Eric Hour
Fractional COO Leadership
Every Thursday since 2017, Eric Hour has published one essay on the operating decisions that don't make the keynote circuit — vendor renegotiations, org-chart surgery, the unglamorous mechanics of getting a Series B to cash-conversion positive. The archive below collects the issues that have shaped how 38,000 operators think about their work.
The Letter does not cover news cycles or fundraising gossip. Every issue sits inside one of the four columns below — chosen because each represents a recurring decision point that 140+ engagements have surfaced as make-or-break for a growth-stage operator.
When contribution margin drifts below plan and nobody can explain why. Renegotiation playbooks, COGS forensics, freight audits, and the S&OP rituals that catch variance before month-end.
Browse 142 issues →Hiring freezes done right, severance math, manager-to-IC ratios, and the political work of replacing a VP. Field-tested org-chart moves from companies that grew past 500 without breaking.
Browse 138 issues →The QBR, the weekly staff meeting, the Monday forecast call, the monthly board pack. Templates, agendas, and the second-order metrics that make a leadership team actually trust its numbers.
Browse 161 issues →Diligence prep, the secondary window, board composition fights, and the moment a founder has to decide whether to step aside. Notes from operators who have actually lived through each scenario.
Browse 91 issues →“The Letter is not a content-marketing channel. It is a record of what works, what failed, and what I would do differently next time — written plainly, without management theater. If a paragraph reads like a LinkedIn carousel, I have not done my job.”
A working CFO is the difference between an opinion and an outcome. This week's essay walks through the exact negotiation sequence a fractional team ran against three logistics vendors and one enterprise cloud provider — including the email templates, the demand-letter cadence, and the moment the largest vendor blinked first.
A working library of the most-referenced issues from the last twelve weeks. Each row links to the full essay and the optional operator template referenced inside it.
A working sequence for rewriting twelve vendor contracts in eleven weeks without losing the relationship. Includes the demand-letter cadence and the substitution map.
A week-by-week playbook for stabilizing a revenue org after a senior departure. Covers comp recalibration, rep-quota smoothing, and the call you must make to the top three accounts.
Why most weekly forecast meetings start with the wrong number — and a 35-minute agenda that gives a leadership team real conviction by 9:15am.
A redacted day-by-day of a recent fractional engagement: what the data room was missing, the two requests that almost killed the deal, and the one slide that saved it.