Fractional & Interim Operations Leadership
Senior operations, risk and governance support for teams growing faster than their processes. Embedded alongside you, without the cost of a full-time hire.
Most teams outgrow their processes before they notice
After twenty years of building and leading teams in some fairly demanding environments, the pattern I see most often is a simple one: organisations rarely get the time to properly review how they work, or how their people are set up to do it. Delivery takes the day. The structural work waits for a quieter month that doesn’t arrive.
That isn’t a failure of leadership. It’s what happens when a committed team is doing something ambitious with not quite enough of anything. But it does catch up. The CEO ends up carrying three roles. Governance sits a step behind delivery. There’s a risk register, and nobody’s really using it. Safeguarding is genuinely in hand, but hard to evidence when a someone asks.
Hiring a permanent Operations Director takes months, and it isn’t always the right answer anyway. Often what you need is the capability now, at a size you can afford, for as long as the problem lasts.
That’s the work I do, and it’s the work I’ve always enjoyed most.
Watch how the work actually flows. Then improve it, together.
What I do is straightforward. I come into a team and spend real time watching how the work actually happens, rather than how the process map says it should. I talk to the people doing it, because they usually already know where it snags. Then we build a plan that makes both the people and the processes more effective, and I stay to lead it through to delivery.
Your team already holds most of the answer; what they generally don’t have is the time to step back, or a second set of eyes that’s seen how other organisations solved the same thing. That’s the bit I add. The plan we end up with is one you own and can defend to your board, because you helped build it.
I’ve spent many years running operations, governance and risk in settings where the consequence of getting it wrong isn’t a missed deadline but someone getting hurt a long way from help. That builds a particular discipline. Structure that’s quick to stand up, proportionate to the organisation, and designed to hold under pressure rather than to look good in a board pack.
It also means I’m comfortable in the conversations people tend to put off. Duty of care. Safeguarding. What actually happens at three in the morning on the other side of the world. Those conversations go a lot better when there’s trust in the room, which is most of the reason I listen before I recommend.
Alongside the consultancy I’m an on-call firefighter with Dorset & Wiltshire Fire & Rescue Service. It keeps incident command and crisis decision-making a live skill rather than a story about something I used to do.
What you can expect
Work done with you, not to you.
I’ll spend the first week(s) listening before recommending anything, and I’ll build the plan with the people who have to live with it. Nothing lands on your team as a surprise.
A straight answer, early.
On the first call I’ll tell you honestly whether I’m the right shape of help. Sometimes the answer is a permanent hire, or a specialist in something I don’t do. I’d rather say that in thirty minutes than three months in.
No dependency built in.
The aim is to leave you with structure your team can run confidently without me. Good work here should make me less necessary over time, not more.
Discretion as standard.
I spend my time inside organisations at their least polished. What I see stays there, and I’ll say the difficult thing to you before I say it to anyone else.
Ways to work together
Fractional Ops & Risk Director
One to three days a week, embedded with your team. I take on the operations, governance, risk and people work, report into you and your board, and build the structure the organisation hasn’t had time to build for itself, working with the people you already have rather than around them.
Interim Operations Director
Full-time cover through growth, transition, restructure or crisis. I step into the role, hold it steadily, and hand over systems that outlast the engagement.
Training & Facilitation
Practical, values-led sessions in leadership, risk management (ISO 31000), safeguarding, crisis planning and wellbeing — for delivery teams, leadership groups and boards.
Not sure which fits? Start with a governance and risk diagnostic, a short, fixed-scope review that gives you an honest picture of where you stand and what to do first.
Purpose-driven organisations where delivery carries real risk
- Charities and non-profits: governance, safeguarding and funder ready assurance
- Expedition and adventure travel operators: risk management, duty of care, remote operations, incident response
- Sporting organisations and governing bodies: participant welfare, safeguarding, programme delivery
- Media and production companies: filming in high-risk and remote locations
- Humanitarian and international programmes: operational structure in complex environments
It travels well across sectors, and the common thread is always the same. If your organisation is doing something worthwhile in a setting where things can genuinely go wrong, we’ll understand each other quickly.
When Louise joined Secret Compass, we were early into the Covid pandemic and scaling fast. Our governance hadn’t quite caught up. She rebuilt and developed our operational and risk frameworks, which held up under real-world pressure in remote, high-risk locations. That’s rare, and it’s exactly what she’ll bring to any organisation she works with.
Tom Bodkin, Co-Founder & Managing Director, Secret Compass
20+ years
leading operations, people and risk
10+ person
HQ team built at Secret Compass, tripling organisational capacity
B Corp
accreditation led end to end
47 departures
per season delivered on a single national programme
Three steps, and no long sales process
1. A conversation.
Thirty minutes. Tell me what’s going on, or what’s coming, and I’ll tell you honestly whether I can help.
2. A proposal.
A clear scope, cadence, duration and rate, written so your board can read it. No retainers that outlive their usefulness.
3. The work.
Fractional and interim engagements typically run three to twelve months. Training and facilitation is booked ad hoc. Either way you get a start date, a plan built with your team rather than for them, and someone who stays to see it through.
Final rates are scoped to the length and complexity of the engagement, and agreed before anything begins.