There’s always a ceiling. Whether you’re a first-time entrepreneur or a repeat, every stage of growth brings a new one to break through.

Depending on the business stage and team size, you may reach a crossroads where breaking through the next ceiling takes more than you can do alone or with existing resources. You’ll explore your options: Consultant, Advisor, Operations Manager, AI Agents, General Manager, Chief of Staff, COO and Fractional COO.

Lots of great options, but a lot to decide. The question becomes: What’s the right path for you?

Empower provides three:

If you’re in that spot where you need resources to accelerate growth, but feel stuck selecting the right one, it’s time to simplify. In this post, I’ll focus on one to help clarify: the Fractional COO.

Let’s assume that you’ve decided that a full-time employee is not the path you’ll choose right now. There are two questions you can ask to narrow the ongoing evaluation:

The advisors are a sounding board. You bring them your thinking or challenges, and they offer their expertise to bring clarity and guide next steps.

The consultant studies the business and provides a roadmap. Deep thinking, clarified recommendations. The work of making it real stays with you, unless you expand the scope to have fully implemented solutions delivered.

The fractional operator builds. They get deeper into the business, not to study it from the outside and report back, but to step inside it and own how it runs. They build the missing pieces: the decision-making structure, the workflows, the cadence, the accountability. And they stay long enough to make sure it holds, training your team to run it without them.

None are bad choices. It’s a function of what you need in this moment and whether you have the time, capacity and skill to turn a working plan into an operational reality.

How connected are the problems you’re trying to solve?

Do the bottlenecks live in one function or spread wider?

If the answer is the latter, then a Fractional COO may be the right solution.

As a Fractional COO, I’ve:

None of this is isolated to one place. I’m orchestrating the big picture.

So, when does a Fractional COO make sense?

We all want a strong return on our investment.

Fractional COOs are a solution to mitigate momentum slowdown as the business grows more complex.

The founder's time savings enable more focus on growth strategy and things only you can do.

The cost savings from gaining operational leadership without the full-time price tag, as well as from the reduction of operational drag.

The real upshot? The time and money freed up don’t sit idle. It can be reinvested in growth: customers, revenue generation, capital, R&D and team.

A Fractional COO isn’t only about taming chaos, cleanup and getting entrepreneurs out of the weeds. That’s all real, but it’s table stakes. The real power is in having this resource as a meaningful growth lever. The systems I reinforce and build don't just reduce mess; they shape how fast you can grow and how it feels to be your customer along the way.

My background spans business operations, customer success, product and go-to-market, so I tend to connect how a business runs to how it makes money and keeps customers, not just whether the back of the house is neat.

This fits single-founder-led businesses in their “second stage.” There’s real revenue traction, the team has grown to 10+ (full-time, contractor or combination) and the business requires the founder to lead the company instead of holding it all together.

Ink & Honey is a strategic copywriting business, focused on supporting founders and executives in increasing their visibility, credibility, and opportunity on LinkedIn. They also offer blog writing, email marketing, and website copy services.

Q: When did you know you were destined to build a business?
A: “Quite honestly, I didn't! I was laid off unexpectedly at the end of 2024 and built my business out of necessity. I have always been the primary breadwinner in my household, and the job market dictated that I'd have more success betting on myself than waiting on someone else to hire me. It wasn't until I received financials from my first year that I thought, ‘hey, maybe I can do this!’“

Q: What’s the most unexpected thing (+/-) that’s happened along your entrepreneurial journey?
A: “Referrals. I've delivered at the highest level for my clients, so they've been more than willing to refer me. That's no surprise. But the most unexpected thing I've experienced is being referred by people I don't necessarily know well but who I have touched in the community or through my presence on LinkedIn.“

Q: When did you hit your first scaling challenge, and how did you overcome it?
A: “I said yes to everything in the beginning because we needed the income, and I was still trying to land on my offering. I have much smoother systems running now, but one of the best moves I made was investing in an EA who keeps me focused and completes tasks I'm simply not interested in completing myself. I look forward to hiring 1099s in the near future!“

Q: If you were starting all over, what’s one piece of advice you would give yourself?
A: “To have more faith in myself. I should have taken the leap into entrepreneurship a long time ago, but didn't think I had it in me. That layoff was the best thing to happen to me in a multitude of ways.“

Q: Do you have one ask or offer you would like to share with the Empower community?
A: “Connect with me on LinkedIn! I would love to see and support the work you're doing.”

Q: A fun one, what’s your all-time favorite restaurant and where is it located?
A: “Morton's Seafood Restaurant - Madisonville, LA“

Stay up-to-date with Jillian and Ink & Honey by following her on LinkedIn.