Nicole R.

Is your business growing, or are you just getting busier? Most of the owners I work with have been getting busier for years. Revenue is up, the team is bigger, and somehow everything is harder than it was two years ago. That is usually not a growth problem. It is that the business still runs through one or two people’s heads and nothing is written down. I call it stalled momentum. I spent two decades inside manufacturing before I ever consulted - government-contract trailer production on FEMA and NSA work, freeze-dried food ingredients, building products, paper, automotive supply. I built an OSHA compliance program from scratch, ran cycle counts and bills of materials, and managed production scheduling. I know what a floor looks like when it is working and when it is not. Now I do that for owner-operated companies, usually $2–20M with 15–100 people, where growth outpaced the systems holding it together. 25 years, 600+ organizations. How I work I capture how work actually moves through your company from the people doing it, not from how leadership believes it moves. The gap between those two is usually where the problem lives. Then I draft the process from what I captured and stress test it under live conditions before anything is final. My background is in instructional design, so what I build is training material written to the role rather than a reference binder, which is why it gets used instead of filed. Metrics come last, deliberately. Measurement laid over an undocumented process just gives you a more precise picture of the chaos. What it is actually for Nobody wants SOPs. They want to grow without breaking, or to sell for what the business is actually worth. One client’s valuation came back reflecting inventory on the shelf rather than the maturity of the operation. Closing that gap is the work. Recent • Owner-operated manufacturer, 28 people: captured processes held through the heaviest receiving week of their year with no adjustments; surfaced 15 open regulatory exposures nobody had reported or suspected • Light industrial staffing: 54 processes documented across 8 categories, then systems selection and build • Industrial sensor manufacturer: built the end-to-end innovation and automation process across four operating companies - 42 initiatives through the pipeline, reporting to the CTO I also work with nonprofits on governance, grant readiness, and compliance-aligned operations. How to start A scoped assessment with a defined end and a written finding, yours whether or not we work together afterward. If the answer is that you don’t need a fractional COO, I’ll tell you that.