I work with $50M–$300M consumer brands, the PE firms that own them, and growth-stage SaaS teams that need to understand what is going wrong, why it keeps happening, and what to fix first.
I work as your fractional CTO and technology advisory partner, with embedded operating ownership. What it never means is writing code or running sprint boards. I help leadership find the operating problem, fix the missing ownership and governance around it, and build control without hiring a full-time executive too early.
If any of these sound familiar, here is the good news: none of it means your team is failing. It means the company grew faster than the operating layer beneath it — and that layer can be built. Usually faster than you think.
Enterprise SLA discipline — delivered fractionally.
This practice is intentionally narrow. If three or more items on the left describe your reality, a conversation is usually worth having.
By the time leaders call me, the issue is usually not that the team cannot explain the technology. It is that the business still does not have control. Releases keep creating new problems, incidents repeat, vendor spend drifts, audit readiness turns into a scramble — and leadership spends time on technology issues without getting a plain answer about what is actually happening.
Most scaling companies do not have only an engineering problem. They have a governance problem. The missing layer is the one between "we shipped the code" and "the business ran cleanly."
And that is genuinely good news — because a governance layer can be built in weeks, not years. When it is, the same team that felt stuck starts shipping with confidence, peak weeks become something you plan instead of survive, and leadership finally gets the straight answers it has been asking for.
Every engagement starts with the executive who feels the operational weight most directly. The wording changes a little. The pattern usually does not.
You built a meaningful consumer business through conviction and discipline. The technology stack that helped get you here is now harder to govern, and the language gap between leadership and engineering is becoming a business problem.
You have consumer portfolio companies where technology operations are taking too much executive time. You need a deployable operator who can diagnose quickly, stabilize what matters, and produce a story that holds up with your IC and a future buyer.
Your technical co-founder has become the senior on-call instead of the strategic technologist you built the company with. You need to restore that role and reduce operating drag without making the wrong senior hire.
This work is the operating layer that keeps technology from becoming a recurring business problem.
I help leadership see why the same problems keep coming back, put real ownership around them, and build the discipline to stop them from repeating.
I put release and change control around important launches, promotions, and high-revenue periods so preventable issues stop reaching production — and launches become something to look forward to.
I look at where spend has become duplicated, unclear, or unowned and bring control back to tools, renewals, contracts, and cloud decisions.
I move compliance out of scramble mode and into a steadier operating rhythm so the business is not surprised every time an audit window opens.
I turn technical operating issues into plain-language reporting so the CEO, COO, board, or PE operator can see what matters and what needs action.
I do not just help fix the immediate problem. I help put a governance system in place that can keep working as the company gets bigger and more complex.
Stabilizing operations is the first act — it earns the trust and the visibility. What follows is the work a CTO seat actually exists for: pointing the technology at where the business is going next.
A 12–24 month technology plan sequenced against your growth plan — what to invest in, what to buy, what to retire, and in what order — so technology spend follows business priority, not vendor pressure.
The expensive, hard-to-reverse calls: commerce platform, ERP, major vendor selections. I lead the decision at the executive level — honest cost and risk evaluation, vendor claims pressure-tested, a clean go/no-go process, and clear accountability for what happens after signature.
Which AI and automation investments genuinely reduce cost or risk in your operation, which are an expensive distraction, what to ask vendors before signing, and how to govern the rollout so it strengthens the operation instead of adding new risk.
Define what technology leadership and team structure the next stage actually requires, when to make the full-time hires, and the role definitions that protect you from a wrong senior hire.
Deliver the technology story your board, lender, or future acquirer needs to hear — with the metrics behind it. Especially critical for PE-backed companies heading toward a transaction.
Pre-acquisition or pre-exit: an honest operating read on the technology you are buying or selling, and a risk register that survives a diligence process.
These examples come from prior in-house leadership roles at Disney, Williams-Sonoma, and Rodan + Fields. I keep the company names off the individual cards because the point is not the logo — it is the kind of operational problem that was fixed and the business stability that came out of it.
Cut production incidents 80% and held a 99.999% platform SLA by building ITSM, 24/7 monitoring, and root-cause discipline from the ground up.
Reduced unplanned downtime and emergency hotfixes by putting real change control, release calendar discipline, and go/no-go decisions around the live business.
Moved off the in-house data center into a governed cloud footprint without disrupting the live business, while lowering run-rate cost and improving cost visibility.
Reduced waste across overlapping tools by consolidating into a governed stack and keeping vendor sprawl from returning.
Recovered a re-platform effort that had already failed multiple times and delivered a clean cutover that supported the next stage of business growth.
Improved delivery cadence at scale by replacing manual deployment with CI/CD automation and safer release patterns.
Additional work includes license-audit programs that removed unused spend, point-of-sale stabilization across a large retail footprint, and cross-border release automation for a global entertainment division.
The process is simple on purpose. First, I find where the risk and confusion are coming from. Second, I fix the missing governance around them. Third, I help the business keep control as it grows.
What it is: a focused 30-day operational review from the inside. I look at the systems, decisions, and ownership gaps that determine whether technology runs cleanly or keeps disrupting the business.
The right structure depends on the problem, the urgency, and how much operating change the business needs right now.
In practice, the right engagement structure becomes obvious once the problem is named clearly. The ranges above are typical starting points. I do not bill by the hour — engagements are scoped by outcome and operating cadence, not timesheets. Final pricing depends on scope, urgency, and the operational constraints around the situation — I confirm it candidly on the discovery call, because serious engagements deserve a real conversation about what is actually being delivered.
Three tools built from the same diagnostic I run inside engagements. Use them before we ever talk — the numbers are yours to keep.
20 questions. A plain-English read on where your operational risk actually lives — across incidents, releases, spend, compliance, visibility, and your next big moment.
Take the scorecard →Enter a few numbers from your own business. Get the annual cost of your incidents, your failed releases, and the cloud & vendor spend nobody has audited.
Run the numbers →Evaluating a fractional CTO — me or anyone else? The exact questions to ask, the red flags to watch for, and what should be true at day 30, 60, and 90.
Read the checklist →A complimentary 30-minute call, structured on purpose — to surface whether the engagement is worth pursuing before either of us spends time formalizing it.
We walk through your last three production incidents, your last vendor renewal cycle, the next compliance window, and the operating conversation you are dreading. The objective is honest context.
I tell you, in plain language, what I am hearing, where the actual risk appears to live, and the pattern I have seen this resolve into before.
If there is a credible path forward, we discuss what a phased engagement would look like. If I am not the right operator, I tell you that directly.
When a company is growing, the problem usually does not show up as one dramatic failure. It shows up as repeat incidents, unclear release risk, vendor spend that drifts, compliance that becomes a scramble, and leadership teams that know something is off but are not getting a straight answer.
That is the work I know. I have seen these patterns at scale — inside Disney, Williams-Sonoma, and Rodan + Fields — and I know how to diagnose them and put the missing operating control in place so the business can run more cleanly.
I am not the person who comes in to write code. I work as a fractional CTO and in technology advisory roles — where leadership needs control of the operating layer around incidents, releases, spend, compliance, and accountability.
A complimentary, confidential 30-minute call. You bring the situation; I bring a plain-language read on where the risk lives and what I would fix first — including if the honest answer is that you don't need me yet.
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