Process
SOPs & operational reengineering
Documenting how the work actually gets done, cutting the steps that exist only out of habit, and rebuilding the handoffs where things break. Written so a new hire can follow them.
Fractional COO · Treasure Coast to Fort Lauderdale · Naples
Your business outgrew the way you run it.
I'm a fractional COO and operations consultant for small and mid-sized businesses across South Florida — from the Treasure Coast down to Fort Lauderdale, and over to Naples. Eighteen years of multi-unit operations, spent building the unglamorous things that make a business run without the owner in every decision: written processes, trained managers, systems that talk to each other, AI doing the repeatable work, and numbers you can see on a Monday morning.
18 years multi-unit operations
9 locations managed
50+ trainer bench built
SHRM-CP certified
Sec 01 — When this helps
You don't need another consultant's deck.
- Every decision still routes through you, and the week falls apart when you're out of town.
- Your training is a shadowing week and a folder of PDFs nobody opens twice.
- Revenue grew, margin didn't, and nobody can tell you exactly where it went.
- You bought the software — CRM, POS, scheduling, accounting — and it's half-configured and half-ignored.
- Two locations work beautifully and the third one doesn't, and the difference is a person, not a system.
- You're the reason it works. That's the problem you want to solve.
Sec 02 — Services
Fractional COO services
Operations leadership, part-time, inside your business — not advice from the outside. Mix and match; most engagements combine two or three of these.
People
HR & team development
Org structure, job scorecards, onboarding, training paths, performance conversations, and the compliance basics most growing companies skip. SHRM-CP certified.
Training
LMS & certification systems
Turning tribal knowledge into a real training system: module maps, quiz banks, certifications, and a content structure that separates what changes monthly from what doesn't.
CRM
CRM buildouts
Built from scratch or rescued from a half-finished rollout: pipeline stages that match how you actually sell, required fields, automations, dashboards and clean data migration. Hands-on with HubSpot, Monday and Salesforce.
Systems
Technology implementation
Selecting, configuring and actually rolling out POS, scheduling, inventory and back-office platforms — including the migration, the training, and the part where people adopt it.
Numbers
Budgets & performance metrics
Budget build, labor and cost-of-goods controls, a weekly operating scorecard, and reporting the management team reviews instead of files.
Leverage
AI-assisted process work
Using AI where it removes real hours — drafting documentation, standardizing reporting, handling repeatable research and content — with guardrails on what it is allowed to touch.
Planning
Strategic & project planning
Turning a growth goal into a sequenced plan with owners, dates and a weekly cadence — new locations, service lines, system changes, or a restructure.
Executive support
Executive business partner
For owners who need leverage before they need a COO: calendar and inbox control, meeting prep and follow-through, vendor and travel management, and the follow-up list that keeps decisions from dying.
Events
Events & trade show operations
Conference and event execution end to end: budget, logistics, collateral, staffing and follow-up. Built from running 10+ domestic and international shows a year.
Sec 03 — Who I work with
Industries
Deepest bench
Multi-unit restaurants & hospitality
Groups running two to twenty locations. Hands-on with Toast, Aloha, Micros, Restaurant365, Tripleseat and FusionPrep, and with the labor and prime-cost math underneath them.
Fast results
Trades & home services
Painting, flooring, maintenance and specialty contractors who grew past what the owner can personally schedule. Estimating, dispatch, crew standards, CRM and the digital front door.
Systems-first
Any small to mid-sized business
Professional services, retail, wellness, real estate, light manufacturing. Operations problems rhyme across industries: unclear roles, undocumented process, half-used software and reporting that lives in one person's head.
Sec 04 — About
Eighteen years of running the back of the house.
I spent most of my career in multi-unit operations — Director of Operations at a restaurant group, operations manager and corporate trainer across nine locations, and then full operational ownership outside engineering at a venture-backed technology company, reporting to the President and CTO.
What that adds up to is a specific kind of useful. I've written the SOP that a nineteen-year-old can follow on a Friday night. I've built a fifty-person certified trainer bench. I've migrated a company onto a new POS and a new CRM and handled the part everyone underestimates, which is getting people to actually use it. I've run ten-plus trade shows a year on two continents. I hold a SHRM-CP, so the people side comes with real credentials rather than improvisation.
These days a lot of my work involves AI — not as a novelty, but because documentation, reporting and repeatable research are exactly the hours it can give back to a small team. I build the guardrails along with the workflow.
