From the Floor #1: Nobody buys a fractional COO
By Rob Pegg · July 2026
This is the first of a monthly column: what running a fractional practice actually looks like from inside, one month at a time. No case studies dressed up as lessons, no success theatre. Just what happened and what it taught me.
Nobody buys a fractional COO
This month's lesson came from my own pipeline, which is fitting, because the operational advice I give clients applies to me whether I like it or not.
I'd been reaching out to managing directors and owners I know, describing what I do the way this industry describes it: fractional COO, board adviser, embedded operational leadership. The response was polite and thin. So I ran the experiment I'd tell any client to run: change one variable and watch what happens. I stripped the labels out entirely and described outcomes instead. The operation running without the owner in every decision. The number someone actually holds. The peak that doesn't become a crisis.
Replies changed almost immediately. Not because the offer changed, but because the language stopped asking people to understand a category before they could recognise a problem.
Why labels lose
"Fractional COO" is insider language. It makes sense to people who already know the model, which means it filters your audience down to people who don't need convincing and were probably coming anyway. The owner who actually needs the help isn't searching for a fractional anything. He's lying awake about a contract going live in nine weeks with a warehouse that isn't ready. Meet him there, in his words, and the conversation starts. Meet him with a job title he's never hired and it doesn't.
The same failure runs through most SME sales decks, job adverts and board papers I see: language organised around what the writer is, instead of what the reader is losing sleep over. It's cheap to fix and almost nobody fixes it, because the labels feel professional and the plain version feels exposed.
The wider point
Everything is an operation, including the selling of operational help. Small experiments, one variable, honest reading of the result, no attachment to the version that isn't working. If I'd defended my original wording because I liked it, I'd have concluded the market was quiet. The market was fine. The label was the problem.
That's issue one. Next month, whatever the floor teaches me next.