Questions, answered

No, I'm based in the UK and work with clients across the US, UK and Australia. In practice my afternoons are your mornings, which covers most of the working day on the East Coast and the start of it on the West. Everything I build is remote-first because it has to be.

Me. I do the work myself. That's the reason the quality holds, and it's the main difference between working with me and working with a consultancy where a senior person sells and a junior delivers.

No, and most of my clients aren't tech people either. That's the point. You tell me how the business works, I handle everything technical, and I train your team until the new way feels normal. If you can use a phone, you can use what I build.

Most of it lands at the start. Discovery and onboarding need real conversations, because I can't fix what I don't understand. After that I work independently and come back to you at agreed points. The build phase is designed to take you out of it, not pull you in.

It depends entirely on scope, which is why the first call is free. As a guide, one-off implementations typically run from a few thousand dollars, and ongoing fractional COO support is a monthly retainer. You'll have a fixed price in writing before anything starts, and I don't work on open-ended hourly billing.

Yes. Thirty minutes, no pitch, and you'll leave with recommendations whether we work together or not. If I'm not the right fit I'll tell you on the call and point you somewhere better.

That's fine, you can buy the audit on its own. If you go ahead with the build within the agreed window, the audit fee comes off the cost.

A focused implementation is usually four to six weeks. A full operating system across a business is closer to three to four months including training and embedding. You'll have a timeline in the proposal.

Training for your team, measures so you can see it's working, and thirty days of support after go-live. Longer support is available and gets scoped as part of the engagement.

Both, and I'll tell you honestly which one you need. Off-the-shelf is faster and cheaper when it fits. Custom is worth it when you're paying for six tools to cover gaps, or when nothing on the market matches how you actually work.

Almost never. Most engagements keep what's working and fix the joins. Starting over is expensive and usually unnecessary.

Yes, and it's one of the things I do best. I've spent years in clinical research and regulated care, and the approach is always the same: build compliance into how the business runs, so the evidence is a by-product of the daily work rather than something assembled the week before an inspection.

Take the scorecard, it takes five minutes and gives you a real report. Or come to The Ops Room on a Thursday and ask. Neither costs anything.

From solo operators to businesses of a hundred-plus. What matters isn't headcount, it's whether the business is founder-led and whether the way it runs has fallen behind the size it's become.

Run the scorecard. It produces a report you can forward, with a score, the weakest areas, and an estimate of what the gaps are costing. That's usually a more effective starting point than a conversation.

A free hour on Zoom, every Thursday, where I answer operations questions from whoever turns up. No pitch, no slides, and no question is too small. It's the part of this work I can give away.