The Operating Review
Up to four weeks, one diagnostic.
The Operating Partnership
Six months recommended. Month one is the Operating Review.
The Operating Review
Know exactly what is holding your business back, and what to do about it.
Every engagement starts with a thorough Operating Review: up to four weeks inside your numbers, your team, and the way work actually gets done. You see what I see, in your own portal, and we go through every finding together.
Format
Up to four weeks, one diagnostic.
How it runs
Founder questionnaire, founder one-to-one diagnosis sessions, team questionnaires and interviews, live business observations.
What you get
A deep review of the operational health of your entire business: what works, what leaks, and what is missing. Then a 90-day plan to action the change, presented live and agreed together.
At the end
You know what to fix, in what order, and why. And you have the option to continue into the Operating Partnership.
Inside the Operating Review.
Up to four weeks. I look at your business from three angles, because no single one tells the truth on its own.
01
The founder sessions
We sit down, one to one. I ask you targeted questions across the whole business: what works, what worries you, where you want to take it.
How the business looks from where you sit.
02
The team questionnaires and interviews
Your team answers a questionnaire written for them, which you review before it goes out. Interviews follow where useful, always agreed with you first.
How the business looks from where they sit.
03
The business observation
I get access to your tools and your systems, sometimes your office, and I watch how work really gets done.
How the business actually runs.
Then I put the three views side by side
The diagnosis lives in the gaps between the three views. Finding those gaps, and knowing what they mean, is my job. It is what you hire me for.
What you walk away with.
The diagnosis
Your whole business, reviewed in depth across nine dimensions: what works, what leaks, what is missing, what to fix first. The clearest view you will ever have of your own company.
The 90-day plan
The change, in order, with an owner and a deadline on every line. Actionable Monday morning.
Presented live, agreed together, then living on your private portal.
Delivered in person in Qatar, or fully remote.
09 · AI
Whenever I conduct an Operating Review, I also run a deep AI assessment, at the level you would expect from a specialist AI supplier.
That is why AI is its own dimension in my methodology, and a key one.
“…felt like someone finally turning the lights on in a room I’d been navigating in the dark for years. For the first time in a long time, I feel genuinely calm. Clear. Ready. Like I’m finally moving, but on tracks.”
Elsbeth Blekkenhorst-Tammes
Founder, WWC
FAQ
My team will not like being interviewed. How will you manage that?
That reaction is normal and I plan for it. Every conversation is agreed with you in advance, and we decide together how it runs. Nothing any individual says comes back to you attributed. What comes back is the pattern, which is the only part that is useful anyway.
Do you work in person, or remotely?
Both. In Qatar, in person is easy. Travel inside the GCC works too, agreed in advance, and the same goes for Europe when travel is taken care of. I also work fully remotely, and leading a team remotely is not a problem. We agree the balance of remote and onsite time when we scope the engagement.
What’s the investment?
It depends on the shape of the engagement: the scope, the number of days, the business itself. Get in touch and we will scope it together. For the Operating Partnership, the level is agreed at signature and recalibrated after the Operating Review, in either direction, with the Review as the evidence. You will never receive a timesheet from me.
Where does the 9D Framework come from?
The 9D was built in cooperation with Teresa Cavalla, another fractional COO. Between us: more than 40 years of operating experience, inside corporates, startups and founder-led businesses.
It stands on proven frameworks, on executive and leadership training, and on what we have watched work and fail inside real businesses.
It is not a frozen model. We run it in live engagements, reassess it, and update it, because the world it measures is moving fast, and a method that stands still falls behind. What you get is one view of your whole business, across nine dimensions.
We have already worked with a consultant but did not get any results. What’s your value proposition?
The difference is what happens after the analysis. A consultant studies the business, hands over recommendations, and leaves you to apply them. That last part is the hard one, because it has to happen while the business keeps running.
I start with a deep diagnosis of your business in particular: across nine dimensions, inside your systems and with your team, rather than a framework applied from the outside. Out of it comes a 90-day plan that we go through and agree together, so nothing is imposed on you.
Then I stay. In a Partnership I am inside the business, leading the change with your team until it holds on its own. And whatever is already working, I keep and protect.
Do you do the work, or advise on it?
In practice, I become the founder’s sparring partner, the number two of the business. I diagnose, architect, install, and pilot the people and systems that do the work. Doing your team’s tasks is not my job, and if it were, you would have bought a pair of hands and kept the same problem. When a project needs a specialist builder, a custom AI deployment for example, I bring one in and lead the delivery.
Why six months for The Operating Partnership?
The first 2-4 weeks are dedicated to the Operating Review: a thorough diagnosis of the business, and the plan that comes out of it. Changing the way a company runs takes longer than understanding it. Giving every function an owner, and settling a rhythm your team keeps on its own, is usually the work of two quarters.
Although I recommend six months, I am open to discussing a smaller structure: a three-month engagement, if it is tightly scoped and we agree together that it can bring a quick change. I always aim for the best return on your investment, and I advise accordingly.
Will structure make my company rigid?
That fear usually comes from having seen bad structure: process for its own sake. What I build removes ambiguity, not personality. One owner per function, decisions that stop waiting, numbers that arrive on time. Structures don’t restrict people. They free them.
You know what to fix, in what order, and why. And you have the option to continue into the Operating Partnership.
