Where the map meets

the territory.

FRACTIONAL CHIEF OF STAFF

Creative strategy and structural scaffolding for visionary builders shaping new products or navigating intense transition. For when you need a multi-disciplinary co-conspirator to close the space between a wild idea and an undeniable, working reality.

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Part time on the org chart, all-in on the hard part.

What Is a Fractional Chief of Staff and Operations Officer?

There’s the version of your organization that lives on your website. And then there’s what’s actually happening on a Tuesday afternoon when three people are out, the strategy is six weeks behind, and someone just scheduled another all-hands.

I work in the gap between those two things.

Ask three people on your team how a decision gets made, and you’ll get three different, confident answers. One manager runs 1:1s like a report-out because that’s how it was always done to her. Another treats them as actual coaching conversations. Nobody agreed on which one is right, so both just keep happening. Six months from now, most of your team won’t remember exactly how last quarter’s big call got made, only that it did, and that someone else probably should have been in the room.

None of this shows up in a strategic plan. All of it is quietly running your organization anyway.

A fractional Chief of Staff and Operations Officer is a strategic partner to your Executive Director or CEO who also owns your organization’s operational infrastructure, at a fraction of full-time. The work is noticing where the drift has happened, and closing it: getting departments that have quietly stopped coordinating back into the same conversation, picking up the initiative that stalled three months ago for reasons nobody wrote down and finishing it, building systems and workflows that match how your team actually works instead of how the org chart says it should.

Drawing on my own experience as a startup founder and an executive director, I bring real strategic thinking and the willingness to do the unglamorous execution too: technology infrastructure, HR, budgets, all of it. Part of the job is simply deciding what does and doesn’t land on your desk, so you stay focused on the relationships and decisions only you can make.

What Does a Fractional Chief of Staff and Operations Officer Do?

Team Coordination & Culture

Reconnect departments that have quietly stopped talking to each other
Sort out competing priorities and resourcing conflicts before they turn into standoffs
Notice where stated values and daily behavior have drifted apart, and name it directly
Act as the translator between functions that technically work together but don’t really understand each other’s constraints
Keep work moving across the handoffs between departments, where things most often quietly stall

Structure and Systems

Design decision-making, workflow, and communication systems that match how your team actually works, not just how the handbook says it should
Build processes that hold up as you grow, without burying anyone in approvals
Learn how work actually flows today before changing anything, so new systems don’t just create a new version of the same gap
Get institutional knowledge out of individual people’s heads and into something the next hire can actually learn from
Build metrics and dashboards that reflect what’s really happening, not just what’s easy to report

Strategic Execution

Turn a strategic plan into a roadmap with actual owners and actual dates, not just good intentions
Coordinate the initiatives that need three departments to cooperate
Take a stalled project and get it moving again, including figuring out why it stalled in the first place
Protect priorities from quietly becoming background noise once the next fire shows up
Build a path forward that fits how your culture actually operates

Executive Support

Be a real thinking partner for the decisions that don’t have an obvious right answer
Take a complicated, half-formed problem off your plate and come back with real options
Own the special projects that don’t fit cleanly into anyone’s job description
Protect your time for the work only you can do: external relationships, fundraising, big-picture direction
Help you see what’s actually happening beneath a status report that says everything is fine

Who Is This For?

Organizations in Growth Mode
You’re past the scrappy startup phase, somewhere between $500K and $5M in budget, and the processes that worked at half this size are now the thing slowing you down. You need operational leadership to professionalize the organization without losing what made it work in the first place.
Organizations in Transition
New leadership, a merger, a pivot, a round of layoffs, whatever the change, the map your previous leadership drew no longer matches the territory you’re actually operating in. You need someone steady enough to manage the chaos while things resettle.
Executives Buried in Operations
You’re good at vision and strategy, and you’re also the person still approving expense reports at 9pm. You need someone to take the day-to-day execution off your plate so you can actually do the fundraising and external work only you can do.
Teams With Talent but Lacking Coordination
Every individual on your team is excellent at their function. Almost nobody is connecting the dots between functions, so good work happens in parallel instead of together. You need someone who can see the whole terrain, not just their own department’s corner of it.
Organizations Where the Map Doesn’t Match the Territory
Your org chart says one thing. Decisions actually happen another way. Your stated values sound good in the handbook and hollow in the hallway. People have quietly built workarounds for your official process because, as they’d tell you privately, “that’s not really how we do it.” You need someone who can name the gaps honestly and actually close them.

What It’s Like to Work Together

Most engagements start with an actual phone call, not a formal proposal process. Tell me what’s going on, and I’ll tell you honestly whether I’m the right fit. If I am, I drop into however your team already works: one day a week if things are relatively calm, three or four if they’re not, for a minimum of three months and usually closer to a year. I’ve done this enough times that I don’t need six weeks to find my footing, and I’m not advising from the sidelines. I’m in the meetings, building the systems, and doing the operational work next to your team. I’m not doing the work instead of them, but am drawing on two decades of getting past the official version of events to find out what’s truly happening on the ground. The goal is never to make myself permanently necessary. It’s to close the gap between your map and your territory, and leave your people able to keep it closed once I’ve scaled back or moved on.

Other Ways to Work With Me

Organizational Narrative Assessment

Map your organizational terrain before charting the path forward. A 6-week diagnostic that surfaces where your official story, org chart, policies, stated values, diverges from how decisions actually get made, what actually gets rewarded, and where things actually get stuck. Using interview methods built from two decades of documentary filmmaking, I listen for what’s really happening beneath the surface, then help you close the gaps that matter most.

Best for organizations that sense something’s off but can’t quite name it, or that want real information before making a major change.

Map With Me

Workshops, Masterclasses, & Self Paced Courses

Build your team’s own capacity to do this work. Interactive training that teaches your leadership team to spot misalignment themselves, design systems that fit your culture, and navigate change without losing what makes the organization work. From the 90-minute workshop (“When the Map Doesn’t Match the Territory”) to multi-session masterclasses, these sessions hand your team the framework and the skill, not just a one-time fix. The same framework is also available as a self-paced video course for teams who’d rather work through it on their own schedule, no live session required.

Best for individual leaders, teams building internal capacity, or organizations not ready for ongoing fractional support yet.

Learn With Me

Ready to Close the Gap?

Let’s start with a real conversation about what’s actually going on in your organization, and whether fractional operations leadership is the right next step.

Let’s Talk

WHAT MAKES THIS DIFFERENT

I do the work, not just the slides

I’m not handing you a deck and a bill. I build systems, run meetings, own execution alongside your team, and stay until it’s actually working. I’m not interested in handing you a PowerPoint (ok, yes I am, but then I want to do what’s on the slides).

A documentarian’s ear

Two decades of documentary work gave me an unusual ear for what’s really going on beneath the surface of an organization. The gap between what people say in meetings and what’s true is usually where the work is.

I’ve been inside mission driven orgs

I’m building myself out of a job

Every system I build, I train your team to own. The goal is that eventually you don’t need me. That’s not a bug. That’s the whole point