A fractional COO is a senior operator embedded part-time inside a company to install operating discipline, fix process bloat, and document the playbooks your team will run on after the engagement ends. The role replaces $15,000–$25,000/month in operational overhead, software spend plus the hidden labor of managing tools nobody fully understands, at a fraction of full-time COO compensation.
Obsidian Axis Group runs fractional COO engagements at $3,000–$7,500 per month. Multi-month, embedded, structured around a clean exit. Cedric Corbett is the principal, a decade inside Amazon, International Paper, Spirit Halloween, Maersk, and Levi Strauss operations, now compressed into a process any $10M–$100M operator can run.
When a fractional COO actually fits.
A fractional COO is not a generic alternative to a full-time hire. The strongest fits are post-acquisition and lower-middle-market, where the operating gap is acute and the methodology earns its full scope. The role also fits two broader operator situations that are easier to overlook.
01 / Post-acquisition
The seller-operator leaves at close. The new owner inherits a business that runs on tribal knowledge, undocumented, in one person's head. A fractional COO installs the documented operating system in 90 days, before the muscle memory walks out the door.
02 / Founder bottleneck
You're a $10M–$50M operator. Every decision routes through you. You can feel it in your calendar. A fractional COO un-routes the decisions, identifies which ones need to come back to you and which never should have, and installs the SOPs that let the team execute without your sign-off.
03 / Sponsor-led ops install
Private-equity portfolio company. The sponsor wants documented operating discipline before the next round, before the auditor asks for it, before the strategic acquirer does diligence. A fractional COO produces the operating system the next investor will want to see, and gets out before the next holding-period reset.
04 / Operational due diligence pre-sale
You're 12–18 months from selling. The buyer's diligence team will pull every SOP, every KPI definition, every decision flow. A fractional COO writes them properly before the data room opens, instead of frantically during it.
05 / The right-sized COO need
You know operations needs senior attention. You also know a full-time COO is the wrong shape. Either the comp band ($250K+ base, equity, severance risk) is wrong for your stage, or there isn't 40 hours a week of actual COO work, or both. A fractional engagement scopes to the operating gap, not to a job description. You get the same operating discipline at 20–30% of full-time cost, with a clean exit when the work is done. Most fits in this bucket are $5M to $30M operators where the founder is doing the COO work in their spare time and it is showing.
06 / The diagnosis-first engagement
The process feels leaky. Decisions take too long. Growth isn't translating into operational capacity. You know it could be running better but you can't name the specific problem yet. The Diagnose phase of a fractional engagement names the gap with numbers, in writing, in four weeks. You decide whether to keep going from there. No long-term commitment is required to get the diagnosis itself, and most operators leave that phase with a specific list of things that are costing them, even if they choose to fix it themselves from there.
The Axis Method. Five stages.
Every fractional COO engagement at Obsidian Axis Group runs through the same five-stage methodology. Each stage has explicit deliverables and explicit exit criteria. Read the full methodology at /axis-method.
| Stage | Duration | What gets delivered |
|---|---|---|
| 01 Diagnose | Weeks 1–4 | Operational map · waste inventory · decision-routing graph |
| 02 Stabilize | Weeks 4–10 | Highest-leverage broken process fixed · interim SOPs in use |
| 03 Document | Weeks 10–16 | Permanent SOPs, KPIs, decision trees · the operating system in writing |
| 04 Hand-off | Weeks 16–22 | In-house team runs the system · we verify and step back |
| 05 Compound | Quarterly | Optional check-ins to verify the discipline persists |
One engagement type. Three scopes.
All engagements are structured the same way. The variable is depth and embed time per week.
| Scope | Monthly fee | Embed | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Light | $3,000 | ~1 day/week equivalent | $10M–$25M, single high-leverage problem |
| Standard | $5,000 | ~2 days/week equivalent | $25M–$50M, post-acquisition install |
| Deep | $7,500 | ~3 days/week equivalent | $50M–$100M, sponsor-led portfolio install |
The math: a Deep engagement at $7.5K/month replaces $15K–$25K/month in operational overhead, software your team rents but doesn't fully use, plus the hidden labor of the people managing it. You're not hiring another person. You're retiring the bloat that was costing you silently.
Beyond SOPs. The full operating discipline.
Most consultants will hand you a binder of SOPs and call the engagement complete. That is not what installs operational excellence. The actual install layers four dimensions, sequenced so each one supports the next.
01 / Process discipline
The Lean and Six Sigma traditions, applied without the ceremony. Value-stream mapping during Diagnose. Variation reduction at the highest-cost hand-offs during Stabilize. Standard work documentation during Document. Visual management and pull-based flow during Hand-off. Continuous-improvement cadence baked into the daily standup, so improvement compounds after we leave. Read more in the Lean Six Sigma glossary and the post on what to keep at LMM scale.
