quality rather than to production. That's the whole design. It's also why the ninety-day scope above is realistic rather than optimistic.
What happens when you leave?＋
You own everything. Code, accounts, documentation, all of it, in your repositories under your credentials. I write handoff documentation as I go rather than at the end, because I run a portfolio and I've had to hand things off to myself more than once.
How is this different from an agency?＋
An agency sells you hours and a project manager. I take the problem and I'm accountable for the outcome. An agency also won't take part of its fee in performance. In the right situation, I will.
You haven't worked in my industry.＋
Possibly not. Metals, luxury watches, construction, legal referral and real estate are not one industry, and the knot underneath them has been the same every time. If yours genuinely needs domain depth I don't have, I'll tell you on the first call rather than three months in.
What if it doesn't work?＋
I don't offer a money-back guarantee, and I'd rather tell you why than dodge it.
You're buying strategy and the work that comes out of it. I'm going to give you both. A refund promise would suggest I'm not sure about that, and I am.
What I do give you is a fixed price, so you know the commitment before you start. A scope in writing, so we agree what finished means. And 30 days' notice either way on anything ongoing, so you're never held in something that stopped being useful.
Where I work
Five industries where the ticket is high and trust is what stands between the customer and the sale.
Start with the smallest thing.
Send me a quote you've already been given and I'll tell you what I think of it, free and in writing. Even when the answer is that the quote is fair and you should take it.
I take limited engagements.