I build the business around the expert.
Business operations and strategy for expert-led health, fitness and education businesses. The ones built on one person's expertise, and held up by it.
Four things I hear on almost every first call.
- “I need systems to take some load off me.” Usually true, and usually a symptom. The load is what you can feel. The structure creating it is what you can't see from inside.
- “We've bought the software. It hasn't helped.” Most established businesses already own everything they need. What's missing is the architecture that makes it one system rather than several.
- “My course isn't selling the way it should.” Sometimes the offer. More often the audience was never sorted, the follow-up doesn't exist, or the thing is named after its method rather than the problem it solves.
- “Everything still comes back to me.” The founder sits in every process because the business grew faster than the structure did. Ordinary, and fixable, in a specific order.
Nothing in a business is separate from the rest of it.
Marketing shapes sales. Sales shapes onboarding. Onboarding shapes retention, and retention shapes what acquisition has to cost. So I don't look at any part on its own. I read three things together.
The founder
How you're operating right now. Proactive, or reacting because something's on fire. What you're exceptional at, what you'd rather never touch again, and how much change the business can absorb at this moment. The founder determines how change happens, so I read that first.
The business
Marketing, sales, CRM, customer journey, delivery, onboarding, retention, churn, team, cashflow, systems. Not to grade it, but to see how complete it actually is, and where the gaps sit relative to each other.
The alignment
Usually the most valuable of the three. What you believe the problem is, against what the evidence says it is. Where the business promises one thing and delivers another. Where you think the bottleneck is, versus where it actually sits.
The requested solution rarely solves the actual problem.
Someone says they need a CRM. My first question is always why. Not because the software is wrong, but because I want to know what problem they believe it solves. Sometimes it's the right answer. Often the real issue is positioning, or the offer, or that nobody follows up. Technology should never stand in for diagnosis.
Expert-led businesses that are past the beginning.
Businesses in growth or launch, with a small to medium team around them. Coaches, educators, clinicians, practitioners. People whose expertise became a business, and who now have a business to run as well as expertise to deliver.
Beyond the size of it, I work with founders who genuinely care about the people they serve, who are curious, and who are comfortable not having every answer, not from a lack of confidence, but because building a business asks for a lot of different disciplines at once. That's the part I care most about. The businesses I want to build are ones that make people's lives better.
The founder carries the mission. The infrastructure keeps it from resting on them alone.
Three stages, and you can stop after any of them.
- 01Diagnostic. Two to four weeks. I go through the founder, the business and the gap between them, and hand back a written diagnosis, a visual map and the order to fix things in.
- 02Build. Scoped to what the diagnosis found. I design and install the systems, in the sequence the business actually needs rather than the sequence that feels urgent.
- 03Fractional GM. Optional, and only for businesses that need someone holding operations, numbers and delivery week to week.
A piece of work in its own right, not a long sales call.
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 and the numbers, because that's where you see what's working, what isn't, and what was never built. Where there's more than one owner, I work with each of you, because partners rarely hold the same picture of the same business.
What you end up with
A substantial written diagnosis, your business mapped visually so you can see how the parts actually connect, and a working session where we go through all of it together. Not a summary emailed over, but a proper handover of what I found.
And an order to fix it in
Which problem is load-bearing, and which ones resolve on their own once it's dealt with. Sequence is most of the value. Knowing what's wrong is common; knowing what to do first is the part that saves money.
You own it
The diagnosis and the execution plan are yours. Take them and run it yourself, or hand them to someone else. Both are fine outcomes, and neither requires 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.
Growth systems
Offers and positioning, the path from first contact to sale, follow-up that runs whether or not anyone remembers to do it, and reporting that shows what actually worked.
Delivery and retention systems
Onboarding, the rhythm of contact through an engagement, the points where people quietly disengage, and how renewal gets asked for rather than hoped for.
The founder's operating system
What you look at each week, what the team owns without asking you, and where the decisions actually get made. Usually the last thing built and the one that holds the rest up.
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 GM 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 a GM 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 would.
Ten years running the business, not advising from outside it.
From 2016 to 2025 I was General Manager of an online coaching business, working 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.
- 01Revenue scaled from under $1M to more than $2.6M AUD a year
- 02Client base grew from around 100 to roughly 240 at its peak, with recurring monthly revenue near $220K
- 03Operations across a team of 30+ staff and contractors
- 04Both founders freed from day-to-day operations, one to strategy and growth, the other to coaching and content
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, funded through a government R&D 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 an expert-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.
- United Health Education
- DFM Independent Home Living
- Paddo Performance
- Boutagy Fitness Institute
- Neuroscience of Coaching
- She by Sharry
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.