What does "operations consultant" actually mean?
It's the overall approach: senior, hands-on operations work for founder-led service businesses that have outgrown how they currently run.
There isn't one engagement that fits every situation. There are four specific ways to work together, each suited to a different kind of problem: a paid diagnostic, a flagship sprint, an ongoing retainer, and an embedded leadership seat. Pick the one that matches the problem you're actually trying to solve.
Pick the engagement that fits the problem.
Operational Friction Audit
A paid diagnostic that finds exactly what to fix first.
Learn more →Founder Capacity Recovery Sprint
A flagship engagement that diagnoses and fixes your costliest bottleneck.
Learn more →Automation & Optimization Retainer
Ongoing work keeping your automated systems running and improving.
Learn more →Fractional COO
An embedded leadership seat for ongoing operational decisions.
Learn more →Fifteen years inside Fortune 500 operations, now applied to founder-led businesses.
I spent fifteen years inside Fortune 500 financial services running operations, removing bottlenecks, and rebuilding the systems that handle complexity at scale. The lesson that carried over: the problem is almost never the people. It's the system they're stuck operating in.
I work process-first. Before recommending any tool, automation, or hire, I want to see how work actually moves through the business: where decisions wait, where handoffs break, where the founder is still the answer. The fix follows from there.
Ricardo Cruz Consulting exists to bring that rigor to founder-led service businesses that have grown past what one person can hold alone, but aren't ready (or shouldn't have to be) for a full-time COO.
FAQ
How is this different from the Fractional COO engagement?+
This page describes Ricardo's overall approach as an operations consultant. The Fractional COO is one of four specific ways to work together: an ongoing embedded leadership role, with retention tied to metrics reviewed on a set schedule. The Operational Friction Audit, Founder Capacity Recovery Sprint, and Automation & Optimization Retainer are the other three, each suited to a different kind of problem.
Do you work onsite or remote?+
Engagements are primarily remote, with onsite availability for specific milestones (kickoff sessions, team training, leadership reviews) when the engagement calls for it. This gets confirmed during scoping.
What size businesses do you work with?+
Founder-led service businesses, roughly 10 to 50 employees, where the founder is still the bottleneck for too many operational decisions and the business has outgrown how it currently runs.
Not sure which engagement fits?
Take the Growth Capacity Assessment first. It tells you where the real bottleneck is and which engagement matches.
Start the Assessment