A business operations consultant for the process and systems you've outgrown.
Most growing businesses hit the same wall: the way work gets done still lives in one person's head, and nobody has written it down. A business operations consultant's job is to find that work, turn it into a process and a system the team can run, and leave once it holds without you. There is no separate operations-consulting package. It runs through the offers already on this site, each with its price on its own page.
What a business operations consultant does
A business operations consultant maps how a business actually runs, builds the process and systems that let it run without the owner in the room, and hands over the documentation so the team can keep running it. The test is whether it still works a month after the consultant has gone.
That last part is the one that gets skipped. A small business has no operations department to hand the result to. If the process only lives in the consultant's notes, or only the consultant knows how the system works, you have hired a dependency, and the first time something changes you are back on the phone with them.
So the order I work in is plain. Write down how the business makes its calls first. Then build the process and systems to follow what is written. Then hand it over: the documentation, the logins, the notes. The writing-down step is the one people want to skip, and it is the one that decides whether the rest holds up. There is more on why in the approach.
Business process consultant vs. business systems consultant
The two titles get used interchangeably, but they describe different halves of the same job.
Business process consultant
Maps and improves how work moves: the steps, the handoffs, the decisions. The deliverable is clarity on how the business makes its calls, written down so it can be examined and handed to someone else.
Business systems consultant
Builds or chooses the tools and structure those steps run on: the software, the accounts, the automation that carries the process once it is written down.
In practice the two are rarely separable. A process without a system to run it drifts back to however someone remembers doing it last time. A system built before the process is mapped just automates the wrong thing, faster. My work covers both, in that order: map first, build second.
Business process automation consulting
Once a process is mapped, some of its steps are worth handing to software. Business process automation consulting is the part of this work that finds those steps and builds the automation on tools and accounts the business owns — not a separate engagement, the next step of the same one.
It only works once the process itself is written down. Automating a process nobody has documented just makes the undocumented version run faster, including its mistakes. The rule of thumb I use: if a task follows steps you could write on one page and a wrong answer is cheap to catch, it is a good candidate. If it turns on judgment, trust, or a relationship, keep a person on it.
There is a fuller breakdown of what I automate and what I leave alone on AI operations — the dedicated page for the automation side of this work.
Who this is for
The work is the same for a small business operations consultant as for a larger engagement; the dose is smaller. Fewer processes to map, fewer systems to touch, and usually the owner directly rather than a layer of managers in between.
The clean fit is a founder-led or expert-led business between roughly $500K and $10M in revenue — big enough that the founder can no longer hold every process in their head, small enough that a full operations department is premature. If every decision still routes through you and the knowledge that runs the business lives in a few people's heads, that is the gap this work fills.
How this differs from the Seat and from AI operations
Three pages on this site answer three related but different questions, and it is worth being plain about which is which.
Operations consulting (this page)
Maps a process or system and builds it. A scoped piece of work with a defined end: the Map, the Site, or a Session on one problem.
The Seat
A fractional COO takes an ongoing seat on the leadership team to run what gets built, a few days a month, indefinitely. Many engagements start as consulting and grow into the Seat once there is a system worth running day to day.
AI operations
The automation side of this same work, in full: what to hand to software, what to leave with a person, and how a one-person practice compares to the big AI consulting firms.
Where to start, and what it costs
Every price below is already on its own page. Each step credits toward the next, so starting small does not cost you twice.
The Scan — free
Two minutes, no meeting. A scored report on what search and AI engines can read about your business from your website. Run the Scan →
The Read — $450
A recorded walkthrough of your site and a ranked memo of fixes, in two business days. About the Read →
The Session — $250
One call on one operational problem, including where to start on process or systems. About the Session →
The Map — $1,999
Three working meetings that extract how your business actually runs and put it on paper, with a fixed-price build proposal at the end. About the Map →
The Autopilot — from $899/mo
The monthly rhythm that keeps the process and systems true as the business changes. About the Autopilot →
The Seat — from $6,000/mo
Ongoing custom work across the whole operation, a few days a month, six-month minimum. About the Seat →
Not sure which? All eight offers are side by side here.
Questions
- What does a business operations consultant do? Maps how a business actually runs, builds the process and systems that let it run without the owner in the room, and hands over the documentation so the team can keep running it.
- What's the difference between a business process consultant and a business systems consultant? A process consultant maps and improves how work moves; a systems consultant builds or chooses the tools that work runs on. In practice the two are rarely separable.
- What is business process automation consulting? Finding the repeated steps in a mapped process that software can now do, and building that automation on tools the business owns. It only works once the process is written down first.
- Is a small business operations consultant different from one for a larger company? The work is the same; the dose is smaller. The clean fit here is a founder-led business roughly $500K to $10M in revenue.
- How is this different from hiring a fractional COO? This work maps and builds the process and systems. The Seat also takes an ongoing seat on the leadership team to run them. Many engagements start here and grow into the Seat.
Start with what you can see.
The free Scan shows what machines can read about your business today. If it turns up a problem worth fixing, we talk about which step comes next.