Fractional COO
There comes a point when the business you built begins requiring more of you than you should continue giving it.
Sometimes because something is wrong.
But often because something went right.
The customers came. Revenue grew. Opportunities expanded. People were hired. The business became more complex.
And somewhere along the way, you stopped spending most of your time doing the thing you were uniquely good at and started spending it holding everything else together.
You can do all of it.
That doesn't mean you should.
There are things inside your company that only you can do.
The business should be built to protect your capacity for them.
The Role
Sometimes a founder doesn't need another consultant standing outside the business telling her what to do.
She needs an experienced operator inside the room.
Katherine Macri works with a limited number of founders as a Fractional COO + Business Architect, helping operate the companies she has first architected through Human, by Design.
This is not advisory from the sidelines.
Katherine works inside the business—establishing priorities, identifying what needs to happen next, directing execution, solving problems, coordinating resources and making sure the architecture you've created together actually moves.
You remain where you create the greatest value.
Katherine helps build the company capable of supporting you there.
The Pattern
Growth doesn't automatically create infrastructure.
Sometimes revenue grows faster than the company underneath it.
More customers create more demands.
More people create more management.
More opportunities create more decisions.
More marketing creates more moving pieces.
And the founder compensates.
She works longer.
She catches more.
She hires someone for the immediate problem.
Then someone else for the next one.
Soon there may be five talented people working on five different parts of the company—and nobody holding the architecture of the whole.
Everyone is working. Nothing is moving together.
Eventually, the founder becomes the infrastructure.
That's the point at which growth can begin consuming the very person responsible for creating it.
And it is often the point at which Group Forty Three enters.
The company should support the human.
Not consume her.
Group Forty Three believes businesses should be designed around human capability.
That means identifying the work that genuinely requires you—and building the people, systems, technology and infrastructure around you to carry what doesn't.
It doesn't diminish the contribution of other people.
It makes room for it.
Everyone contributes where their capability creates the greatest value.
The result isn't simply a more efficient company.
It's a company that no longer requires its founder to be its contingency plan.
Scope
This is not administrative operations.
Katherine does not enter your company to manage payroll, bookkeeping, HR administration, employee scheduling or routine administrative functions.
She operates at the level of the business itself.
Katherine architects the company, then helps operate what she has architected.
Where It Begins
Before Katherine operates a company, she needs to understand it.
Completely.
That's why ongoing Fractional COO engagements are only considered after completing Human, by Design.
Human, by Design is a three-hour private strategic intensive followed by your comprehensive GFT Blueprint.
Together, you put the business on the table.
Katherine looks across the whole rather than diagnosing one isolated function.
Then she architects the path forward.
Your Blueprint establishes long-term direction and works backward into increasingly immediate priorities—ultimately identifying what should happen next.
Private Strategic Intensive
Human, by Design — $1,995
The Blueprint is complete in itself.
You can take it and execute independently.
There is no obligation to continue working with Group Forty Three afterward.
The Invitation
Human, by Design also gives Katherine an opportunity to determine whether she believes her continued involvement would materially benefit the business.
And whether the relationship is right.
Group Forty Three maintains only a small number of ongoing Fractional COO engagements at any given time.
Where there is mutual fit, sufficient resources to execute the architecture, and a founder genuinely prepared to make the changes required to move the business forward, Katherine may invite her to continue into an ongoing engagement.
Not every Human, by Design client receives that invitation.
And not every founder needs it.
Some founders leave with their Blueprint and have exactly what they need to execute.
Others realize something during the process:
I don't need another plan to carry.
I need someone capable of helping me carry the company.
That's where the relationship changes.
The Engagement
Katherine remains close to the company and assumes responsibility for helping move the architecture forward.
The exact relationship depends on the business.
It can include business architecture, positioning, commercialization, offer and product development, marketing direction, customer journey, operational priorities, AI integration, organizational structure, team requirements, execution oversight, identifying gaps and opportunities, and translating founder vision into executable priorities.
But this isn't a menu of services.
You don't hire Katherine to perform a predetermined list of COO functions.
You bring her inside the business.
She figures out what is preventing the business from becoming what it could be.
Then she helps build what needs to exist next.
One Architecture.
However It Gets Built.
Sometimes the company already has excellent people.
Katherine can work directly with the existing team—establishing priorities, providing direction, coordinating execution and keeping everyone working toward the same architecture.
But wherever appropriate, Katherine prefers to keep execution close to Group Forty Three.
If the business needs a website, positioning, copy, an offer ecosystem, a funnel, content, photography, AI implementation or another piece of infrastructure identified through the Blueprint, GFT can assemble and oversee the resources required to build it.
Some work is performed directly by Katherine.
Some is supported by AI.
Some requires trusted specialists.
The architecture stays centralized either way.
Additional implementation projects are scoped separately from the ongoing Fractional COO engagement.
Background
For more than 20 years, Katherine Macri has worked across entrepreneurship, business development, marketing, positioning, product development, commercialization, operations, leadership and company building.
Her value isn't knowing one function unusually well.
It's seeing how the functions connect.
Katherine has helped take businesses from ideas to companies, helped founders build infrastructure around rapid growth, repositioned businesses, created offers and brands, built marketing ecosystems and developed the people and systems required to support the human at the center of the company.
In one business, that meant helping transform a company generating hundreds of thousands of dollars annually into a multimillion-dollar business by doing something deceptively simple:
Building the company around what its founder did best.
Instead of requiring him to carry every function, Katherine created the people, systems and infrastructure around his highest-value contribution.
He could do what only he could do.
The company learned to carry the rest.
That principle still sits underneath Katherine's work today.
Human, by design.
This Work Requires Trust.
Bringing someone inside your business at this level is different from hiring a consultant.
Katherine needs room to operate.
The founder remains the founder. The vision remains hers.
But the purpose of bringing Katherine into the company is to give a capable operator responsibility for translating that vision into movement—not to create another person the founder has to manage.
This relationship works best with founders who are ready to make decisions, invest in what the business actually requires, allow capable people to own their work and stop making themselves responsible for everything simply because they are capable of doing it.
Money alone doesn't make an engagement a fit.
The willingness to build does.
Now build one that doesn't require all of you to keep running.
If you are interested in working with Katherine as a Fractional COO + Business Architect, the first step is Human, by Design.
There is no separate application into an ongoing Fractional COO engagement.
First, we architect the business.
Then, if continued work makes sense for both sides, Katherine may invite you to explore what it would look like for her to stay.