Fractional operations leadership

A senior operator in the business a fixed number of days a month, on an ongoing basis, for owners in Dubai, the UAE and the GCC who have outgrown founder-led control and do not yet need, or want, a full-time operations director.

Who it is for

Owner-led and family-owned businesses with several sites and somewhere between 30 and 250 staff. The business works. The owner is still approving too much of it. Managers bring him decisions instead of making them, the numbers arrive when someone remembers to send them, and a week away from the business costs him a week of catching up when he returns.

Hotel and holiday-home operators of the right size can use the same seat as a bridge: three or four days a week for nine to twelve months, to get the company to the size and steadiness at which a conventional general manager takes the seat, then a handover.

What triggers it

Usually one of these. The owner wants to step back from the daily running and has nobody to hand it to. A new site or a new market has stretched the structure that ran the first ones. The managers are good at their jobs and untrained at running a business. Or the owner has priced a full-time operations director, looked at the calibre available at that price, and decided against it.

How it runs

Part-time and ongoing. A fixed number of days a month, agreed at the start and reviewed every quarter. Jeff sits inside the operating rhythm, in the business: the weekly operations meeting, the monthly numbers, the site visits, the decisions that are stuck. The rhythm is built to produce decisions, made by the managers who own them, with the owner informed rather than consulted on everything. Between visits the managers run the business and Jeff is a phone call away.

What changes in the first ninety days

The operating rhythm exists and is kept. Every manager knows what he owns, what he decides alone, and what goes to the owner. The monthly numbers arrive on a date, in a shape the owner can read in twenty minutes. The two or three problems the business has been walking around for a year are named, ranked and being worked. The owner has had his first week away without the phone ringing.

How it ends

When the managers decide instead of asking, the rhythm runs without Jeff in the room, and the owner can step away and know the business holds. At that point the engagement ends, or it reduces to a quarterly review. A fractional seat that never ends has stopped doing its job.

Fractional or interim

Interim is near full-time for a fixed period: Jeff takes the seat, carries the result, and takes no other client of that kind while he is in it. Fractional is part-time and ongoing: Jeff works through your managers on a rhythm, and the seat stays yours. If you are unsure which you need, the Operating Review answers that question in three weeks.

Proof

The fractional seat itself: since 2025 Jeff has worked with the founder of a Finnish sports-technology company on an ongoing, part-time basis, on the founder's rhythm, invoiced as the work is done. The work has run from the business plan and platform concept to a West African expansion: sharpening the strategy, reviewing an investor case and returning the verdict that it was not yet investable, then rebuilding it, and reading the cultural ground between Finnish and West African partners. The founder runs the company; Jeff is the operator he calls before the next move.

The operating results come from the seats Jeff has held full time. At a Swiss home-services group of around 2,000 staff, twelve agency heads had spent twenty years asking the founder's permission for most decisions. Within a year they were running their own numbers, the year-end close had gone from four and a half months to three weeks, and in a down year where the forecast was that no agency would meet budget, two of seven did and the rest closed the gap by copying their methods.

At an Apple flagship store in Zurich, Jeff led a team of up to 200 with up to fifteen managers. Five promotions came out of that leadership team, including his own successor, and team engagement moved from the bottom quarter of Apple's stores in Europe, the Middle East and Africa to the top five of about 115.

The work has been done in hospitality and hotel ownership groups, multi-site retail, home services and service businesses, in the Gulf, Southeast Asia and Europe.