Serving as a Business Co-Pilot to Improve Results
What is a CEO or founding team to do when the business isn’t making desired progress?
When company leaders needed to spend their time on the top initiatives only they could lead, I filled the gap, serving as a thought partner on the big customer and product questions we had to answer, while establishing, managing and evolving operations
Recent Project: Synervoz, a Leading Digital Audio Product and Services Startup
Synervoz boasts one of the strongest digital audio engineering teams in the world, and its Chief Executive Officer is an expert in creating consumer experiences with technically complex audio requirements, including voice AI, interactive voice and video chat, remote collaboration, music creation, social audio and video, and gaming.
The company began by creating a B2C mobile app, Switchboard, and it pioneered many user behaviors that have become commonplace today in products such as Slack Huddles, X Spaces and Voxer. A few years ahead of its time, Synervoz pivoted to providing B2B custom engineering services and transformed its consumer app into an audio SDK designed to reopen the door to venture-sized growth, raising venture capital, or creating an M&A opportunity.
The CEO brought me on to scale his contributions to the company, giving him breathing room to dedicate time to the strategic projects that only he could lead. That’s what I’ve done.
We iteratively prioritized and executed the highest-leverage activities, ensuring the CEO spent his time smartly. I took on his other responsibilities, including tasks where the CEO had less prior experience. We continually identified and explored assumptions critical to the business’s growth, closing learning gaps to ensure we were on the right path. We stood up and refined scalable structures that were “good enough” for today and anticipated our growth curve.
More specifically, I took on day-to-day go-to-market operations and business operations, including HR (people operations), finance (oversight of bookkeeping, reporting, and analysis), and legal management. The CEO and I teamed up to build a brand new sales motion from scratch, and we split the related business development activities. I managed customer onboarding and collaborated with the Chief Technology Officer and VP of Engineering to manage customer projects. This included developing a new company-wide business and technology security framework, plus new practices to support our agile development process.
With the CEO and CTO focused on the most strategic aspects of the business—work that only they could do—in combination with my unique contributions:
We increased revenue materially in 2022 over 2021.
We closed a strategic bridge financing in 2023.
Through April 2025, we had secured close to $750,000 in government R&D grants to fund product development.
We began 2025 with our biggest revenue months ever, increasing product traction for our scale-able SDK, and a plan to endure the recessionary environment.
With my help, the company has had the breathing room and resources to pursue a compelling new growth strategy, building on its engineering prowess, leveraging its scalable audio SDK.
Recent Project: A Founder-Led, Profitable AgTech Startup
When I first met this founder, he was drowning in his own success, but they didn't let that challenge be the end of the story.
It's not a fun way to live. Often, something gives: your personal life, or the business pays the price.
In this case, the SaaS platform the founder built had delivered quantifiable business benefits for a marquee enterprise customer—a leader in their industry. The founder saw that he could address similar needs in other sectors.
He had a real use case. Capital in the bank. And a credible growth hypothesis to test.
But there was one problem. The founder, a 10x engineer and the product visionary, still owned everything. The business wasn't built to run without him doing it all. There wasn't the capacity or talent on the existing team to take on more.
The company was crushing it in supporting its keystone customer, but it paid for that success with operational debt. The foundation wasn't there to realize the founder’s growth ambitions.
This wasn't a business that needed world-class operations yet. But it did need a stable foundation—just enough structure to free up the founder to take on the additional job of testing the waters for expansion, and to support growth if (hopefully when) it arrived.
Here's what made the difference: the founder saw it and acted.
He recognized that his highest-leverage work was:
Serving as a strategic advisor to the customer
Advancing the SaaS product
Testing the next phase of growth
He made the (often difficult) leadership call to delegate.
That's where I had the privilege to step in: I joined the team as a fractional operating partner—part get-it-done operator, part growth thought partner—to take ownership of everything that was slowing him down. I behave like a co-founder, fully committed and sharing the team’s passion for what they do.
I ran an operations reset. We didn't overbuild. We concentrated on what was needed, with clear guardrails.
That meant:
Offboarding underperforming external partners in finance and tax
Bringing on new SF-based advisors aligned with the company's growth goals
Launching and standardizing on Rippling and introducing lightweight performance management and KPIs
Restating historical financials and establishing compliance routines
Shoring up legal infrastructure to protect IP and prep for future fundraising or M&A
As an embedded team member, not a consultant, I quickly got grounded, learned by doing, and built momentum through early quick wins. Then we moved into a steady cadence of advancing 1–3 high-leverage priorities at a time, tracked transparently with a simple project management system and weekly rhythm.
A few months in, the business was more stable, less risky, and easier to manage. The top-priority backlog had been cleared, and the team was aligned and executing. Eventually, I transitioned ownership of the new systems to a standout internal team member.
Operational debt isn’t always obvious (until it breaks). But the founder saw the issue early and called me in to help. By doing so, he gave himself the capacity to swim toward the next big opportunity for the business.
Case Study: The PTDC
Venture Lifecycle Stage. Build.
Approach. I conducted an initial, end-to-end analysis of the organization and designed a four-month project to eliminate major risks and score quick wins. Thereafter, I established and improved emerging human resources (policies, comp, etc.), finance (planning, reporting, analysis), and legal functions, as well as project prioritization and planning. Foundational customer insights research and follow-up analysis enabled us to build a customer experience (CX) map informing product, customer success and marketing.
Results. These efforts resulted in a crisp customer value proposition to align the team and business management system (budget, plan and KPIs tied to a CX map) to guide us and track progress.
Benefits included improving the performance of a key landing page by 22% after results had been stuck for a year.
