Is this a coach or an operator?

An operator. Coaching is a separate thing I do and it has its own page. This engagement produces documents, decisions and hires. If what you want is a thinking partner for your own development and not someone taking work off the desk, the coaching version is the better fit.

How many days a month?

Enough to be useful and not so many that the company stops building the muscle. The range runs from a couple of days a month, where the founder mainly needs somewhere to take decisions, up to something close to half-time through a financing. We set it at the start of each quarter, not once at the beginning.

What if my co-founder and I disagree about this?

Then that is the first piece of work and it should happen before anything else. A fractional operator brought in by one founder over the objection of another becomes an argument instead of a solution. I will take the call with both of you or not at all.

When the permanent version of the seat is affordable and fillable, which usually arrives with the round after the one you are working on now. I would rather help write that job description than stay past the point of being useful.

You are a scientist-founder, and now you need help running the company.

You were hired by your own company for the science. The rest of the job arrived with it. I do the rest of the job with you.

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Whether this is you

Nobody tells a founding scientist that the company is a second job with a different skill set, and the transition rarely announces itself. It shows up as a week with no science in it.

The research plan is good and there is no operating plan underneath it.
You are about to make the first ten hires and the order is being set by who happens to be available.
The board meeting takes two weeks to prepare and the useful part lasts twenty minutes.
You are spending your time on decisions you did not train for and cannot delegate to anyone currently in the building.

What the work is

I run the company with you. The operating plan behind the science, who to hire and in what order, what to build in-house and what to buy, how to handle the board, and the decisions you did not train for. Some founders want this for a quarter. Some keep me for a year.

This is the closest thing I do to a seat rather than an engagement. In practice it looks like chief-of-staff or fractional chief strategy officer work: I run the company alongside the founder, take the decisions they did not train for off their desk, and leave the science where it belongs. I ran operations for a $130 million HIV vaccine program across governments, donors and research institutions, which is a useful apprenticeship in the particular problem of holding a technical program and an organization together at once.

How it runs

The operating plan: The science plan turned into something with owners, dates and a number attached to each line. That translation is most of the value, because it becomes the document that lets you say no to things without arguing about them each time.
Who to hire, and when: The first ten people, in the order that keeps the company alive rather than the order that feels complete. Most early teams hire toward the org chart they expect to need and run out of money before it is finished. The real question is which single hire removes the most work from the founder's desk, and it is rarely the one with the most impressive title.
Build or buy: What belongs in-house and what belongs at a CRO or CDMO, decided on the cost of control rather than habit. Building capability is a fixed cost and a hiring problem; buying it is a management problem and a margin. Founders tend to build what they enjoy and outsource what they do not, which is the wrong axis.
The board: The pack, the pre-reads and the conversations that happen before the meeting, so the meeting is short. A board that first learns something in the room will spend the room relitigating it. Managing directors between meetings is the job, and treating it as politics is how founders end up surprised in the room.
The rest: The decisions you did not train for, made alongside someone who has made them before. Compensation, a co-founder conversation that has gone wrong, whether to take the meeting, when to let go of someone you like. None of these appear on a workstream and they take the most out of a founder.

What you end up with

An operating plan comes first, with owners, dates and a cost against each line of the research plan. Hiring gets sequenced against that same plan: the first ten roles, ranked by what each one removes from your desk. For every function there is a build-or-buy decision with the cost of control written out. The board gets an operating rhythm covering the pack, the pre-reads and the between-meeting cadence. And once a week an hour is held open, so the decisions with no obvious owner get made rather than deferred.

Scope and fee

This one is scoped as a seat, not a project. The usual shape is a monthly retainer for a defined number of days, running from a quarter through a specific moment, a financing or a board transition, up to about a year. It starts with the same short diagnostic as everything else, which here is mostly two weeks of watching where the founder's time actually goes. It is the one part of the practice where the right outcome is that the company outgrows me and hires the permanent version of the seat. I set the rate after the first call and revisit it each quarter along with the days. Never hourly.

When not to call me

The title, the equity and the direct reports stay where they are. This is not a chief operating officer role, and where a company needs a permanent operator with authority, hiring a fractional one delays that decision at some expense. Nor am I your CMC consultant or the person running your clinical operations; most of these engagements sit alongside a chief development or chief scientific officer who owns the science. And it does not work where the founder wants the work done rather than done with them. The whole mechanism is that the decisions get made together until they no longer need to be.

Questions founders ask

Is this a coach or an operator?: An operator. Coaching is a separate thing I do and it has its own page. This engagement produces documents, decisions and hires. If what you want is a thinking partner for your own development and not someone taking work off the desk, the coaching version is the better fit.
How many days a month?: Enough to be useful and not so many that the company stops building the muscle. The range runs from a couple of days a month, where the founder mainly needs somewhere to take decisions, up to something close to half-time through a financing. We set it at the start of each quarter, not once at the beginning.
What if my co-founder and I disagree about this?: Then that is the first piece of work and it should happen before anything else. A fractional operator brought in by one founder over the objection of another becomes an argument instead of a solution. I will take the call with both of you or not at all.
When should it end?: When the permanent version of the seat is affordable and fillable, which usually arrives with the round after the one you are working on now. I would rather help write that job description than stay past the point of being useful.