Caterina Ruberto Business operations and strategy consultant, and fractional general manager. Sydney.
I build the business around the founder.
I work with coaching, education and health businesses. Better systems, fewer of the jobs you don't enjoy, and more time for the work you started the business to do.
Four things I hear on almost every first call.
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01 “I'm wearing every hat in this business.”Coach, marketer, salesperson, admin, tech support. Five jobs, and you were only ever trained for one of them.
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02 “Everything still comes back to me.”It comes back to you because the business grew faster than the structure did. That's normal. It's also fixable, in a particular order.
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03 “We've bought the software. It hasn't helped.”Most people already own everything they need. The tools just aren't talking to each other, so you're still the thing joining them up.
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04 “My offer isn't selling like it should.”Sometimes it's the offer. More often nobody sorted the audience, nothing follows up, or it's named after your method instead of their problem.
You've helped me grow my business by giving me more time to work on it.
Watch the full conversation, 44 minutes
Ten years running a coaching business, not advising from outside one.
I spent nearly ten years inside an online coaching business, finishing as General Manager and part-owner. I worked alongside the founders to build the systems, reporting and leadership structure that let it grow without them in the middle of it.
I came in as a client, which means the marketing worked on me and a sales call converted me before I ever worked there. Then I was the person on the other end of that phone. Then I coached, having been coached. Then operations, then the whole business.
That's the reason I don't look at one part of a business on its own. I've been through the whole sequence from both sides of it, and I know how a decision made in marketing turns up months later in retention.
Revenue scaled from under $1M to more than $2.6M AUD a year
Client base grew from around 100 to roughly 240 at its peak, with recurring monthly revenue near $220K
Operations across a team of 30+ staff and contractors
The last stretch of that job was less ordinary. I was product owner on an AI-assisted coaching platform, built with university researchers in machine learning, information systems, communications and neuroscience. It was funded through a government research and development program. The work was written up and presented at an international information systems conference, where I'm named among the contributors.
I mention it because it's the other half of what I do. I know this industry from the inside, and I can hold a technical build with specialists whose field isn't mine. Most problems in a founder-led business sit somewhere between those two things.
Since then I've worked independently with founder-led businesses across health, fitness and education, as a consultant and as a fractional general manager.
Find what to fix first.
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What you ask for is rarely what fixes it.
Change one part of a business and something else moves, whether you meant it to or not. Which is why the thing you can feel is often not the thing causing it. So I don't look at any part on its own. I look at three things together.
You
What you're brilliant at, what you'd happily never do again, and whether you're currently building or firefighting. Nothing changes in a business unless the person running it can carry the change, so I start there.
The business
Marketing, sales, onboarding, delivery, retention, team, money, tools. Not to mark it out of ten, but to see which parts exist, which don't, and which ones are quietly held together by you.
The gap between them
Usually where the real answer is. Where you think the problem is, against where the evidence says it is. What the business is taking from you, against what it needs to.
Someone tells me they need a new website. I always ask why first. Not because they're wrong, but because I want to know what they think it will fix. Sometimes it is the right answer. Often the offer isn't clear enough for any website to carry it, or nobody follows up with the people who do get in touch, or the whole thing quietly depends on the founder to close. A new website won't solve any of those.
Three stages. You can stop after any of them.
- 01Diagnostic. Two to four weeks. I go through you, the business, and the gap between them. You get it in writing, mapped out visually, and in the order it should be fixed.
- 02Build. I build what the diagnosis found, in the order the business actually needs, not the order that feels most urgent.
- 03Fractional general manager. Optional. For businesses that need someone holding operations, numbers and delivery week to week.
Who this suits.
Coaches, educators, clinicians and gym owners with a small to medium team, growing or launching something. People who are very good at the thing they do, and now have a business to run on top of doing it.
Beyond that, I work with founders who genuinely care about the people they serve. Who are curious. Who are comfortable not having every answer, because running a business asks you to be good at a lot of things at once. That's the part I care about most. I want to build businesses that make people's lives better.
The founder carries the mission.
The infrastructure keeps it from resting on them alone.
You get a real piece of work, not a sales call.
The scorecard tells you which part of the business is weakest. This tells you why, and what to do about it.
It runs two to four weeks, depending on how much there is to untangle. I need access to the back end. The systems, the data, the numbers. That's where you see what's working, what isn't, and what was never built. If there's more than one owner, I work with each of you separately. Partners rarely hold the same picture of the same business.
What you actually get
A written report on what I found. Your whole business mapped out so you can see it on one page. And a session where we sit down and go through it together. Not a summary emailed over and left with you to decode.
And what to do first
Most owners already sense something's off. What they don't know is which thing to deal with first. That's most of what you're paying for. Fix the wrong thing first and you spend a lot of money without much changing.
It's yours to keep
The report and the plan belong to you. Run it yourself, hand it to someone on your team, or give it to another consultant. All of those are fine with me. If you'd rather I built it, that's the next conversation.
What it costs
Most diagnostics fall between $3,000 and $5,000 AUD, depending on the size and complexity of the business. You'll have a fixed fee before we start.
Built properly, then handed over.
The build is scoped to what the diagnosis found, not to a package decided in advance. In practice most projects sit in one or more of three places.
Getting people in
What you sell and how it's described. What happens between someone finding you and someone paying you. Follow-up that happens whether or not anyone remembers to do it, and numbers that show you what worked.
Keeping them once they're in
How people get started with you, and what happens after. The points where they go quiet before they leave. And asking people to stay, instead of waiting to see if they do.
Running it day to day
What you look at each week. What your team can get on with without checking with you. Where decisions actually get made. Usually the last thing we build, and the one that holds up everything else.
Which of those comes first is the diagnosis, not a preference.
You're paying me to do the part I'm good at, so I do it. But everything gets documented and walked through, and if you want to take it in-house you can. I spent years on the other side of this as a business owner, watching contractors build things only they understood. Nobody should be held ransom by their own infrastructure.
Work runs on a shared board so you can see what's happening without asking. Mostly asynchronous, with a short check-in each week while a build is active, and walkthrough recordings as things go live.
Fractional general manager.
Some businesses don't need a project. They need the role. Someone holding operations, numbers and delivery week to week, without hiring a full-time general manager to do it.
How it works
Part-time and remote, scoped case by case, and shaped around what the business is actually missing. That might be running the numbers and reporting, holding the team accountable, owning delivery, or sitting in on the decisions that need an operator in the room.
Whether it's the right shape
A build suits a business that needs infrastructure. A fractional general manager suits one with people to manage and enough happening to warrant a standing role. The quickest test is whether the role and its responsibilities are clearly defined. If they are, you've done the diagnosis yourself. If you can't yet say what that person would own, that's not a problem. It just means the work comes earlier. A diagnostic and a build will get you further than a hire.
Tell me what's going on in the business.
Most people who get in touch were sent by someone I've worked with. If you suspect the business has outgrown the way it's currently held together, write down what's happening and what made you go looking. If it sounds like something I can help with, we'll talk properly. If it isn't, I'll say so and point you somewhere better.