We spend the first three weeks watching how your business actually runs, then ship three working systems by the end of week twelve. No deck. No roadmap for someone else to build. A different operation, live and tested, that costs less to run than the one it replaced.
01 / What's at stake
Most operations don't fail because the work is hard. They fail because the work has too many people in front of it. Every new client added one process. Every new process added one approver. Every approver added a meeting. The meeting got rescheduled. The work waited.
You can name the steps in your head right now. The lead form that someone has to score before it goes to sales. The invoice that has to be re-keyed into the second system because the first one doesn't talk to it. The weekly report someone rebuilds by hand from six dashboards. None of these things are decisions. They're rituals you inherited from when the company was smaller and you needed to stay close to the work.
Here is the part nobody says out loud. The approval chain that always approves shouldn't exist. The knowledge that only lives in one person's head shouldn't live there. The process bloat that's now the cost of doing business was an accident that became a policy. There is a version of your operation that runs without those rituals, costs less to run, and gives the people doing the work their afternoons back. We've built that version three times.
The approval chain that always approves shouldn't exist. The knowledge that only lives in one person's head shouldn't live there.
02 / What we ship in ninety days
Every sprint produces the same five artifacts, in this order, by the dates we agree to on day one.
01 · Week 1-3
Three weeks of time-tracking, interviews, and process mapping with the team that actually does the work. Output is a single document. Every process scored on time, frequency, error rate, and necessity. The bottom of the list is what we kill first. The top is what we automate. Nothing rebuilt yet. You sign off on the priority list before any code is written.
02 · Week 4-6
The first system live. Usually lead routing, ticket triage, invoice approval, or contract review. The pattern is the same. A piece of work arrives, the system reads it, applies the rules you actually use (not the rules in the policy doc nobody updates), and routes it. Humans see the 10% of cases that need judgment. The other 90% never sat in a queue.
03 · Week 6-9
Single-person dependency is the most expensive thing in your business. We build a retrieval system grounded in the documents, the past decisions, and the policies that one person carries around in their head. New hires get up to speed in weeks instead of months. Your senior person stops being the support desk. When they take a vacation, nothing breaks.
04 · Week 9-12
On day one we agree which approval chain to rebuild. Then we rebuild it. Most companies have one that's been approving the vast majority of items by default for years. The chain exists because nobody ever turned it off. We build the version where the routine cases go through automatically with an audit trail, and the small share that actually needs a human review goes to the right human with the context already attached.
05 · End of Week 12
Three systems live by day 90, plus a documented record of how to find and ship the next three yourself. Or roll into CAIO if you want a partner for the next cohort. The playbook covers what we changed and why, how to maintain it, the runbooks per system, and the diagnostic method we used to find the first three opportunities so you can apply it again. Includes the org-chart math as a sub-element: which roles can now spend their hours on the work they were actually hired for, and which can be redeployed. If you want help finding the next three, that's the Fractional CAIO conversation. If you want to take the playbook in-house and run it yourself, the document is enough.
03 / The 90-day cadence
01 · Day 0
We walk through the operation, name the candidate processes, and confirm a 90-day sprint is the right shape. If your problem is one workflow, we route you to Workflow Automation. If your problem is ongoing AI leadership without a fixed end, we route you to the CAIO. We only quote when the shape fits.
Free. Thirty minutes. Cal.com.02 · Week 1-3
Time-tracking with the team. Process mapping in person and over screen-share. Opportunity scoring against ROI and feasibility. End-of-week-three deliverable is the priority list. You sign off on the first three systems before any build starts. If we don't agree, we adjust. If we still don't agree, we end the engagement and you keep the diagnosis.
Three weeks. Fixed scope. No code yet.03 · Week 4-6
The fastest-ROI system from the priority list, scoped tight enough to ship inside three weeks. Weekly demos. Weekly course corrections. The system enters production at week six and your team starts using it that week. We don't wait for the sprint to end to ship.
First system in production by week six.
04 · Week 6-12
Cycles two and three run in parallel and stagger. The second system ships around week nine, the third by week twelve. By the time the sprint ends, three systems have been live long enough for your team to know how they behave under real load, not in a test.
Three systems running by week twelve.05 · Week 12
End-of-sprint handoff includes the playbook, the runbooks per system, training for the people who'll own them, and the org-impact model. We answer questions for thirty days post-sprint as a backstop. After that, three paths: you take the playbook in-house and run it yourself, you move into a Fractional CAIO relationship to keep finding the next opportunities, or you call us in six months for the next sprint. All three are normal outcomes. The sprint has a clean end either way.
Sprint closes at day 90. No auto-renewal.04 / Proof
A marketing agency that spent three hours a day on Google Business Profile work now spends two hours a week. Same eighty-plus accounts. Same output quality. One system instead of a person.
Six hundred unique location pages shipped in a single month. The manual baseline was over a year. The team that would have written them is doing strategy instead.
05 / Questions
A 90-day sprint with a fixed end date and three shipped systems. The Fractional CAIO is the ongoing relationship that comes after, if you want it. Ops Transformation is a discrete project. CAIO is a partnership. Operations Transformation has a hard end date by design. If you want ongoing leadership past day 90, start with CAIO instead. Many clients run an Ops Transformation first, then decide whether to move into CAIO once they've seen us ship. Both are fine. Picking the wrong one isn't.
Sixty days isn't enough to ship three real systems. Six months loses the urgency that makes the diagnosis honest. Ninety days is the smallest window where a team can watch the work, kill the rituals, build the replacements, and run them under real load before we hand them off. Shorter sprints produce changes that don't stick. Longer ones produce changes that don't ship.
The diagnosis is yours to disagree with. We score and rank, you choose. We won't build something we don't believe in, and you won't pay for something you don't want. If we can't agree on the priority list by end of week three, the engagement ends there and you keep the audit. It has happened more than once. Both times the diagnosis was right and the client came back six months later.
This is the most common failure mode in operations work, and the reason we spend three weeks watching before we build anything. The people doing the work tell us which rituals matter and which ones they'd kill if they could. The systems get designed with them, not at them. By the time a system ships, the team that uses it already knows what it does and why. Resistance shows up when consultants redesign in a room without the operators. We don't.
We run 1-2 Operations Transformation sprints in parallel, never more. The work is too dense to thin it out. If both slots are full when you ask, we tell you the next available start date rather than overcommit.
Fixed fee for a 90-day sprint, scoped on the strategy call once we agree on the shape. Most engagements fall in a range we'll confirm in writing before you commit. We anchor pricing to the documented hours and headcount cost the sprint reclaims, not to our time. If we can't quantify the saving, we don't take the project.
Yes, with one adjustment. Multi-entity sprints add a week to diagnosis (we spend that week reconciling how the same process runs differently in different parts of the business) and the priority list usually surfaces unification opportunities the leadership team didn't know existed. The ninety days holds. The scope shifts.
Next step
Take the five-minute readiness assessment and we'll send a report you can read without talking to us. If a sprint looks like the right shape, the report includes a calendar link. If it doesn't, you keep the report and we save each other a sales call.
