Fractional COO for Construction: Questions Owners Actually Ask

Trampetti is an operations consulting and fractional COO firm based in Orlando. We work with owner-led companies where too many decisions, approvals and problems still route through the owner, and we rebuild the operating structure so they don't. A typical engagement touches six areas: operations and process (SOPs, org structure, field-to-office handoffs), finance (job costing, cash flow visibility, budget-to-actual), training, systems integration, AI and automation, and fractional COO leadership. We don't sell software and we don't hand over a strategy deck — we make the changes inside the business and stay until they hold.

A fractional COO is an experienced operations executive who runs your operations part-time instead of being hired full-time. They own the operating rhythm — meeting cadence, scorecards, accountability, cross-department handoffs — typically for a fraction of a full-time COO's compensation. It fits companies that have outgrown the owner's ability to run daily operations but can't yet justify a six-figure executive hire. Trampetti's fractional COO service embeds an operations leader who runs the back office while the owner runs the business.

Day to day, a fractional COO runs the operating rhythm the owner has been holding by hand. That means chairing the weekly management meeting, owning the scorecard and chasing the numbers that aren't moving, making the operational calls that were escalating to the owner, and holding department heads to what they committed to. Over a longer horizon they also build the things that were never built: documented processes, a job costing and reporting setup that shows profitability before a job closes, clear decision rights, and a management layer that can absorb the work. At Trampetti this is delivered as a fractional integrator on a flat monthly fee — remote, one to two hours a week from the owner, no long-term contract.

A business is owner-dependent when its daily functioning requires the owner's decisions, relationships or knowledge. Practical symptoms: approvals stall when the owner travels, pricing lives in the owner's head, key customers will only speak to the owner, and no one else can tell whether a job is profitable. It matters for two reasons. It caps growth — the company can only grow to the limit of one person's attention. And it destroys enterprise value, because a buyer is purchasing a business, not a job. Take the Owner Load Test to see where it's concentrated in yours.

No. Coaching develops the owner; Trampetti changes the company. A coach works on how you lead, think and prioritise, usually in recurring conversations. We work on decision rights, documented processes, job costing, reporting, org structure and the systems those run on — and we do the building, not just the recommending. Owners often keep a coach or peer group like Vistage while working with us; the two solve different problems.

We implement. Our people work inside the business — sitting in your meetings, rebuilding your job costing, writing SOPs with the crews who'll use them, configuring the systems. Most consulting engagements end at the recommendation, which is why most operational plans die: the gap isn't knowing, it's execution. We measure success on whether the structure still runs when neither the owner nor Trampetti is in the room. That's what we mean by operational surgery, not slide decks.

We work with owner-led companies doing roughly $5M–$50M in revenue, usually 20–150 employees, where the owner is still the bottleneck. The common profile: someone who started in the trade or the craft, built a real company, and is now spending their week on approvals and problems instead of growth. Revenue is rising, chaos is rising faster, and the owner works 60–80 hours. Industry matters less than structure — the pattern is nearly identical across construction, property management, manufacturing and field services.

Yes. Construction is where we have the deepest track record, and it isn't the only place we work. Delivered engagements span agricultural construction and workforce housing, insulation and roofing, playground and site installation, property management, HVAC and commercial trades, telecom and IoT, manufacturing and import operations, healthcare, engineering, and municipal and government contracts. See Results for named examples in each. The reason the work transfers is that owner-dependence is a structural condition, not an industry one — the diagnosis changes very little between a roofing company and a property management firm.

Ranked by depth of delivered work: construction and specialty trades (general contracting, roofing, insulation, installation, HVAC); agricultural construction and workforce housing; property management; telecom and IoT infrastructure; manufacturing and import operations; engineering; healthcare operations. Our People360 staffing arm supports a wider set — legal, real estate, nonprofit, education, energy, logistics and more — because staffing transfers across industries more easily than operational redesign does.

Below roughly $5M there usually isn't enough organizational complexity to justify the work — the owner should still be close to everything, and the money is better spent on sales. Above roughly $50M you generally need permanent internal operations leadership rather than a fractional model, though we do project work at that scale. The sweet spot is $10M–$50M, where the company has outgrown informal management but has no operations infrastructure yet.

Four situations where we'd tell you not to hire us. If the owner isn't genuinely willing to give up control — we can build the structure but we can't make someone use it. If the business has a sales problem rather than an operations problem, fix demand first. If cash is tight enough that a consulting fee is the difference, stabilise cash first. And if the intent is to validate a decision already made rather than to hear a diagnosis, we're the wrong firm. We'd rather say this on the first call than three months in.

Yes. We're headquartered in Orlando, with an office in Chicago and a remote team in San Diego, and we work with clients nationally. The engagement itself runs remotely: the six-week assessment is built on structured interviews and a data deep dive, both of which work without anyone on-site. The ongoing operating rhythm — scorecards, weekly meetings, reporting reviews — is remote by design, which is also how it should run once we're gone: it shouldn't need someone senior standing in the building to hold. It also means you're not paying for travel or per-diems.

