Fractional COO
Operations
A CPG brand's operations either scale with the business or become the reason growth stalls. We take the operating seat — supply chain, cash, the co-man relationship, the systems a founder never had time to build — until it runs without needing to live in your head.
Scope
What the seat actually covers
Supply chain & co-manufacturer relationships
Sourcing, production planning, and the co-man relationship managed as an actual partnership — not discovered to be unmanaged the week a run goes wrong.
Unit economics & cash discipline
Knowing your true cost to serve, modeling the impact of a trade spend change before you make it, and keeping cash visibility ahead of the number, not behind it.
Trade spend & retail operations
Trade promotion that's actually measured, deduction management, and the operational side of a retail relationship once the sell-in is done.
Playbooks & standard operating procedure
The recurring decisions in your business — monthly close, a new retailer onboarding, a production run — documented once as a repeatable process, not re-solved from memory every time.
Accountability & delegation infrastructure
The systems and cadences that let you hand off real ownership to a team — status that surfaces itself, work that doesn't go stale without anyone noticing.
Hiring & team build-out
Knowing when the next operational hire is earned versus premature, and building the onboarding path so that hire is productive in weeks, not quarters.
How it runs
An engagement, in four moves
Operating audit
A ground-level read of the business as it actually runs today — supply chain, cash position, retail operations, where the founder is still the single point of failure.
Stand up the systems
Playbooks, cash cadences, and accountability structure built for how this specific brand operates — not a generic template dropped in from the last client.
Run the seat
We operate inside the business at the cadence it needs — weekly, embedded, in the rooms where the calls get made — while the systems compound.
Institutionalize
The goal was never permanence. We hand off a business whose operations run on documented systems and an accountable team, not on us.
From the Midyear Letter
“Do you know your unit economics? Can you model the impact of a 3-point trade spend reduction? Is your co-man relationship actually managed, or are you hoping they care about your business as much as you do?”
Operations