Three ways Leafwood takes weight off a founder's plate, separately or together, depending on where things stand.
The recurring, unglamorous work that eats a founder's week. Handled, tracked, and off your plate for good.
Vendor and contract management, reporting, scheduling. The recurring tasks with no natural owner that quietly eat a founder's week without ever showing up on a strategy slide.
Real, documented procedures your team can follow without you, so growth doesn't run through one person's head.
We map how work actually happens, design the workflows that should replace it, and get the team trained and using them. Not a document that sits in a drive.
An honest look at how the business actually runs day to day, and the changes that make it run better.
An audit across tools, roles, and workflows, a clear prioritized plan, and hands-on help implementing it. Not just a slide deck of recommendations.
Fractional COO engagements typically range from about $150 to $400 an hour, or $10,000 to $25,000 a month for an ongoing retainer, depending on scope and how many hours a week the business needs. Cost scales with complexity, not company size alone: a smaller business with tangled operations can need more support than a larger one that's already organized. Book an intro call for a quote specific to your business.
A consultant typically delivers recommendations and leaves. A fractional COO is embedded in the operations of the business on an ongoing basis, actually implementing the systems, processes, and administrative structure they design. That means not just advising on paper, but running point on getting it built and adopted by the team.
Usually when a founder is spending more time on administrative and operational work than on revenue-generating activity, when the same operational problems keep recurring without ever being fixed for good, or when the business has grown past the point where informal, in-the-founder's-head processes still work. None of these require a large company. They show up early.
The specifics vary by engagement, but common work includes documenting and improving core processes, managing vendor relationships and contracts, overseeing reporting and operational admin, and taking ownership of the recurring decisions and coordination that would otherwise land on the founder. The goal is a business that runs on process, not on one person's memory.
This is scoped per engagement rather than fixed. Some businesses need a few hours a week of ongoing oversight, others need closer to a part-time commitment during a specific push, like preparing for a fundraise or cleaning up operations after a period of fast growth. The right amount is whatever closes the actual gap, not a standard package.
Often, yes. A fractional COO and an operations hire solve different problems. An operations employee typically executes within a structure; a fractional COO builds that structure in the first place, at a senior level the role may not otherwise have access to. The two frequently work well together rather than being a substitute for each other.
No. If anything, the earlier a growing business gets real operational structure in place, the more it benefits, since bad habits and workarounds get harder to unwind the longer a company runs without them. Most fractional COO clients are small, founder-led businesses, not large ones with big operations teams already in place.
Not sure which of these fits? Let's talk it through.
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