Everything runs through me. I cannot grow because I am the bottleneck, and a full-time COO is a hire I cannot justify yet.
A Chief Operating Officer for the days a business your size actually needs one. We take ownership of the operating rhythm, the reporting, the supplier relationships, the processes that only exist in somebody's head, and hand it back documented and running without you. Most founder-led businesses reach a size where the founder is the operating system. Every exception, every escalation and every decision that does not fit a rule arrives at the same desk, and the business stops growing at the width of that desk rather than at the limit of its market. A full-time Chief Operating Officer fixes it and costs more than the problem, at least for a year or two. A fractional one is the same ownership on a fraction of the cost base, and it is a reversible decision. We are not consultants who write a target operating model and leave. We hold the seat. Suppliers escalate to us, the monthly pack is produced by us, and the process documentation is written from what the business actually does rather than what it would like to do. The test of whether it has worked is simple: how many things reach the founder this month that did not need to.
Dinmore Bell provides a fractional Chief Operating Officer for founder-led businesses: ownership of the operating rhythm, reporting, supplier relationships and process, on a fixed monthly fee. It suits a company too large to run informally and too small to justify a full-time operations hire, and it is priced as a retained function rather than by the day.
How we own it
Take the operational load off the founder
The recurring decisions, the supplier escalations, the things that reach you because there is nowhere else for them to go. We take them, run them to a standard, and report on what happened rather than asking you what to do. In the first weeks that means sitting behind you rather than in front of you: watching what arrives, what it costs to answer, and which of it is genuinely a judgement only the founder can make. Most of it is not. A price exception inside an agreed band, a supplier who has missed a delivery for the second time, a customer asking for terms that already exist in the standard set: each of these has a right answer that can be written down once and applied by somebody else every time after. What we take is the whole decision, not the administration around it. That distinction matters. An assistant reduces the effort of a decision and leaves the decision with you; a Chief Operating Officer makes it and tells you what happened. The change a founder notices first is not a lighter inbox. It is that the phone stops ringing on evenings and weekends, because the people who used to ring have somewhere better to go. Where a decision genuinely does belong to you, it arrives with the work already done: the options, the numbers, the recommendation and the deadline, in a form you can answer in a sentence.
Write down how the business actually runs
Most founder-led businesses run on knowledge held by three people. We document the real process, not an idealised one, so it can be delegated, audited, and eventually handed to a permanent hire without the business stopping. The reason this is so rarely done is that writing it down is nobody's job and is never urgent. The reason it matters is that undocumented process is the single largest constraint on what a business can delegate, and therefore on what it can grow to. It is also the thing that reduces a price at diligence, because a buyer is purchasing a business, not a founder's memory. We start from what happens rather than from a template. That means following an order from enquiry to cash, a hire from advert to first day, a supplier from selection to payment, and recording each step as it is actually performed, including the workarounds. Workarounds are the interesting part: they mark where the official process failed and somebody quietly invented a better one, and half of them should become the process. What comes out is short. A page per process, the decisions marked, the exceptions named, and the person accountable written at the top. Long process manuals are written to be filed; short ones are written to be used. We then run the business from that documentation for a period, which is the only honest test of whether it is right, and correct it where it is not. The same document set is what a permanent Chief Operating Officer or operations manager inherits when the business is large enough to justify one. The handover is an afternoon rather than a quarter, because the thing being handed over already exists outside somebody's head.
Build the reporting that makes a decision
A short monthly pack that answers the questions you actually ask: what came in, what went out, what is late, what is at risk, and what needs you. Built once, produced without you, and readable in ten minutes. Most reporting in businesses this size fails in one of two directions. Either there is almost none, and the founder runs on the bank balance and a feeling, or there is a great deal of it produced by an accountant for a different purpose, and nobody reads it because it answers questions nobody asked. Management accounts tell you what happened to the money. They do not tell you which customer is about to leave, which supplier is about to fail, or which contract renews in six weeks with a price increase built in. We build the pack backwards, from the decisions a founder actually makes in a month. Whether to hire. Whether to take on a customer at that price. Whether to chase a debt or write it off. Whether a project is late enough to tell the client. Each of those needs two or three numbers and a trend, not a dashboard with forty tiles on it. The discipline is that the pack is produced whether or not anything interesting happened, on the same day each month, by us rather than by you. A report that depends on the founder finding time is a report that arrives when there is bad news to explain and not before. Over a few months the pack becomes the record of how the business behaves, which is what makes forecasting possible, what makes a lender or an investor comfortable, and what tells you early that something has changed while it is still cheap to do something about it.
Know what it costs before you commit
A fractional Chief Operating Officer is a fixed monthly fee agreed after a scoping conversation, not a day rate that rises with the amount of trouble. That is deliberate. A day rate makes the founder ration the very thing they are buying, and the calls that get avoided are usually the ones worth making. The fee is set against a defined scope: which processes we own, which meetings we hold, what the reporting pack contains, and what falls outside. It moves when the scope moves and not otherwise. There is no minimum term dressed up as a partnership, because a function you would not renew is a function that was not working. What it replaces is usually part of a salary rather than all of one. A full-time Chief Operating Officer at the level a founder-led business actually wants is an expensive hire with a long search, a notice period and a real cost of being wrong. The fractional route puts the same ownership in place in weeks, at a cost that sits alongside the existing team rather than above it, and it ends when a permanent hire is justified.
Where specialists come in
We run operations and the commercial function; we do not undertake reserved legal activities, we do not act as a statutory director unless separately appointed and agreed in writing, and we do not provide regulated accountancy, audit or tax services. Where a matter needs a licensed insolvency practitioner, an auditor, a health-and-safety consultant or regulated HR advice on an individual dismissal, we instruct the appropriate specialist and coordinate them.
Sectors we run this for
- What is a fractional Chief Operating Officer?
- A senior operator who takes ownership of a company's operating rhythm on a part-time, retained basis: reporting, supplier relationships, process and the recurring decisions that currently reach the founder. Unlike a consultant, they hold the seat and make decisions rather than recommending them.
- How is this different from a management consultant?
- A consultant analyses and recommends; the work of acting on it stays with you. A fractional Chief Operating Officer takes the decisions, runs the suppliers, produces the reporting and is accountable for the outcome. You are buying ownership rather than advice.
- How many days a month does it take?
- It is scoped by what we own rather than by days, and agreed as a fixed monthly fee. In practice most founder-led businesses of thirty to three hundred people find the operating rhythm is held in a few days a month once the process documentation exists.
- When should a business hire a full-time COO instead?
- Usually when the operating load is genuinely daily rather than weekly, when there are several site or country operations to hold together, or when the role has become as much about leading a large team as about running the rhythm. We hand over to that hire and make the handover part of the work.
- What happens to the documentation if we stop?
- It is yours and it stays with you. The process documentation, the reporting pack and the supplier records are built in your systems rather than ours, which is also what makes a handover to a permanent hire an afternoon rather than a project.
- Can you work alongside our existing operations manager?
- Yes, and it is a common shape. The operations manager runs the day; we hold the standard, the reporting and the supplier negotiations, and act as the senior person they escalate to. It is often the cheapest way to make a promising internal hire succeed.
- Do you take on the supplier relationships directly?
- Where that is what the business needs, yes. We become the named contact for escalation, hold the review meetings and run the renewal negotiations, which is usually where the fee pays for itself in the first year.
- How quickly does it start to show?
- The reporting pack exists within the first month or two. The reduction in what reaches the founder is usually felt by the end of the first quarter, once the recurring decisions have been written down and delegated. The process documentation takes longer, because it is written from what actually happens.