A fractional COO can make a world of difference in a team’s long-term strategy and performance. Often, it is hard for business leaders to look to the future amid a demanding project, economic downturn, or after a shift in team members. In these cases, it may be time to consider hiring a fractional COO with varied experience and a fresh perspective. Fraction Force Strategies can help your business or nonprofit reach its long-term goals.
How Fractional COOs Contribute to and Develop A Company’s Long-Term Goals
Fractional COOs must seek to define the direction of a company by creating day-to-day action items that move the company toward its long-term goals. They must also provide quality advice and direction for companies that find hiring a full-time COO unattainable. There are several vital attributes a fractional COO must bring to the table when working with clients seeking long-term growth:
- Communication With Team Members: Communication and collaboration with company leadership ensures that their goals for operations are aligned across the company’s strategic objectives. This should include regular planning sessions to maintain accountability around tasks and strategies.
- Process: After assessing its current processes and resources, a company’s plan should be created. This will be used to set them on a path for realistic growth and scalability. If current processes do not adequately serve the company, a fractional COO will help create new ones.
- Agile Project Management: Fractional COOs are adept at pivoting or picking up the slack during or after surprise changes in a business’s structure. For instance, if an employee leaves and needs someone to absorb their workload quickly, they can be there to take on that task or project so it doesn’t fall behind. If a client hopes to accelerate specific processes, they can provide expertise to help a business achieve goals faster than they could on their own.
- Unbiased Views of Long-Term Goals: Fractional COOs have typically worked with many different companies throughout their career, making them specialists in various fields. This allows them to help companies that need a fresh set of eyes to look at their resources and determine how they can be optimized to reach the goals they have been striving towards unsuccessfully. For many clients, success simply means knowing what resources they have and what’s required to achieve their goals. Fractional COOs can help outline the steps and shifts needed to do so.
Addressing Common Challenges When Implementing Long-Term Strategies
Business owners have justifiable anxieties about the prospect of hiring help. That stress can be alleviated by breaking down some common challenges fractional COOs typically see when aiding clients.
- Resistance to Change: It can be challenging to adjust to a change in how your business operates. This is why leading with an understanding, explanatory perspective during meetings with leadership and other employees can make them feel more comfortable about the adjustments.
- Poor Communication: Company leadership should be deeply committed to making changes in their company, which means being upfront about things that have not worked in the past. Fractional COOs who are kept in the loop about employee issues and failed or stalled projects help a company improve. Although their role is fractional, they are deeply embedded in company operations and culture, so insight and transparency are essential.
- Constraints in Resources: Whether the constraints are financial or personnel-based, many businesses and nonprofits have limited resources. Fractional COOs apply an adaptable and creative mindset to these situations to stretch money or resources and achieve company goals.
- Lack of Ownership & Clarity: Some companies lack specificity when assigning team members responsibilities. There may also be a need for clearer procedures in how employees complete tasks. Roles should be divided into defined steps amongst team members to make the organization work more efficiently. This is one of the areas in which a Fractional COO can bring a fresh perspective.
- Unreasonable Expectations: Company leaders must understand that sound processes and systems sometimes take time. Tackling short-term problems can align a company toward growth, even if it isn’t immediately evident. Setting expectations and timelines in the first few meetings ensures everyone is on the same page about what obtainable and maintainable growth looks like for that particular organization.
Measuring the Impact of a Fractional COO on Long-Term Growth
Making short-term operational improvements a priority can help shape a company’s broader, long-term vision. That is why addressing immediate pain points can help build up to long-term goals. Ways to measure the success of these changes include:
- Increase in Availability/Resources: When streamlining operations and clarifying daily tasks, employees will have more time to work ahead instead of struggling to keep up. Operating more efficiently can free up money or resources for more significant projects.
- KPIs: KPIs, or key performance indicators, are put in place to measure how everyday work supports the company’s long-term goals. Looking at these measurements continuously can indicate how a company is doing and where they are going. Revenue growth is a standard KPI that can tell how a company has improved while working with a fractional COO.
- Goal Implementation: During initial conversations with a company, a fractional COO will hone in on their “focus areas,” which are larger goals they wish to accomplish. From there, a fractional COO will work backward to establish the steps required to reach long-term goals. Checking off smaller objectives on the roadmap to larger goals can be a great way to measure how much closer you are as a company to matching up to your broader vision.
- Measuring Efficiency: Measuring operational efficiency can be done by counting how many estimates or proposals a company receives and how many they complete each week. Measuring customer intake and retention is an excellent indicator of whether changes to operations have been made for the better.
At Fraction Force Strategies, we aim to help optimize your business model so that long-term growth and goals go from unlikely to attainable. Have questions about our services? We can be contacted through our website and by phone at (615) 733-9505.
We look forward to speaking with you!