Fractional COO
Day-to-day operating leadership, part-time, until you need one full-time
A fractional Chief Operating Officer who runs the business day to day: builds the team, the processes, and the vendor relationships that keep a fintech or ISO running, and hands it off once you are ready to hire full-time.
Built for every buyer we serve
Fast-growing platforms and ISOs where operations has outgrown the founders' time but does not yet justify a full-time COO.
Why this costs you money
These are the failure modes we see most often in Business Operations.
Operations has outgrown the founders' time, but volume does not yet justify a full-time COO salary.
Process and vendor management get done ad hoc, and nobody owns the whole picture.
Interim leadership prevents hiring the wrong full-time person under pressure.
Everything included, in writing
Scope is written down before work starts, and changed only in writing. Nothing is added or dropped without a written change order.
- 01Operating assessment
- 02Team and process build
- 03Vendor and partner management
- 04Reporting cadence and KPIs
- 05Transition to full-time hire
All 5 are written into the scope document before work starts. What you actually need is settled on the call, after the Assess read.
From first call to live
3 phases, each ending in something written. Exact dates are set at the Assess step, once the scope is known.
- 01Phase 01
Week 1 to 2
Operating assessment
- 02Phase 02
Monthly
Function leadership
- 03Phase 03
Transition
Handoff
What makes this different
These are specific to Business Operations, and they are in the scope document rather than only on this page.
People who already know the industry
Analysts, underwriters, dispute specialists, and SDRs who do not need six months of training to be useful.
A baseline before any change
Current workflows, tools, headcount, and cost per outcome measured first, so improvement is provable.
Placed under your management
Your direction, your tools, your standards. We supply the people and the operating discipline, not a black box.
Senior cover without a full-time hire
Fractional leadership that runs the function until you are ready to hire for the seat.
What clients say
We publish no client names. These describe the shape of real engagements in Business Operations.
See the engagementsThe most useful thing they did was tell us the problem was upstream of what we hired them for. Nobody else in the room was willing to say it.
We had been quoted eighteen months and seven figures to register as a PayFac. Midcore mapped the alternative in two weeks and told us plainly that our volume did not justify it yet. That conversation saved us a year.
Our agents were spending half their week on paperwork. The desk took the boarding queue, the disputes, and the residual reconciliation. Same headcount on the sales side, materially more selling.
- Written scopeAgreed before work starts, changed only in writing.
- Reporting from your dataEvery number opens to a record you can check.
- Scoped, logged accessRevocable by you at any time.
What the work looks like
Anonymised engagements from across the six core services.
All case studiesA platform earning a thin referral share on customer processing wanted the margin that sat with its processor, without the registration, capital, and compliance headcount a full PayFac requires.
Field-services SaaS platform An ISO gave its agents their selling week backAgents were spending roughly half their time on statement analysis, applications, and chasing processors. The fix was not more headcount on the sales side.
Independent sales organization A card-not-present merchant came back from a monitoring thresholdA rising dispute ratio put the account within sight of a card brand monitoring program, and with it the processing relationship itself.
Subscription merchant processing at scaleWritten by people who have done the work
Articles on Fractional COO and the wider Business Operations practice.
All insightsA fractional CFO pencils out until finance needs a full-time owner every day, not a part-time one covering payroll tax and equity.
10 min read Agent Agreements: The Clauses That Decide Who Owns the PortfolioAn ISO agent agreement's vesting clause decides who keeps the residuals on paper. State law can decide it differently once termination actually happens.
9 min read Business Operations Audit: What It Finds in an ISO's BooksA business operations audit usually finds the same three things: records that cannot prove what they claim, unrevoked access, and an untracked cost.
10 min readStraight answers
The questions that come up on almost every Fractional COO call, answered before you have to ask them.
What does a fractional COO actually do day to day here?
How many days a week?
How is this different from Staff Augmentation?
How does an engagement start?
What does Fractional COO cost?
Can we stop after the Assess?
How long does Fractional COO take?
Still not sure Fractional COO is what you need?
That is what the Assess is for. Book a 30-minute call and we will tell you which service fits, whether you need one at all, and what the first engagement would cost. We will also tell you when the answer is no.
Ready to talk about Fractional COO?
Tell us what is happening. We will tell you whether this service fits, and whether you need it at all.
- 01Within 1 business dayA US-based practice lead replies and books a 30 minute call.
- 02On the callWe map the problem, the volume, the partners, and the constraints.
- 03After the callYou get a written read of one to three pages, yours to keep.
- Handled under NDA
- Written, not a slide deck
- No obligation to continue