In a founder-led consumer brand, operations often grows by accident. Someone starts managing suppliers, someone else tracks stock in a spreadsheet, and a few good people hold the whole thing together. That works for a while. A fractional head of operations is a senior operator who works with you for an agreed number of days each month, owning the function without the cost of a full-time hire.
Signs it may be time
- Growth is outpacing your systems. Orders, products or channels have multiplied, and the spreadsheets and manual workarounds are creaking.
- Stock and cash are in tension. You hold too much of some lines and run out of others, and nobody can say with confidence why.
- Suppliers and partners are managed informally. Co-manufacturers, packaging suppliers and your 3PL are not held to clear service levels, costs or forecasts.
- A big change is coming. You are preparing for a new ERP or warehouse system, or a move to a new 3PL, and nobody on the team has done it before.
- The founders are still the operations team. The people who should be working on the brand are chasing deliveries.
- No one owns the numbers. There are no regular, trusted measures of service, cost to serve or stock health.
What a fractional head of operations does
The work depends on what needs fixing, but it commonly includes demand planning and sales and operations planning that the whole team uses, inventory and cash control, supplier and co-manufacturer management, regular reporting on a small set of operational measures, and building or hiring the team that will run it.
How it differs from a full-time hire
- Cost and commitment: you pay for the days you need, and the arrangement can be reduced or wound down.
- Experience: you get someone who has run the function in larger organisations, which a business of your size may not yet be able to attract full time.
- Handover: the aim is to leave documented processes and a team that can run the function without outside help.
When it is not the right answer
If the business already needs a senior operations leader every day, a full-time hire may be the better fit. A short diagnostic review is a sensible way to find out, and it is how engagements with Supply and Scale begin.