Senior operations leadership for service businesses too small to hire it full-time.

Operations experience built at scale, now applied where it's needed most. For the 5-to-30-person service businesses where it makes the largest difference.

Book a 20-minute discovery call →

The diagnostic

Operations isn't your strength — or where you want to spend your time.

Most owners of 5-to-30-person service businesses are running operations whether they planned to or not. The work gets done. But it runs on your memory, your follow-ups, and a tolerance for friction that used to be manageable and isn't anymore.

The patterns show up differently, but the root is usually the same:

  1. 01

    Workflows depend on you knowing what happens next. When you're out, things slow down or stall.

  2. 02

    Quality is inconsistent week to week — not because people aren't trying, but because nothing is written down the same way twice.

  3. 03

    You've looked at AI tools, automation, and new systems. You know there's leverage available. You don't have time to figure out what goes where.

  4. 04

    Hiring an operations person full-time isn't the answer — either you can't justify the cost yet, or you've tried, and it didn't stick.

If any of that sounds familiar, you're in the right place.

Three ways to work together

Start with a Sprint. Continue if it's working.

Every engagement begins with a paid diagnostic. We don't sell ongoing work to anyone who hasn't walked through their own operations with us first.

Ops Clarity Sprint

A two-week paid diagnostic. We map what's actually happening in your business, identify your top three operational bottlenecks, and deliver a prioritized plan for fixing them.

What's included
  • Workflow mapping across delivery, sales, and ops
  • Top three bottlenecks identified and ranked
  • Prioritized 90-day fix list
  • Specific proposal for the highest-impact implementation
Good fit if
  • 5-to-30 person service teams
  • Owners who feel operations is a tax, not a system
  • Pre-AI-tooling, pre-fractional-COO

$4,500starting price

AI Starter Sprint

A 1–2 week engagement for solo consultants, coaches, and very small firms who want to get organized with AI tools and build a real practice for using them.

What's included
  • Information architecture for your work
  • Workflows that put AI in the right places
  • One working session running a real problem through the new system
  • Templates and prompts you actually use
Good fit if
  • Solo operators and 1–3 person firms
  • Curious about AI, tired of demos
  • Ready for a real practice, not another tool

$1,500starting price

Fractional Ops Partnership

For clients who want ongoing senior operations support after a Sprint. Month-to-month with a clear scope and measurable outcomes — an experienced COO on call without the full-time hire.

What's included
  • Weekly working session with the owner
  • Active stewardship of the Sprint roadmap
  • Hiring, vendor, and tool decisions you can hand off
  • Quarterly review against measurable outcomes
Good fit if
  • Post-Sprint clients with momentum to protect
  • Businesses scaling 5 → 30 people
  • Owners who want their evenings back

$3,500per month

How an engagement runs

A two-week diagnostic, end to end.

No prep, no slides, no pitch. Just a structured walk through your operations and a written read of what we found.

  1. 01

    Discovery call

    20 minutes. 15 on what is actually happening in your operations, 5 on whether a Sprint or another path makes sense.

    Day 0

  2. 02

    Mapping week

    We sit with the work. Interviews with you and your team, a walkthrough of the systems you actually use, and the friction nobody has had time to name.

    Week 1

  3. 03

    Pattern read

    A written diagnostic — your top three bottlenecks ranked, the patterns underneath them, and a specific argument for what to fix first.

    End of Week 1

  4. 04

    Prioritized plan

    A 90-day roadmap with the highest-impact implementation scoped as its own concrete proposal. You leave the Sprint with a plan, whether or not we keep working.

    Week 2

  5. 05

    Decision point

    Continue with a Fractional Ops Partnership, take the plan in-house, or hand it to your team. The Sprint is a complete deliverable on its own.

    After Week 2

The shift, illustrated

Same eight functions. Different system underneath.

Everything talks to everything. The owner is the connective tissue.

The system is the connective tissue. The owner is free to choose where to spend their attention.

The Four Patterns essay

Across every stuck service business, the same four patterns appear. Not sometimes. Every time.

01

The owner is the operational memory.

The single source of truth for what happens next, how clients are handled, and what the standards are. It doesn't feel like a problem until the owner needs to take a week off — and then it's the only problem.

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02

Growth has outpaced systems.

The business is bigger than it was three years ago, but it is being run with the same processes — meaning Slack threads, mental models, and the owner's follow-ups. Every new hire makes the gap wider, not smaller.

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03

The ideas vault.

The list of improvements every owner has that somehow never gets built. Not because the ideas are bad. Because capacity went somewhere else, every quarter, for years.

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04

The fourth is —

Read the full essay for the fourth pattern. It is the one nobody names out loud, and the one most worth fixing.

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Read the full piece →

Who's running this

Two decades of operations, in service of small teams.

I'm Lawrence Miera. I built and ran operations at institutional scale for twenty years. Now I do that work for the businesses that need it but can't justify a full-time hire.

Operations experience
20yrs
Sweet-spot team size
5–30
Sprint length
2wks
Read the full story →

A recent Sprint

"We stopped running the business out of my head. Two weeks. The plan was specific enough that my team could execute without me in every meeting."

Owner · 18-person professional services firm

Time to roadmap
14days

From discovery call to written diagnostic and 90-day plan.

Top bottlenecks identified
3

Ranked by impact, with a specific implementation proposal for the first.

Owner hours / week reclaimed
~9hrs

Within the first 60 days of the partnership that followed.

Engagements continued
8/10

Of clients move from Sprint to Fractional Ops Partnership.