It runs in three movements. Diagnose — six weeks. Around ten structured interviews across the company plus a deep dive into your operating and financial data, mapping where decisions, approvals and knowledge concentrate on the owner. It ends with a gap analysis covering every improvement opportunity we've identified in the business, and a 90-day plan. Rebuild. We fix what the assessment found — writing SOPs, restructuring roles and decision rights, standing up job costing and budget-to-actual reporting, installing a management cadence, integrating the systems that hold your data. Hold. We stay while the new structure takes load, then reduce involvement deliberately so the company doesn't trade dependence on the owner for dependence on us. Most engagements run 6 to 12 months; most clients keep us on for 12 to 18.

The first six weeks are the assessment. We conduct around ten structured interviews across the company — leadership, managers, the people actually doing the work — and run a deep dive into your operating and financial data: job costing, budget-to-actual, reporting, systems, process. We're looking for every decision that can only be made by the owner, and everything the business is losing because of it. It ends with two documents: a gap analysis covering every improvement opportunity we've found, and a 90-day plan that sequences them. We also usually move two or three obvious things immediately — an approval that shouldn't need the owner, a report nobody was getting — because early relief buys the credibility the harder changes need.

Concrete artifacts, not a bound report. From the six-week assessment you get two documents: a gap analysis covering every improvement opportunity in the business, and a 90-day plan that sequences them. Both are yours whether or not you continue. From the implementation work that follows, the artifacts are the structure itself — documented SOPs for the processes that were living in people's heads, an org and accountability structure defining who owns which decision, a job costing and reporting setup that shows profitability before a job closes, a KPI scorecard with named owners, a management meeting cadence, and system integrations connecting the platforms you already run.

One to two hours a week. That's the whole ask. The assessment is built on roughly ten interviews with your team, not ten interviews with you, and the data work happens without you in the room — which is deliberate, because a diagnosis that depends entirely on the owner's account of the business tells you what the owner already believes. If you find yourself spending more time on the engagement in month six than in month one, something has gone wrong.

Against one test: does the business run when the owner isn't in it? We instrument that with measurable proxies — how many decisions escalate to the owner, whether jobs close at forecast margin, whether the management cadence runs without the owner in the room, whether reporting arrives without being chased, and hard operating metrics specific to the business. Two examples from delivered work: first-time-through success moved from 41% to 86% on a telecom quality program, and project managers improved project profitability by 14%+ after PM training. We agree the metrics before we start.

You keep the structure — the SOPs, the reporting, the scorecard, the meeting cadence, the org design. The wind-down is deliberate: we reduce involvement in stages while the internal team takes ownership, so the handover is tested rather than assumed. Some clients keep a lighter ongoing fractional COO arrangement; others take it fully in-house. If a client can't function without us, we've failed at the actual job.

Trampetti prices four ways depending on what you need. The six-week assessment is billed as a fixed project fee. Implementation work that follows is a project-based fee plus an ongoing maintenance fee. A fractional integrator — an operations leader who runs your operating rhythm week to week — is a flat monthly fee. Automation specialists are billed at an hourly rate. There is no long-term contract on any of them: if we aren't performing, you can cancel at any time.

Five things, in order of impact: company size and revenue complexity; the number of locations, divisions or entities; how bad the data is at the start — companies with no reliable job costing take longer because the reporting has to be built before it can be trusted; how much implementation we do versus your team; and whether there's existing management capacity to hand structure to, or whether that layer has to be built. A single-location $8M contractor with clean books is a materially different engagement from a three-entity $60M operation running on spreadsheets.

Yes. The diagnosis is a six-week assessment billed as a fixed project fee — it isn't a free discovery exercise, because it isn't a sales call. It's ten structured interviews and a full deep dive into your operating and financial data, and it ends with a gap analysis and a 90-day plan that are yours to keep whether or not you continue with us. Before that, the first conversation is a free 15-minute call and the Owner Load Test is free.

When the problem is demand, not operations — better systems won't fix an empty pipeline. When the owner isn't ready to hand over control, because the structure will get built and then bypassed. When cash is tight enough that the fee itself creates strain. And when the company is small enough that the owner genuinely should still be in everything. In those cases the honest answer is to wait, and we'll say so.

Hire full-time when operations are complex enough to need daily executive attention, you can carry the compensation, and you can define the role well enough to recruit against it. Use a fractional COO when you need senior operational capability now, the role isn't yet a full-time job, or you don't yet know what the role should be — which is the most common case. Many owners hire a full-time COO too early, hand them an undefined role in an unstructured company, and lose them inside a year. Fractional work often defines the role properly first, which makes the eventual permanent hire succeed.