02 / Team performance
Tuckman's stages and Edmondson's safety-accountability framework, used as diagnostic and intervention. Most LMM teams are stuck at Norming-via-suppression and the leader thinks that is success. The Stabilize and Document phases install the practices that move a team into the Learning zone (high safety AND high accountability), where the operating system actually compounds. See the practitioner post and the psychological-safety glossary entry.
03 / Decision routing
Mapping every recurring decision and assigning it to the lowest level it can responsibly live at. Founder-bottleneck count drops by half in the first 90 days because most decisions had been routing to the principal by default, not by design.
04 / Measurement and cadence
Three to five KPIs that matter, defined precisely (formula, data source, owner, refresh cadence). Reviewed on a weekly cadence. Connected to specific decisions. Reports nobody reads do not count.
The four together produce operational excellence: the persistent state of running the business without the founder being the operating system.
Fractional COO vs full-time COO.
| Fractional COO | Full-time COO | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | $36K–$90K/year | $250K+ base + equity |
| Time to impact | 2–4 weeks | 3–6 months ramp |
| Exit cost | None, engagement ends | Severance, search, replacement ramp |
| Best when | Operating gap is acute, scope is bounded | Operating gap is permanent and growing |
Built on the floor. Not in a classroom.
Cedric Corbett runs every engagement personally. A decade of enterprise operations across Amazon, International Paper, Spirit Halloween, Maersk, and Levi Strauss, $3B+ in operational impact, now compressed into a methodology any $10M–$100M operator can run.
The Axis Method was stress-tested inside DefaultFail, the operator community where every system was proven by real business owners before it became a consulting engagement.
Questions worth answering before we talk.
What is a fractional COO?
A fractional COO is a senior operator embedded part-time inside a company to install operating discipline, fix process bloat, and document playbooks, without the cost of a full-time hire. The role is typically retained on a multi-month basis at a fraction of full-time COO compensation.
How is a fractional COO different from a management consultant?
Consultants deliver decks. A fractional COO does the work. The difference is operational accountability, sitting in your standups, owning hand-offs, getting paged when production breaks, and leaving documented systems behind. We are operators, not advisors.
How much does a fractional COO cost?
Engagements at Obsidian Axis Group run $3,000–$7,500 per month, depending on scope and embed depth. A typical engagement replaces $15,000–$25,000/month in operational overhead, software spend plus the hidden labor cost of managing tools nobody fully understands.
How long does a typical engagement run?
Three to nine months. The Axis Method is structured around a clean exit, diagnose, stabilize, document, hand-off, compound. We are explicitly not trying to embed indefinitely. If we are still essential at month twelve, we did our job wrong.
When should a company hire a fractional COO instead of a full-time COO?
When the operational gap is real but doesn't justify $250K/year + equity. Common situations: post-acquisition (the seller-COO leaves, the new owner needs operating discipline installed), a $10M–$50M company where the founder is the bottleneck, or a portfolio company where the sponsor wants documented ops before the next round.
What does a fractional COO actually do day-to-day?
In month one: operational due diligence, waste audit, decision-routing map. Months two through four: stabilizing the highest-leverage broken process. Months four through six: writing the SOPs, KPIs, and playbooks the company will run on after we leave. Final months: training the in-house team to run it without us.
Is a fractional COO a fit for a private-equity portfolio company?
Yes, particularly post-acquisition. The Axis Method was built for sponsor-led ops installs. We coordinate with the deal team on reporting cadence, integrate with whatever PortCo monitoring already exists, and produce the documented operating system the next investor will want to see in due diligence.
Do you work remotely or on-site?
Both. The diagnose phase usually requires 1–2 on-site weeks for shadowing, after which the engagement is mostly remote with monthly on-site days. We are headquartered in Charlotte, NC and serve the Southeast (Greenville/Spartanburg, Atlanta) plus remote across the United States.
What industries does Obsidian Axis Group work with?
We come out of enterprise distribution, fulfillment, and manufacturing, Cedric's decade is in those verticals. We work best with operations-heavy businesses: manufacturing, distribution, logistics, e-commerce fulfillment, services with field teams. We are not a fit for pre-revenue SaaS or pure professional services.
What happens after the hand-off?
The documented operating system stays. The team runs it. We are available for quarterly check-ins or a re-engagement if you acquire and need to install discipline at a new portfolio company, but the deliberate design is that you don't need us anymore.
Thirty minutes. No pitch deck.
We'll review your operational situation, name the biggest bloat, and tell you honestly which scope fits where you are. If neither does, we'll tell you that too.