Fractional COO · Regulated Service Firms
Fractional COO for regulated service firms
We build the operating systems that let work move from sale to delivery without living in the founder's head.
I build the operating systems that let work move from sale to delivery without living in the founder's head.
Brian Montes
Fractional COO
The problem
You have real revenue and a growing team
But execution still depends too heavily on the founder.
Work gets stuck between people with no clear owner
Managers lack a consistent cadence and accountability structure
Client delivery varies depending on who's running the engagement
People processes are informal and don't scale with the team
Regulation raises the cost of that chaos. Guesswork does not scale under exam, audit, or client scrutiny.
The outcome
In 90 days, you will have
A weekly operating cadence
Priorities, owners, KPIs, and an action tracker your leadership team actually runs.
Clearer ownership and documented workflows
From client onboarding through delivery — so nothing falls through the gap between two people's job descriptions.
Core people systems
Role clarity, onboarding, manager accountability, and policy and documentation discipline.
How we work
How we work
Weekly leadership cadence
Priorities, owners, KPIs, and an action tracker reviewed every week. The leadership team runs the meeting — not the founder.
Ownership and delivery systems
Documented workflows from client onboarding through delivery. Clear handoffs, quality gates, and accountability at every step.
Manager accountability
Monthly scorecard reviews, 1:1 cadence, and escalation paths that stick. Managers inherit real ownership, not just a title.
People systems
Role clarity, onboarding, policy and documentation discipline — built for your firm's size, not a Fortune 500 template.
Weekly leadership cadence, monthly scorecard review, focused systems implementation, and executive-level accountability — without adding a full-time COO or HR executive.
Best fit
Best fit
Regulated service firms
Compliance, advisory, and professional services adjacent to regulated industries
Founder-led through early management layer
You have a team, but the founder is still the de facto COO
Past product-market fit
Operations and people are the bottleneck, not the product or the market
Willing to change how work is owned
Not just buy a playbook PDF — actually restructure how decisions get made
How engagements usually look
How engagements usually look
Diagnostic
Map ownership, delivery, managers, and people systems across the firm. You leave with a short operating plan that names the gaps and the sequence to close them.
Fractional COO
Weekly leadership cadence, manager coaching, delivery system, and hiring and people process — embedded inside your firm, not advising from the outside.
Build and hand off
Install the operating rhythm, stand up accountable managers, then step back on a defined timeline. You keep the system; I move on.
About
Brian Montes
Brian Montes is an operator and advisor who has built and run delivery, compliance-adjacent, and leadership systems for regulated and professional service firms.
He works as a fractional COO for firms that need clear ownership, accountable managers, and operations that scale without the founder in every loop.
Contact
Ready for an operating system that doesn't depend on you?
Tell me about the firm, where work breaks today, and what "working" looks like in 90 days.