They solve adjacent but distinct problems. An EOS Implementer teaches and installs the EOS framework — facilitating sessions, introducing the V/TO, Rocks, Scorecard and Level 10 meetings, and building the leadership team's habit of using them. A fractional integrator runs the business using that toolset week to week, inside a company already committed to EOS. A fractional COO owns operations without requiring any specific framework. Trampetti places fractional integrators directly, on a monthly fee — we run L10-style meeting cadences and scorecards where they fit. What separates us from a pure implementer is scope: we'll also rebuild job costing, restructure the org, document the processes and integrate the systems underneath, which is outside what framework installation covers. If your leadership team needs to be taught EOS, hire an Implementer. If you need someone to run the operating rhythm and fix what's underneath it, that's us.

Sometimes, and when it's viable it's the better answer. It works when you have someone with the judgment and the respect of the team who is genuinely capable of holding operational accountability. It fails in two predictable ways: promoting your best producer out of the work they're excellent at, and promoting someone into a role with no defined structure, which sets them up to fail. A common sequence is to build the structure first, then promote into it — the internal person inherits a working system instead of inventing one.

Scope and finish line. A traditional consulting engagement produces analysis and recommendations, and ends at the deck; implementation is your problem. We do the diagnosis too, then stay and build. The practical difference shows up in who does the work — our people write the SOPs with your crews, rebuild the job costing in your accounting system, and sit in your weekly meetings. We're also small and industry-specific rather than generalist, which means less benchmarking and more time in your building.

Software is downstream of structure. Procore, Odoo, QuickBooks, a CRM, a dashboard — none of them fix undefined decision rights, undocumented processes or missing accountability. They usually expose them. Most companies we work with own good tools that are half-configured, siloed, or running parallel to the spreadsheets people actually trust. We fix what's underneath the tools first, then make the tools carry it — including connecting the systems you already pay for so your data stops living in silos.

Mike Trampetti is the founder of Trampetti, with 25 years of experience in business consulting and construction. He has scaled companies and helped owners sell them — which is where the focus on owner-dependence comes from. A business that can't run without its owner is worth materially less at sale, because a buyer is purchasing a business, not a job. His certifications: Six Sigma Black Belt, Design for Six Sigma, licensed real estate broker, Odoo certified, and Claude (Anthropic) partner. He is also a Vistage member. The perspective is a working operator who has run the programs and been on the job sites, not an analyst — and he takes every initial 15-minute call personally. More on About.

Named, documented examples from Results:

• Bliss Products (installation): a 7-point gross margin improvement scaled in parallel with rapid growth
• Sprint (telecom): first-time-through success from 41% to 86%; 10,000 contractors trained
• Wi-Max (construction): 2,400 site builds in 12 months on time and on budget, ~$5K savings per site, 32,000 desktop analyses and field visits in three weeks
• Optimus (property management): five workflows taken from unwatched to automatically checked, with zero added headcount
• Green Attic (insulation/roofing): launched a new roofing division, 4.8-star rating across 145 five-star reviews
• Engineering client: recovered $600K in out-of-scope work
• PM training: project managers improved project profitability by 14%+
• Healthcare client: productivity up 32%, revenue up 73% in one year

Yes. We'll connect you with owners who've been through an engagement, matched as closely as we can to your industry and situation — a construction owner talks to a construction owner. We do this at the point where you're seriously evaluating, not on the first call, out of respect for our clients' time. Written case studies are on Results.

Not a guaranteed outcome, and be sceptical of any operations firm that promises one — results depend on decisions we don't control, including whether the owner and leadership actually use the structure we build. What we do instead is remove the lock-in: if we aren't performing, you can cancel at any time. There's no minimum term to sign into and no long-term contract to get out of. Alongside that: metrics agreed before we start, and a gap analysis and 90-day plan you keep regardless of what happens next. If we don't think we can help, we say so on the first call.

Everything we see — financials, job costing, pricing, customer data, employee information — is treated as confidential and covered by a mutual NDA. Access is limited to the people on your engagement. When we work inside your systems we use named accounts under your control rather than shared logins, so access can be revoked cleanly at any point. Our own infrastructure runs behind Cloudflare. We also do this work for clients: for one insulation and roofing client we stood up a password vault, two-factor authentication and cybersecurity training in under a month.

People360 is a Trampetti product: trained remote team members placed in business operations and support, finance and accounting, marketing and creative, and technical assistant roles. It exists because operational redesign keeps surfacing the same gap — the structure is right but there's no one to run it, and the role doesn't justify a local full-time hire. People360 supports 22 industries, a wider set than the consulting practice, because staffing transfers across industries more readily than operational redesign does.

CXEO Academy is a Trampetti product for the layer between owner and crew — the project managers, supervisors and emerging managers who have to hold accountability once the structure exists. It addresses the most common reason operational change fails: new structure handed to managers who were never taught to run it. It's training and capability building, distinct from executive coaching, which works one-to-one on the individual.

No. Most clients start with one problem. Consulting, People360 staffing and CXEO Academy training are bought separately and often used in sequence — a diagnosis identifies a structural gap, the gap needs a person, and the person needs to be trained to hold it. If you only need one, buy one.