I have been running EOS as an integrator for eight years, first for clients and then as a COO, and the thing I keep seeing is that the gap between a company's plan and its week is where most of the trouble lives. Closing that gap is the work I like most and the work I think I am best at. I will be the one in the room with your team. If you are wondering whether any of this fits where you are, I would rather have a conversation than send you a proposal.
An experienced operator to help your leadership team set direction and follow through on it.
Fractional COO services for leadership teams in two situations. The direction isn't clear yet, and the team needs someone to turn what it is already doing into a vision it can act on. Or the direction is clear, and progress is slower than it should be. We work with your team part time, as a chief operating officer would, and we stay until the cadence and the accountability are part of how the team works without us.
Who this is for
Founder-led companies where the founder is still the only person holding it all together. The team is good and knows what it is doing, but the direction lives in the founder's head, meetings drift, and priorities compete with whatever came in that morning. That company doesn't need a full-time operator yet. It needs the vision written down in a form the team can act on, the planning, meeting and accountability structure installed, and someone to run it until the team owns it.
Larger organizations that need an operations-minded executive to drive results through a department or a division. The people are in place, and progress could be faster with a better honed plan, or with someone to drive progress and follow through against it. We come in as the executive facilitator: we sharpen the plan, hold the cadence, chase the follow-through, and leave a structure the team keeps.
What we do
EOS implementation
The Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) is a set of simple tools for running a company: a shared vision, quarterly priorities, a weekly leadership meeting and a scorecard. We implement it with leadership teams over six to twelve months, so the cadence and the accountability still hold when we step back. This is informed by Ryan's eight years as an integrator, the person who makes the tools work week to week, and as COO of a venture-backed startup.
- An ongoing engagement, usually six to twelve months
- The operating cadence installed with your leadership team: annual, quarterly and weekly
- An accountability structure, so each priority and each number has one owner
Strategy and planning
Aligning strategy and operations requires a clear picture of where the organization is headed. We have experience helping founders, department heads and functional leads crystallize their vision, solicit feedback from stakeholders and get buy-in from their teams. Offsites and planning sessions are usually where that work comes together, once the diagnostic has been done.
- Mission, vision and values, written so the team can actually use them
- Annual strategy planning
- Quarterly planning and goal setting
- Organization design and people operations
- Process design and improvement
- Offsites, workshops and project standup
AI operations for leadership teams
Teams properly empowered and trained in AI can produce several times the work output with better accuracy and fewer headaches. Tasks that require manual entry, verification and monitoring, which have historically pulled employees away from the most valuable uses of their time, can be eliminated almost entirely. But these improvements have to be made carefully, or an organization turns into a conduit for AI slop. We help a leadership team get there in four parts:
- An operations audit that finds the work still done by hand, and what it costs
- A build that takes one of those jobs over, so the team sees it working on their own work first
- AI strategy and governance: which work AI should touch, which it should not, who owns each system, and how the team checks the output
- One-on-one AI training for leaders, and self-guided training programs tailored to your organization, so each person learns on their own work
How we work
The best companies we have worked with spend the right amount of time on where they are headed, and then put in place simple processes that connect that direction to the day-to-day. This avoids both the long visioning project that changes nothing and the endless meetings that happen when people work hard without a clear objective. We meet with your team to understand what you need, find the biggest opportunities, and write a step-by-step plan for getting there.
Where this work has been done
- A fast-growing consumer products company: an ongoing EOS implementation, six to twelve months, with the leadership and marketing teams
- Thrivable, a health technology startup: as COO, the operating cadence, planning, hiring, and a company-wide AI rollout
- A local engineering firm: the mission, values and ten-year target, written with the partners and the team, then the hiring rubric that follows from them
- A federal agency: retail operations consulting, as a contractor through a global professional services firm
- A global professional services firm: an internal project standardizing procedures across the audit practice
- A pediatric therapy nonprofit: a mission and vision consultation, pro bono
- A diabetes nonprofit: a planning and vision-setting offsite
- Georgetown University: dozens of academic research center designs and proposals
A note from Ryan
Ryan Fuchs
You'll work with Ryan directly. Reach out for a consultation.
Reach out