I help businesses become frictionless organisations — the kind you'd want to work in, and that your clients love. I don't just diagnose; I roll up my sleeves and build systems that last.
If your business has cracks — client churn, broken workflows, a lack of clarity — I come in, stabilise, then scale. All through systems built around people.
I serve, I don't hawk. We start with a free 30-minute conversation and a diagnostic lens to find your biggest opportunities together — and if what you actually need is a fractional COO, a non-executive director or nothing at all, that is what I will tell you on the call.
Diagnose broken processes, confusion zones and waste. Stabilise operations across finance, delivery, compliance and workflows. Create clarity with roles, accountability and metrics.
Design and execute practical growth strategies that make a real difference. Improve performance across every key area to create capacity to grow. Develop people and products to expand into new markets.
Broker partnerships, funding and talent to prepare the business for its next stage. Join the dots between opportunities, investors and networks — the right people on the right projects at the right time.
Most people who enquire do not need a general advisory engagement. They need one specific thing, and it is usually cheaper than I am.
Advisory earns its fee when a problem crosses functions — when sales, delivery, pricing and cash are each defensible on their own and the business still does not work. That is the case nobody inside the business can fix, because everyone can see their own half of it and nobody owns the join. Here is the test I use, and you can run it yourself in about ten minutes.
Two of those five point away from me. That is deliberate. The fastest way to waste money on advice is to buy a broad engagement for a narrow problem, and the second fastest is to buy any engagement at all while the real constraint is that you have not put your prices up since 2023.
No mystery, no discovery phase that quietly becomes the project. Four weeks from the first call to a plan your team can actually run.
The free 30-minute call, then a short written scope before any money changes hands: what we are looking at, what we are deliberately not looking at, and what a good outcome looks like in your words rather than mine. If the scope reads like something a specialist should do instead, I will say so here.
Read-only access to your accounting system, your job or project tracker and your CRM. Then 45-minute conversations with six to ten people across the business, including at least one person who actually does the work you want fixed. I walk your two most common jobs end to end, from enquiry to invoice paid.
Every handoff, every wait, every point where work travels backwards a step. Alongside it, the money: which jobs, clients and services actually make margin, and where it leaks between the quote and the invoice. Most owners find at least one thing on this map genuinely surprising.
I give you the findings in person before anything is written up, because the first draft of a diagnosis should be argued with. If your team can knock a finding down, it deserves knocking down. What survives goes in the plan.
Three to five things, sequenced, each with a named owner inside your business, a date and a way of telling whether it worked. Everything else is written down explicitly as not being done this quarter — a plan without a stop list is a wish list.
Engagements fail on this list far more often than they fail on the analysis, so it is written down rather than assumed.
The figures below are illustrative — an invented firm, used so you can run the same sum on your own business this week. They are not a client and not a promise.
Take a 14-person firm. Work out the fully-loaded hourly cost of an average employee. On a £35,000 salary, employer's National Insurance adds £4,500: HMRC charges secondary Class 1 contributions at 15% on earnings above £5,000 a year for the tax year running from 6 April 2026. That is £39,500 before auto-enrolment pension, which takes it past £40,000. Over roughly 1,600 genuinely productive hours a year, call it £25 an hour — and that is before premises, software or management time.
Now ask every person one question, this week, and promise them the answer will not be held against them: how many hours did you spend chasing something, redoing something, or waiting for someone?
Suppose the honest average comes back at six hours each. Fourteen people × six hours × £25 is £2,100 a week. Across 46 working weeks that is £96,600 a year — none of which appears as a line in your accounts, because friction never invoices you. It shows up instead as capacity you thought you had, deadlines you missed, and a margin that is a few points lower than it should be.
You do not need me to run that number. You need it to decide whether the friction is worth a phone call — and, if you do call, so that we are arguing about the same figure from the first minute. If the answer comes out at a few thousand pounds, you have your answer and it is no.
Advice is easy to buy and hard to judge. These are the checkpoints I would want if I were paying.
None of that is original and none of it is complicated. It works because it is boring and repeated — the same argument I make in simple beats clever, and the same principle underneath Performance on Purpose, which is the framework I use when the work is as much about the owner as the business.
I've built and scaled professional-services and fintech ventures from the ground up, led M&A projects, and created partnerships across finance, law, tech and investment. I bring the discipline of a COO, the mindset of a founder and the connections of an investor — wired for systems that scale with people, not against them.
The businesses I've founded and back are the clearest evidence of how I work.
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Visit →Two differences that matter. First, the deliverable. A consultancy engagement usually ends with a document, and the hard part — getting people to work differently — stays with you. I stay for that part, and every action on the plan carries the name of someone in your business rather than mine. Second, the scoping. I will tell you when the answer is not me: if your one-sentence problem names a single function, hire that function; if it names a decision your board keeps postponing, a non-executive director is a cheaper seat. I would rather lose the work on a free call than take a fee for a general engagement when what you had was a specific problem.
The first 30-minute conversation is free and carries no obligation. The diagnostic is then quoted as a fixed fee once I have seen the size and shape of the business, because pricing it before that is guesswork dressed up as a number. You get the figure in writing before any work starts and it does not move unless you change the scope. If the work turns out to be ongoing operating support rather than a one-off piece, that is the fractional COO retainer, published openly on this site at £4,000 + VAT a month for one day a week. No setup fee, and nothing renews unless you say so.
The diagnostic phase runs about four weeks from first access to the plan on a page. What follows depends on what the plan says, and I would be wary of anyone who quoted you a duration before looking. A single crossing-functions fix — the client journey from enquiry to invoice, or pricing and delivery together — is usually a matter of weeks. A business that needs its whole operating rhythm rebuilt is a quarter at minimum, and at that point you are buying operating support rather than advice. What I will not do is stretch four weeks of work across six months because there is a monthly fee attached to it.
Both, and the mix is not arbitrary. The diagnostic phase needs me physically in the business. You cannot watch a handover go wrong over a video call, and people tell you rather different things standing by a kettle than they do in a scheduled meeting with the owner present. Expect one or two full days on site in the first month. After that most working sessions run remotely, with on-site days kept for the things that genuinely need the room: redesigning a process with the people who run it, a difficult pricing conversation, or training a manager into a new routine. I work with businesses across the UK and travel for the days that earn the travel.
When the problem is either smaller or larger than it looks. Smaller: one late function — bookkeeping, credit control, marketing — is cheaper to fix by hiring for it than by reviewing the whole business around it. Larger: with under about six weeks of cash runway, your order is lender, accountant, and if necessary a licensed insolvency practitioner. Advisory comes after that. It is also wrong if you want a report for a bank or a buyer, which is an accountant's or corporate financier's job, and wrong if you have already decided and want the decision endorsed. Paying for agreement is the most expensive thing on this page.
Book a free, no-obligation 30-minute call. We'll find the biggest opportunity in your business — then you decide if you want a hand fixing it. No pitch, no fluff.
Prefer email? andy@andyjackson.com
