Shane Gring
Shane Gring is a fractional COO in Pittsburgh who builds the operating layer founder-led businesses have outgrown.
He works as a fractional COO, an operator, and a consultant to founder-led and expert-led companies, and runs an independent operating practice from shanegring.com. He founded Certainly, a cooperative of fractional operators, and Method Lab.
He lives and works in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and takes clients across the United States.
Same job, at bigger and bigger scale.
I started my career in AmeriCorps at a Habitat for Humanity site in Colorado, where I built my first operating systems, the kind that turn good intentions into finished houses.
After that, fifteen years of doing the same job at bigger scale. Community and program operations at the U.S. Green Building Council. Workforce and platform operations at the International WELL Building Institute, building the systems behind a global health-and-buildings standard. Fractional ops, marketing ops, and revenue ops work since, inside the founder-led and expert-led businesses that need operating infrastructure they don't have yet.
The job is always some version of the same job. Map how the business actually works. Get the methodology, the standards, and the decisions free of the few people who carry them. Build the operating layer the team can run on. AI is the best tool we have for it, and we will use it. But it isn't the point.
The point is whether the thing the business was built to do actually keeps happening when it scales.
Selected engagements.
- International WELL Building Institute: technology and marketing partner across a ten-year engagement. Turned a 400-page standard into a self-service platform serving 300,000 users in 131 countries.
- SEAM Certification: fractional COO. Digitized the standard itself and stood up the site as the working business, not a description of one.
- DRVN Golf: operations lead. Turned a founder's method into the platform other coaches run on — certification, curriculum, partner network, one surface.
- TeamBuildr: fractional marketing and revenue ops consultant.
- U.S. Green Building Council: community development manager. Built a national community development program from the ground up — a lightweight path to sustainability for organizations priced out of LEED.
More detail on recent work, and the thinking behind all of it on my approach.
The rest of it.
I'm an architecture geek who travels to see buildings, a long-suffering Detroit sports fan, and a Miami University grad. I live in Pittsburgh with four daughters under six. A systems challenge in itself.
Want an operator's eyes on your business?
Start with the free Scan. Two minutes, a scored read of what search and AI engines can actually understand about your business from your website. Or get in touch and tell me what's stuck.
Run the free Scan →