“Fractional” is one of those words that sounds like it was invented in a meeting. I use it on proposals because it is the term people search for, but what it means is simple. You get a senior person running part of your business, for a fraction of their time and a fraction of what they would cost to employ.
An operations manager in a small business is the person who makes sure things actually happen. Enquiries get answered. Jobs get scheduled. Suppliers get paid. The process for onboarding a new customer exists somewhere other than the owner’s head. Numbers get looked at once a month by someone who will say what they mean. In most businesses under about twenty people, that person is the owner, and the owner is also the salesperson, the technical expert and the one who does the invoicing at eleven at night.
Handing that over does not mean handing over control. It means handing over the running. Here is what it looks like in practice, because I do it for several businesses at once and they are all different.
For a hospitality technology group it means the accounts function: bookkeeping in Xero, VAT every quarter, payroll, expenses, the company secretarial work, and being the person who deals with HMRC when a letter arrives. The owner does not need to open Xero, and that is the point.
For a signage manufacturer it means business development: a pipeline that keeps moving, the right people found and approached, and a monthly report showing exactly what went out and what came back. For a serviced accommodation operator with twenty properties it means the whole back office: the property and compliance database, the channels, the content, the numbers. For a business psychologist it means her entire marketing function, from the weekly blog to the monthly newsletter to the reporting.
What is common to all of them is the shape. You hand over a whole function, not a list of tasks. We agree what “running properly” means for that function and write it down. Every month you get a report showing what was delivered against that, and a check in where we set the top three priorities for the next month. You approve everything before it goes out. There is no timesheet, because you are buying the function being run, not hours.
And under the surface, all of it runs on systems I have built with AI, which is why one person can hold that many functions across that many businesses. The mechanical work happens fast. My time goes on judgement.
What does it cost? In the UK a full time operations manager in a small business will cost somewhere north of £40,000 a year once you add employer’s National Insurance, pension, holiday and the desk, and that is before they have found a system to run anything on. A fractional arrangement with me starts at £850 a month for one function kept running to a standard, £1,500 for one or two functions actively improved month on month, and £2,500 for the whole back office and growth function as one integrated service. Rolling monthly, 30 days’ notice, no long contract, because if it is not working you should be able to leave.
The honest comparison is not with hiring someone. Most businesses this size were never going to hire an operations manager. The honest comparison is with the owner doing it themselves at eleven at night, and what that is costing in missed work, slow quotes, late invoices and the growth that never happened because nobody had time to chase it.
If you have read this far and recognised your own eleven o’clock, that is usually the moment to have the conversation.