Seven Signs Your Founder-Led Company Has Outgrown the Founder as Its Operating System
Founders are the reason companies exist, and, past a certain size, the reason they stop growing. That is not a character flaw. It is math. One person’s attention does not scale, and a company that runs on the founder’s attention hits a ceiling somewhere between $8 million and $20 million in revenue. Here are the […]
Year-End Tax Planning Starts in September, Not December
Every December, owners call their CPA and ask what they can do to reduce the year’s tax bill. The honest answer at that point is: not much. The retirement plan should have been set up months ago. The equipment order needs to be placed in service by the 31st. The entity change has to be […]
Fractional COO vs. Full-Time COO: Cost, Fit, and When Each One Is the Right Call
Founders usually ask this question the wrong way around. They ask “can I afford a full-time COO,” when the better question is “what does the business need in the next twelve months, and what is the right structure to get it.” Here is how to think through it. The full-time COO A full-time chief operating […]
Tax Strategy vs. Tax Preparation: Most Business Owners Only Have One of Them
An owner with $600,000 in income sent me his return in April and asked whether the number at the bottom was reasonable. It was accurate. Every line was correct. It was also about as large as it could legally be, because nobody had done anything before December 31 to make it smaller. That is the […]
What Does a Fractional COO Actually Do? A Founder’s Guide
A founder of a $14 million services company told me last year that he was the bottleneck in every decision, and he knew it, and he had no idea how to stop. He did not need a consultant. He needed someone to run the operating side of the business while he went back to selling […]
Recovering a Stalled RegTech Product and Delivering a Launch-Ready MVP
A RegTech SaaS product was significantly behind schedule, lacked documentation, and was not architected to scale. Opscale Intervention The product was assessed end to end. The existing development team was off-boarded and replaced with trusted product leaders and engineers. Documentation was created immediately, scope was narrowed to a true MVP, and a parallel rebuild strategy […]