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Fractional COO Leadership — Est. 2014

Senior operational infrastructure for the companies that can't afford to guess.

Eric Hour embeds a battle-tested fractional COO into your leadership team — giving you Fortune 500-grade operational infrastructure at 18% of the cost of a full-time executive, typically within 14 business days.

A 30-minute diagnostic. No deck. No retainer pressure.

Chapter I — The Operator's Thesis

Why a fractional operator outperforms the executive search.

A Series B founder does not need another advisor. They need a senior operator who has already closed the books, rebuilt the org chart twice, weathered a fundraising crunch, and shipped a board update on a Friday night — sitting inside the team, accountable to the P&L, billed by the hour.

The traditional answer is a nine-month COO search that drains $400K in fees, surrenders 1.2 points of equity in the offer, and lands a generalist who spends the first quarter learning the org chart. The fractional answer is different: a battle-tested operator, embedded inside the leadership team within fourteen business days, carrying a portable operating system refined across one hundred and forty engagements since 2014.

This is not advisory in the loose sense. It is operating — budgets, headcount plans, vendor renegotiations, weekly business reviews, post-mortems, KPI trees, hiring loops — executed by a principal who writes the meeting agenda and signs the offer letter. The model is engineered for the founder who has outgrown the founding team but is not ready to commit a quarter of a million dollars in fully-loaded executive cost to a single hire.

— The Eric Hour operating desk, Austin

Chapter II — The Diagnostic

Every engagement begins with a 47-Point Operational Maturity Diagnostic.

A proprietary baseline instrument, refined across one hundred and forty engagements since 2014, scored against a peer cohort of two thousand four hundred operators. The diagnostic is the artifact that every engagement inherits — it becomes the operating contract, the quarterly scorecard, and the renewal rationale.

I

Revenue Operations

Pipeline coverage, win-rate by segment, sales-cycle motion, CAC payback, renewals motion, and the integrity of the forecast meeting.

II

Delivery & Customer Success

Implementation throughput, NRR benchmarks, escalation discipline, QBR cadence, and the handoff between sales, success, and support.

III

Finance & Unit Economics

Close cycle, burn-multiple discipline, board-pack quality, vendor consolidation, and the boundary between accounting and FP&A.

IV

People & Org

Hiring loop integrity, performance calibration, compensation architecture, manager depth, and the cost of premature seniority.

V

Systems & Data

Source-of-truth inventory, dashboard latency, integration debt, and the operating cost of a tool that does not talk to its neighbor.

VI

Governance & Cadence

Board prep, decision logs, weekly business review, off-site rhythm, and the meetings that actually change a number on Friday.

Scoring band: 0–47 points · Mapped to a five-tier maturity ladder · Benchmarked against the active cohort quarterly.

Chapter III — Field Notes from the Operating Desk

Composite field notes, filed by archetype.

Four engagements, four industries, four composites. Names and identifiers are altered; the operational lessons are not.

Field Note 01 · SaaS · Series B

Renegotiating the forecast meeting.

A two-year-old sales-ops routine had calcified into a monthly ritual where the founder absorbed the number from sales, smoothed it in private, and walked into the board meeting holding a forecast no one had contested. We rebuilt the weekly business review around pipeline coverage by segment, win-rate by rep cohort, and a single source-of-truth dashboard. Within ninety days the forecast variance dropped from twenty-three percent to under seven, and the board pack stopped asking the same question twice.

— Composite operator, North American SaaS, $18M ARR.

Field Note 02 · E-commerce · Series A

Cutting the vendor stack from sixty-one to nineteen.

A direct-to-consumer brand had assembled sixty-one SaaS contracts across marketing, ops, and customer support in eighteen months. The integrations had drifted; three tools duplicated the same KPI; one contract auto-renewed every quarter with no owner. The diagnostic flagged twelve tools that were not earning their seat. Renegotiating those twelve recovered an annualized run-rate north of two hundred thousand dollars inside the first quarter, and shaved roughly eleven hours of weekly reconciliation work from the finance and ops leads.

— Composite operator, EU e-commerce, $9M GMV.

Field Note 03 · Healthcare · PE-Backed Growth

A hiring loop the founder could actually run.

A multi-site healthcare operator had grown to one hundred and forty people without an explicit hiring loop — interviews were inconsistent, scorecards were a single line, and the founder carried the final-round debrief every week. We wrote the loop end to end: rubric design, panel composition, debrief architecture, and a documented reference-check protocol. The new loop cut time-to-hire from fifty-four to twenty-six days, lifted offer-acceptance rate from fifty-eight to eighty-one percent, and gave the founder back roughly six hours per week previously spent arbitrating between competing interviewers.

— Composite operator, US healthcare services, 140 FTE.

Field Note 04 · Nonprofit · Founder-Led Mission

A board pack that pre-empted the difficult questions.

A fifteen-year-old nonprofit had outgrown its founding board's appetite for narrative-only updates. We rebuilt the quarterly board pack around five operating metrics — program throughput, cost-per-beneficiary, reserve ratio, fundraising pipeline coverage, and staff turnover — and rewrote the deck so each page carried a number, a comparison, and a single decision the board was being asked to make. Two cycles later, board meetings ran forty-five minutes shorter, and the executive director stopped walking out of board meetings with a list of follow-ups that took a week to close.

— Composite operator, US nonprofit, $6M annual budget.

Chapter V — Colophon

Five numbers, verified.

No claim on this page is decorative. Each figure below is drawn from the operating desk's internal record and is restated verbatim from the active file.

140+

Operator engagements completed since 2014.

SaaS, e-commerce, healthcare, manufacturing.

96%

Multi-year client renewal rate.

Across the active retainer book.

$187M

Aggregate client cost savings & revenue unlocked since 2018.

Across the engagements on the active book.

14d

Average time-to-impact from signed SOW to first measurable KPI movement.

Measured across the last twenty-four months.

71 NPS

Net Promoter Score across the last twenty-four months.

Independent survey of retained operators.

2,400+

Operators who have completed the 47-Point Operational Maturity Diagnostic.

Cohort benchmark, refreshed quarterly.

Filed from Austin, Toronto, London, and Lisbon · Established 2014.