Senior operating leadership on a simple monthly retainer — so your business runs calmer behind the scenes and performs better at the front. Without the cost of a full-time hire.
I'm not a deal desk and I'm not a bystander. One experienced operator, in your business every week — building the rhythm, the numbers and the habits that let it run without you.
The aim isn't to make you dependent on me. It's a business that runs itself, with the systems and discipline owned and embedded by your team. If you want the plain-English version of the role before you read the rest of this page, start with what a fractional COO actually does.
Plenty of the businesses that ask me this do not need a fractional COO yet. I would rather say so on a free call than three months into a retainer.
A COO — fractional or full-time — is a job about coordination. The role only pays for itself once the cost of coordinating your business exceeds the cost of somebody coordinating it properly. Below that line you do not have an operations problem at all: you have a demand problem, a pricing problem, or a saying-no problem, and none of the three is solved by a better weekly meeting.
So here is the test. Count how many of these five are true of your business today.
Nought or one true. You do not need a fractional COO. Put your prices up, say no to more work, and hire the one specialist role you keep covering yourself at ten o'clock at night.
Two or three true. You have a specific problem rather than a general one. A short piece of advisory work will be better value than a retainer, and it finishes.
Four or five true. The cost of coordination is real and it is compounding. This is the point where a fractional COO earns the fee rather than merely justifying it.
Quick, thorough, no fuss.
A 90-day plan you can actually deliver.
Sleeves rolled up — built with your team.
Coach, hire and hand over so it runs without me.
One day a week, and this is where it goes. Nothing here is a surprise once you have signed.
You, me, and whoever owns the current priorities. The agenda never changes: the action tracker, the numbers, and the one thing that is genuinely stuck. Decisions get made in the room rather than taken away to think about.
The part consultancy skips. Sitting with the person doing the job while they do it. Watching a handover. Rewriting a procedure with the team that uses it. Sitting in on a pricing conversation with a real client and a real number.
Decisions logged, actions with a named owner and a date, the KPI pack updated, and a short note to you that takes five minutes to read. If a week produces nothing worth writing down, that is a signal and I will say so.
Message-level support, and I pick up the phone if something is on fire. This is not an unlimited-access promise dressed up as a feature — it is the ordinary availability of someone who is in your business every week.
Monthly, that becomes an operating review: one page of numbers, what moved, what did not, and what changes next month. Quarterly, we reset the 90-day plan. On the Embedded COO retainer the second day buys hands rather than direction — I take delivery of specific projects myself, run hiring processes end to end, and coach your managers individually, which is closer to one-to-one coaching than to advice.
The fee is the smaller half of what this costs. Here is the other half, written down rather than assumed, because that is where engagements quietly fail.
The figures below are illustrative. They describe an invented firm so that you can run the same sum on your own — they are not a client and not a forecast.
A 12-person professional-services firm turns over £1.2m and makes £132,000 of net profit, an 11% margin. Monthly COO at £4,000 + VAT a month is £48,000 a year, and if the firm is VAT-registered the VAT is recoverable, so the real cost is the £48,000.
Which means the question is not can I afford £4,000 a month. It is can I see a plausible route to £48,000 a year of recurring improvement. Three routes, each ordinary rather than heroic:
Price. A 2% increase across the book on £1.2m is £24,000, and on work already sold it lands almost entirely in profit.
Rework. If 8% of chargeable hours go on doing work twice and you get that to 5%, on £1.2m of fees that is around £36,000 of capacity back — sold, or taken as time.
Leakage. Two jobs a month quoted £400 under where they should be is £9,600 a year.
Those three together come to £69,600 against a £48,000 fee. You do not need all three, and none of them is exotic. But if you cannot construct at least two of them for your own business on the back of an envelope, do not sign a retainer — the honest reading is that you are not yet losing enough to coordination for the role to pay for itself.
