Fractional Operations Leadership · Agencies & Consultancies

Senior operating leadership,
without the full-time hire.

I work alongside founders of growing agencies and consultancies as a fractional COO or Client Services Director. I fix the delivery model, protect margin, and build the operating structure that lets the business scale without depending on any one person.

You might recognise this.

Most agencies and consultancies hit a version of the same wall. It's rarely a talent problem. It's an operating-model problem.

I.

You give every client a slightly different version of the service, so nothing repeats cleanly and every delivery starts again from scratch.

II.

You're still the one approving decisions your team should be able to make without you.

III.

Revenue looks healthy, but margin is thinner than it should be, and no one can quite say why.

IV.

You're considering a COO or Head of Delivery hire, but you're not ready to commit to a full-time salary and the risk of getting it wrong.

V.

A good team is starting to feel the strain. They're capable enough. The structure around them just hasn't kept pace with growth.

VI.

You know the business needs senior operating discipline. You just don't need it five days a week, forever.

Three ways to bring in senior operating leadership.

Not all three at once. Think of it as a ladder: a low-commitment starting point, a flagship ongoing engagement, and a time-boxed option for one clearly defined problem.

Operations Diagnostic

The door opener
From £4,500
Fixed fee, 4 weeks
  • A structured assessment of where operational friction actually sits
  • Covers delivery health, commercial hygiene (pricing, scope, margin), team clarity and capacity
  • Ends with a clear, prioritised action plan you can act on, with or without me
Best for: founders who suspect there's a problem but want a clear-eyed diagnosis before committing to ongoing support.

Fractional COO / Client Services Director

The flagship engagement
From £550 / day
Ongoing retainer, typically 1–2 days a week
  • Embedded part-time at MD/COO level: leadership meetings, operating rhythm, direct accountability
  • Owns named initiatives: capacity model, delivery governance, pricing and packaging, leadership team development
  • I'm not a consultant who writes a report and leaves. I work inside the business.
Best for: businesses that need sustained senior operating leadership but aren't ready to make a full-time executive hire.

Scaling Sprint

The time-boxed intensive
From £9,000
Fixed fee, 8–10 weeks
  • A focused programme to solve one specific, named operational problem
  • Examples: delivery is unpredictable and margin keeps leaking; capacity planning is reactive; growth has outrun who-owns-what
  • Defined scope, defined output, clear end point
Best for: a known problem that needs focused senior attention for a fixed period, not an open-ended retainer.

Fifteen years building and fixing the commercial engine of professional services businesses.

1 → 12
Built a 12-person EMEA consulting practice from the first hire. The most profitable, most-utilised, best-retained team in the business globally.
~35%
Improvement in delivery efficiency through resourcing discipline and QA governance, without adding headcount
£1m+
Added to consulting pipeline by productising service lines and redesigning pricing and go-to-market
6 regions
Built a near-shore operations centre from the ground up, spanning six global regions

I hold commercial accountability and operational design at the same time. I'm not an operations person who needs a commercial lead brought in alongside me, and I'm not a commercial director who doesn't understand delivery.

I understand pricing, resourcing, margin, and how delivery quality connects to retention and growth, because I've been accountable for all of it directly, not just advised on it from the outside.

Over 15+ years across B2B consulting, telecommunications and financial services, I've built consulting organisations from scratch, redesigned pricing and packaging to protect margin, and led people and culture functions alongside commercial strategy, often at the same time.

Chartered Marketer (MCIM) · PG Diploma B2B Marketing · BA English & Film (First Class Honours)
Free Diagnostic · For Agency Founders

The Delivery Dependency Audit

A 5-minute self-assessment across five dimensions (systems, decision-making, quality, capacity and leadership continuity) that shows you exactly how dependent your agency is on you, and what it's costing you.

Download the Audit (PDF)
Honeycomb
Growth

I'm Claire Robinson. For fifteen years I've built and fixed the commercial and delivery engine inside professional services and consulting businesses. I've been the person accountable for the outcome, not just the person advising on it.

Honeycomb Growth is how I bring that experience to founders who are excellent at the work but are starting to feel the strain of scaling it. Growth has usually outrun the structure underneath it, and the fix is normally a better-designed team, not a bigger one.

I work with a small number of clients at any time, embedded as a genuine part of the leadership team rather than a visitor with a slide deck.

Claire