Operations consultant for a business that keeps coming back to you.
The team has grown. You are still chasing delivery, settling priorities and answering questions that should sit with managers.
I’m Antony Draper. I work with UK founders and their teams to find where work gets stuck and change the ownership, decisions and information behind it.
When operations consultancy is useful
You have capable people, but customer problems, missed commitments and decisions still find their way to the founder.
Sales promises and delivery capacity do not line up. Handoffs between teams lose information. Nobody has a clear view of what needs attention until something goes wrong.
The work suits established businesses, typically with 20–50 people, whose founder and managers are ready to examine real examples and change how the work runs.
Follow one piece of work from promise to delivery
We begin with an actual job, customer issue or recurring decision. Who promised the outcome? Who owns delivery? What can they decide, and when must they escalate?
We locate the dependency across Sales, Customers, Operations, Finance and People. Then we check priorities, decision authority, handovers, information and leadership ownership.
The next change might be a clearer handover, a decision boundary, a useful operating measure or a management review. The evidence determines the scope.
What business process improvement looks like in practice
Illustrative example: a sales team agrees a delivery date before checking capacity. Operations discovers the clash and the founder has to renegotiate. We would examine who confirms capacity, who can promise a date and how exceptions are handled.
Agree an owner and an acceptance standard for each important handoff. Give managers the information and authority they need to act.
Use a regular review to check commitments, exceptions and outcomes. Record where work still returns to the founder, then adjust the agreement.
A focused review or support through implementation
The Founder Dependency Review is a 90-minute working session with a written dependency map and 30, 60 and 90-day priorities. It costs £1,250 + VAT and begins with a 30-minute fit call.
Where implementation needs support, we agree the outcomes, responsibilities, time and fee before starting. This can involve work with the founder, managers or both.
Measures might include handover errors, overdue commitments or routine approvals returning to the founder. We agree the baseline and what progress would look like; commercial results are not guaranteed.
Operations consultancy and fractional COO support
A defined process or ownership problem may suit a focused consultancy engagement. Ongoing responsibility across the leadership team may need fractional COO support.
Experience across HP, Capita and complex public-sector environments informs how I work. The task is to build arrangements your team can use in its own business.