For comparison, the full-time version. An illustrative £110,000 salary carries £15,750 of employer's National Insurance, because 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 £125,750 before pension, holiday cover, equipment or a recruitment fee — and before the notice period on both sides, and the risk that the hire is the wrong one. One day a week is not five and I would not pretend otherwise. What it is, is a way of finding out whether the role works in your business before you commit a salary to it.
Senior operating support for a fraction of the cost of a full-time COO — no recruitment risk, notice periods or on-costs.
3-month minimum, then rolling · No setup fee
Book a confidential call →3-month minimum, then rolling · No setup fee
Book a confidential call →Scope call, goals agreed in writing, a data and access checklist, introductions to the team, and the weekly slot in the diary before anything else. Getting access takes days rather than weeks when someone is chased for it, so it is the first thing on the list.
Short interviews across the business, the numbers pulled and reconciled, and the work mapped end to end. Then the basics ship: a weekly operating routine, a one-page KPI pack, a stop / keep / start list, and explicit rules for pricing and cash. A baseline is written down so month six has something to be measured against.
The plan goes live. Written procedures in use for the five jobs you do most. Margin and pricing changes made on real quotes, not in theory. Cash tidied — debtor days, payment terms, standing orders. The first improvements your clients actually notice.
A hiring or upsizing plan with the roles defined, a monthly board summary your team produces, a roadmap covering the next two to three quarters, and a deliberate handover: your people chair the session, own the numbers and maintain the procedures while I move to reviewing rather than running.
A retainer is easy to keep paying and hard to judge. These are the markers I would want in front of me if I were the one writing the cheque.
A full-time COO is a salary, employer's National Insurance, a pension, holiday cover and a recruitment process, all committed before you know whether the role works in your business. On an illustrative £110,000 salary, employer's National Insurance alone adds £15,750 — HMRC charges secondary Class 1 contributions at 15% on earnings above £5,000 a year for the tax year from 6 April 2026. Monthly COO is £4,000 + VAT a month on a three-month minimum. One day a week is not five, so it is genuinely not the same job: the plan has to be smaller and better sequenced. What you get is the same operating thinking, starting this month, with an exit that costs a month's notice rather than a redundancy conversation.
No, and the difference is where the work happens. Consultancy typically produces analysis and hands it over, leaving the implementation risk with you. I spend most of each day inside the work itself — beside the person doing the job, rewriting the way it is done, in the room for the pricing conversation. Every action on the tracker carries the name of somebody in your business rather than mine, because a change nobody there owns does not survive my leaving. Judge it on what is left behind: a weekly routine, numbers people trust, written procedures for your top five jobs, and managers running all of it without me in the building.
It earns its fee once coordination is genuinely expensive: in practice more than about eight full-time-equivalent people, at least two of them managing others, and work passing through three or more hands before a client sees it. Below that, and below roughly £500,000 of turnover, I would tell you not to buy it. The retainer would be a large share of your profit, and the same money spent on a salesperson, better software or a price rise will move faster. Businesses that are too early rarely have an operations problem. They have a demand problem, a pricing problem, or a habit of saying yes too often.
Ninety minutes a week in a fixed working session, plus roughly two hours in the first fortnight assembling records and access. In month one budget closer to half a day a week, because the diagnosis needs you in the room. After that a steady month is the session, a five-minute read of the weekly note, and decisions when the plan needs one. Your managers give an hour a week each and must be allowed to decide what they are handed. The commitment that matters most is not hours at all: it is answering inside seven days when a decision is waiting on you.
Deliberately, and that is the whole point. Three-month minimum, then it runs monthly with a month's notice either side. From month three the handover is explicit: your team chairs the weekly session, owns the KPI pack and maintains the written procedures, while I move from running things to reviewing them. Some businesses stop there, which is a success rather than a lost client. Others keep a lighter arrangement for a board-level view, which is closer to a non-executive director role than an operating one. If the day-30 markers on this page are not true by day 45, I will tell you it is not working.
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
