You Can't Scale Complexity | Derek Fredrickson

Derek Fredrickson (0:00)

I only do three things in my business as a CEO. I focus and work on my vision, I do sales, and I do team development. I'm very much focused on what we do for our clients, which is let the CEO be in the lane of the CEO. That's their zone of genius. If you try to put them into that operator box, it's going to feel like oil and water.

Mickey Anderson (0:19)

Welcome back to another episode of UNLEASHED. Today, we are digging into this growing fractional model, and all of the things that you want to know about hiring a fractional executive, what it looks like for your business, and how to grow a sustainable business in this wild day and age. Today, I am so excited to have Derek Fredrickson with me. Today, from The COO Solution, welcome Derek.

Derek Fredrickson (0:42)

Thank you, Mickey. I'm looking forward to our conversation. Thank you for having me on the show.

Mickey Anderson (0:45)

The world of fractional has been growing pretty steadily over the past decade, I'd say. But now, we're noticing a lot more of this prevalence within companies of many different sizes from small, medium, all the way up to larger size businesses. And you are building a fractional business yourself. So I'd love to hear more about the COO Solution, what you're building, anything that you can share about the business.

Derek Fredrickson (1:08)

Yeah, thank you. I've been doing fractional meaning part-time, right? Just another way to say part-time. Fractional COO, so Chief Operating Officer, basically that number two in your company. You've got your CEO and right next to them, you've got your COO. The CEO is all about coming up with a big idea, the vision, this is where we're going, and the COO was the one that makes it happen. They make it real, they're the execution for the vision. So I've been doing fractional COO work for more than 16 years and helping companies, usually around seven to eight figures grow in scale and typically just getting the founder out of the day-to-day bottleneck so they can focus on the bigger future that they want to be focused on. You're right, I think the world of fractional has been gaining a lot of visibility in the last 10 years or so. I think there were people before then that were doing fractional work, that was just more part-time or more project-based. Where now, I think, I don't know if it's just the environment in the workplace or maybe it's more of a post-COVID thing where people are looking at their professional journeys in different shapes and forms. There's a lot of advantages and some disadvantages to considering the fractional route. I would say it gives you the variety, the flexibility, the independence to choose who you work with, the types of clients that you engage with, the type of work that you do. You can be very selective. I think in a more permanent full-time employee COO position, you don't necessarily have that. You have some other benefits. You may have that security, you may have that groundedness, which some people really crave. But I think I'm noticing a trend of more and more people that are, I say, taking the leap into fractional or they're tipping their toe into fractional to see if that's something that they want to explore going forward. I think it's a very attractive and viable model with the caveat. I always throw this in here because sometimes people are thinking, I should just be a fractional COO, CMO, CFO, whatever that might be.

You are first and foremost a business owner. Never forget that no matter how good you are at whatever it is that you do as a fractional executive, if you don't market and you don't get clients, nobody knows you exist. I always say focus on your marketing and sales in the beginning, more so than your craft. If you're a good fractional CFO, you can get better at being a fractional CFO, but you also need to get really good at building your pipeline, building your network, building your referrals, getting really comfortable and having sales conversations. Because again, if you don't have clients to do amazing work with, then nobody knows you exist if you don't have that steady influx. I've been building the COO Solution for the last two years.

I tell the story that I took off my COO hat two years ago, put on a CEO hat and have been very much in the CEO lane of building and growing and scaling my company. I have a team now of about 15 fractional COOs that work with me, and a bench, meaning kind of like a backup, if you will, of another 50 or 60 that I've spoken to. So it's exciting. It's very motivating. I enjoy the work that I'm doing and yeah, it's been a great ride so far.