01
A messy HubSpot or Salesforce setup.
Pipeline stages that mean different things to different reps. Fields no one owns. Dashboards nobody trusts. The CRM has become a graveyard of good intentions.
For funded founders · Scale-up CEOs · PE OperatorsUS Market8 minute read
A Fractional COOfor startupsthat outgrew improvisation.
You raised the round, hired the team, shipped the product — and the founder is now the bottleneck. This is where I come in: workflow architecture, RevOps, and practical AI operations. AI-always, human-first.
Intro call→
Joanna Spruijt · Fractional COO
01 When to hire
Fractional COO vs. full-time operations director.
A full-time COO is the right hire once the operating system exists. Before that, hiring one means paying a senior salary to build what no one has built yet — a slow, expensive way to discover what you actually needed.
A Fractional COO is the compressed version of that discovery. The trigger is rarely revenue — it's founder time. When more than 40% of the CEO's week disappears into internal admin, hiring approvals, tooling fires, and pipeline hygiene, the business has outgrown improvisation.
The question isn't 'can we afford a COO?' — it's 'how much longer can the founder stay the operations department?'
- 01Founder as bottleneck.
Every hiring decision, tool purchase, and process exception routes through one person. Growth stalls the moment they take a week off.
- 02Series A raised, ops didn't catch up.
The pitch promised operational leverage. The reality is a Notion doc, a Slack channel, and three overlapping CRMs.
- 03Revenue on multiple channels.
Sales-led, product-led, partnerships — each with its own data, its own metrics, none reconciled. RevOps stops being optional.
- 04Exit or fundraise on the horizon.
A diligence-ready company is not the same as a working one. The gap between the two is where valuation gets built or lost.
02 Pain points
What operational chaos actually looks like.
Founders rarely search 'Fractional COO' first. They search the symptoms. If any of these sound familiar, the operating system is the issue — not the team.
02
Tech stack bloat.
Fourteen SaaS tools where four would do the job. Nobody remembers what half of them were supposed to solve. The monthly bill keeps growing; the operation doesn't.
03
Operational bottlenecks in a B2B scale-up.
Deals stall between sales and onboarding. Finance rebuilds numbers from screenshots. Every quarterly close is a two-week fire drill.
04
Scaling supply chain manually.
Orders forwarded by email. Inventory in spreadsheets. Suppliers copy-pasted between systems. The moment volume doubles, something breaks silently.
03 Fix the stack
Built, not grown: how to audit a bloated tech stack.
The reflex when things break is to buy a tool. The right move is the opposite: map the process first, then let the tool serve it. Every unmapped process becomes a subscription with no owner.
A stack audit answers four questions per tool: what process does this serve, who owns the output, what is it costing (license + human time + integration debt), and what would break if we removed it tomorrow. Most stacks lose 30–50% of their spend on that fourth question alone.
- 01
Map before you migrate.
Every core workflow drawn end-to-end: trigger, owner, handoff, metric. No tool decision until the map exists.
- 02
One system of record per domain.
One CRM. One finance stack. One project tool. Everything else is a satellite, not a source of truth.
- 03
Retire, don't accumulate.
Every new tool comes with a decommission for something else. The stack shrinks as the operation matures.
04 AI + Human
AI-always, human-first — in practice.
The AI question in most scale-ups is framed backwards. Teams ask which tool to buy. The better question is which workflow to redesign so an AI agent can safely take on the friction — without owning the outcome.
In every mandate the boundary is explicit: AI handles routing, drafting, enrichment, pipeline hygiene, first-pass QA. Humans keep judgment, negotiation, exception handling, and accountability. Every agent has a documented scope, a metric it improves, and a person responsible for its behavior.
- 01
Practical AI in sales operations.
Enrichment on inbound leads, auto-scored qualification, meeting-notes-to-CRM sync. Reps stop administering the pipeline; they work it.
- 02
Custom AI operational agents.
Business-in-a-box agents that handle a defined workflow end-to-end — client intake, quote generation, follow-up sequencing — with clear escalation to a human owner.
- 03
AI strategy for scale-ups.
A written policy: where AI is allowed, where it isn't, what data it can touch, how outputs are reviewed. The absence of this document is why most AI pilots die.
05 PE exit prep
The 12-week operational cleanup before a PE buyout.
PE firms and acquirers don't buy chaos at full price. Operational disorder shows up as a discount on valuation, an earn-out that keeps the founder locked in, or a killed deal in week six of diligence. The fix is a fixed 12-week engagement.
- 01Week 1–2
Diagnose
Process map, tech-stack cost, margin leakage by product line, key-person dependencies, documentation coverage. Every finding quantified.
- 02Week 3–8
Systemize
SOPs written for the top ten workflows. RevOps rebuilt so ARR, pipeline, and margin reconcile. Automations shipped where cost or error rate justify them.
- 03Week 9–12
Package
Data room complete. KPI history clean. Ownership documented. Investor-facing narrative supported by operational reality — not slides.
Outcome: LOI secured, deal closed, valuation defended.
06 Framework
Three phases. One operating system.
The same frame across founder brands, SaaS scale-ups, and PE portfolios.
- 01Week 1–2
Audit
Current processes captured, cycle times measured, tool cost and overlap made visible. Nothing changes before the bottlenecks are quantified.
- 02Week 3–6
Systemize
Core processes documented, ownership set, first automations shipped. Implicit knowledge turns into a repeatable system.
- 03Week 7+
Scale
The system hands over to the team. KPIs in weekly review, an owner per process, clean handoff points to automation and AI.
07 Results
Numbers from live engagements.
Mineralist
82%
Profit margin, own brand
Automated supply chain in one of the toughest operational categories. Two angel investments, US and Germany.
Zeltra
+62%
Margin after RevOps rebuild
Tech stack rethought from the ground up. Custom business-in-a-box agent built, installed, and integrated with the team.
PE Buy-Out
12 wks
From diagnosis to LOI and close
Twelve weeks of operational restructuring. Profitability above prior benchmarks. LOI secured, deal closed.
08 FAQ
Short answers.
- How is a Fractional COO different from a management consultant?
- A consultant produces a deck. A Fractional COO owns the outcome — documented processes, working automations, KPIs the team actually reviews. The engagement ends when the system runs without the operator.
- How many hours per week is a Fractional engagement?
- Depends on the phase. Diagnostic and rebuild phases usually run one to two days a week. Steady-state fractional coverage sits at half a day to a day per week.
- Do you work with US-based companies remotely?
- Yes. Most engagements run remote-first across US and EU time zones, with on-site weeks scheduled around critical inflection points — investor prep, team offsites, major system cutovers.
- What size of company does this fit?
- Post-seed to Series B for startups; €5M–€50M revenue for scale-ups; portfolio companies in the same range for PE. Below that, clean documentation is enough. Above that, an in-house COO is typically the right move.
Intro call
20 minutes.
Clarity on your operating system.
An honest read on where the bottleneck sits, what a fix looks like, and whether we're the right fit. No deck, no sales script.