Fractional COO Leadership · Chapter One
The 47-Point Diagnostic is the first thirty minutes of working with us.
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. The Diagnostic is the instrument that opens every engagement: a proprietary 47-point read of your operating function, completed before a contract is signed.
§ I — The Instrument
Six operational domains. Forty-seven points. One candid read of where your operating function actually stands.
The diagnostic is not a maturity model pulled off a slide deck. It is a working instrument, refined across 140+ engagements since 2014, that scores where your company sits on the operator-to-executive spectrum. Below, the six domains the 47 points cluster into.
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01
Strategy & Operating Cadence
How strategy is set, who owns it, the rhythm of weekly and quarterly reviews, and whether the leadership team actually operates from a shared plan. Nine points.
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02
Org, Roles & Decision Rights
Whether reporting lines, decision rights, and accountability are written down and lived. The single biggest predictor of founder-bottleneck pain. Eight points.
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03
Finance, Pricing & Unit Economics
Gross margin visibility, CAC payback, the cleanliness of the monthly close, and whether pricing is reviewed quarterly or left to inertia. Eight points.
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04
Revenue Operations & Go-to-Market Mechanics
Pipeline hygiene, forecasting accuracy, the handoff between sales and customer success, and whether marketing is measured against revenue or activity. Eight points.
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05
Delivery, Product & Operational Quality
Whether the product ships on cadence, whether delivery SLAs are met, and the maturity of QA, incident response, and customer feedback loops. Seven points.
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06
Data, Systems & Operational Hygiene
The state of the BI stack, whether dashboards are trusted or ignored, the cleanliness of source-of-truth systems, and the operational discipline of standing meetings. Seven points.
§ II — The Artifact
What the diagnostic looks like in your hands by the end of the call.
Within twenty-four hours of the thirty-minute conversation, you receive a written scorecard. Below, a sample — composite figures, composite company — so you can see exactly what walks out of the call.
Sample Output · Composite Client "Northwind"
Operational Maturity Scorecard — Q1 2026
- Strategy & Cadence 62 / 100
- Org & Decision Rights 41 / 100
- Finance & Unit Economics 78 / 100
- Revenue Operations 55 / 100
- Delivery & Quality 71 / 100
- Data & Systems 34 / 100
Composite score57 / 100
Below the scorecard: a prioritized list of three to five gaps, each annotated with an estimated ninety-day operating cost and a recommended first move. The scorecard is yours to keep whether or not you engage Eric Hour further.
§ III — The Thirty Minutes
Thirty minutes, minute by minute. No mystery, no pressure, no slide deck.
The Operational Diagnostic is structured to be the most useful half-hour a founder spends with an outside operator all quarter. We do not run a sales call. We do not present Eric Hour's services. We run the instrument.
You will receive a short pre-call questionnaire — twelve operational data points, none of them sensitive — so the conversation itself is spent on interpretation rather than discovery. Most founders spend fifteen minutes completing it; some spend forty. Either is fine.
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00:00 – 05:00
Context-setting.
You walk us through the operating function as it stands today. Headcount, reporting lines, the last decision that got stuck. We listen; we take notes.
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05:00 – 20:00
The 47 points, walked.
We move through the six domains in order — strategy, org, finance, revenue ops, delivery, data — asking calibrated questions against the diagnostic. Most are yes/no; a few invite a sentence.
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20:00 – 27:00
Live scoring.
By the twenty-minute mark we have enough signal to score every domain. We read the composite score out loud and identify the two or three domains most likely to constrain the next stage of growth.
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27:00 – 30:00
Your questions.
Three minutes for whatever is on your mind — the engagement model, references, conflict checks, or a sharp question about your own operating function. We close on time.
Twenty-four hours later, the written scorecard lands in your inbox. If the diagnostic surfaces a clear case for a fractional COO engagement, we propose a forty-five-minute follow-up to scope it. If it does not, we tell you so plainly and recommend two or three adjacent operators who may fit. The diagnostic is not a funnel; it is the baseline.
§ IV — The Track Record
The diagnostic inherits a decade of operating work behind it.
Average time-to-impact from signed SOW to first measurable KPI movement.
Multi-year client retention across the active book since 2018.
Operator engagements completed across SaaS, e-commerce, healthcare, and manufacturing.
Net Promoter Score across the last twenty-four months of engagements.
Founded in 2014 by Eric Hour after a decade of operating roles at Amazon and Jet.com. Trusted by 2,400+ operators who have completed the Hour Operational Maturity Diagnostic. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, with a partner network in Toronto, London, and Lisbon.
§ V — Before You Book
Five questions a sophisticated operator asks before sharing operational data with an outside firm.
- Is the diagnostic confidential, and who sees the scorecard?
- Yes. The scorecard is delivered to the founder and one designated operator at your company, and is held under the same NDA that governs all Eric Hour engagements. It is never used as a case study without written consent, and aggregate anonymized findings are the only data that feed our published research.
- What does the diagnostic cost?
- Nothing. There is no fee for the 30-minute call or the written scorecard. If you proceed to a fractional COO engagement, the diagnostic fee is credited against the first month of the retainer. If you do not proceed, you keep the scorecard.
- Who from my team needs to attend?
- You — the founder or CEO — and, if you have one, the operator who most directly runs the day-to-day (COO, Head of Ops, Head of Finance). Anyone beyond that slows the conversation down. We can run follow-on diagnostics with your leadership team once the baseline is established.
- What happens after the call?
- You receive the written scorecard within twenty-four hours. If the diagnostic surfaces a clear case for ongoing work, we propose a forty-five-minute scope conversation at no charge. If it does not, we tell you — and, when we can, recommend another operator who fits. We do not run a nurture sequence or pass your details to a sales development rep.
- Is this just a sales call dressed up as a diagnostic?
- No. The diagnostic is the baseline instrument used inside every Eric Hour engagement; the same 47 points score a client's operating function in month one, in month six, and at renewal. The thirty-minute call is the same conversation we have on day one of a $40,000-a-month retainer — abbreviated for the booking flow. Most founders who run the diagnostic never become clients, and that is a deliberate feature of how the firm is built.
Ready When You Are
Thirty minutes. A written scorecard in your inbox by tomorrow. Yours to keep either way.
Prefer email? [email protected] · Or call +1 (512) 555-0417 · Mon–Fri, 8:00–18:00 CT.