I work out of South Florida and I'm on site from the Treasure Coast to Fort Lauderdale, and over in Naples.
- SHRM-CP
- Licensed in real estate (2021)
- HubSpot · Monday · Salesforce
- Toast · Aloha · Micros · R365
- Tripleseat · FusionPrep · Stella LMS
- QuickBooks
Sec 05 — Engagements
Engagements & pricing
Four ways to work together. Most clients start with the diagnostic.
Start here
Operations Diagnostic
$7,500Four weeks · fixed fee
- On-site observation and interviews with the team
- Process, staffing, systems and margin review
- Findings with the cost of each gap named
- A prioritized 90-day roadmap you own, whether or not we keep working together
Ongoing
Fractional COO Retainer
$6,000Per month · from
- 10–15 hours a week, mix of on-site and remote
- Weekly leadership cadence and operating scorecard
- Direct management of the roadmap and the managers running it
- Six-month term, 30-day exit clause
Scoped
Systems Build
$10,000Per project · from
- One defined build: CRM buildout, SOP library, LMS and certification, POS rollout, or reporting
- Fixed scope, fixed fee, fixed end date
- Team training and handoff included
- No retainer required
Lighter lift
Executive Support
$3,000Per month · from
- Part-time executive business partner, roughly 10 hours a week
- Calendar, inbox, meeting prep and follow-through
- Vendor, travel and project coordination
- For owners who need leverage before they need a COO
Final pricing depends on headcount, number of locations, and how much hands-on execution the work requires. Industry-specialized operations work in South Florida typically runs $5,000–$12,000 a month; I price at the middle of that range and tell you before we start if your scope sits above it.
Sec 06 — Process
How an engagement runs
-
Ops call — 30 minutes, no charge
You describe what's breaking. I tell you whether it's an operations problem, and whether I'm the right person for it. Sometimes the answer is a bookkeeper or a general manager, and I'll say so.
-
Diagnostic — four weeks
I'm in the business: watching shifts or job sites, talking to the people doing the work, opening the books and the systems. The output is a written roadmap with the gaps ranked by what they cost you.
-
Build — the first 90 days
We work the top of the roadmap. Processes get written, systems get configured, managers get trained, and a weekly operating rhythm goes in so progress is visible instead of asserted.
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Hand off
The goal is to make myself unnecessary. Every system comes with documentation and a named owner on your team. Plenty of clients keep a lighter retainer afterward; none of them have to.
Sec 07 — Recent work
Selected work
Multi-unit restaurant group
Training rebuilt as a real LMS
Replaced shadowing-and-PDFs with a structured training system for a growing restaurant group.
- Full module map and quiz bank
- Interactive certification path
- Content split into evergreen and volatile layers so updates stay cheap
Painting & maintenance contractor
Digital front door, fixed
A contractor whose work was strong and whose online presence was invisible or wrong.
- Competitive analysis and digital strategy report, re-run six months later to measure movement
- Google Business Profile claimed and corrected
- Social profiles, logos and headers rebuilt and linked properly
Nine-location restaurant group
Operations & a 50-person trainer bench
Operations manager and corporate trainer across nine locations.
- Built and maintained a 50+ certified trainer bench
- Standardized onboarding across every unit
- Opened and stabilized new locations
Venture-backed technology company
Owned everything outside engineering
Reported to the President and CTO with full operational ownership at a high-privacy startup.
- HR, finance ops, vendor and event operations
- 10+ domestic and international conferences a year
- Operating standards built around client confidentiality
Full work history and recommendations on LinkedIn.
Sec 08 — Questions
Frequently asked questions
What does a fractional COO do?
A fractional COO is an experienced operations executive who works part-time inside your business, usually 10 to 15 hours a week. The role covers the same ground as a full-time COO — process, staffing, systems, budgets and reporting — without adding a six-figure salary to payroll. The job is to build the operating systems the business is missing, then make sure your team can run them without you.
How much does a fractional COO cost in South Florida?
Across the market, monthly retainers for small and mid-sized businesses generally run $5,000 to $12,000 for 10 to 15 hours a week, with lighter advisory arrangements starting near $3,000 a month and scoped projects between $8,000 and $60,000. My retainers start at $6,000 a month on a six-month term, the four-week diagnostic starts at $7,500, and scoped builds start at $10,000. Headcount, number of locations and the amount of hands-on execution set the final number.
How is this different from hiring a management consultant?
A consultant studies the business and hands you recommendations. A fractional COO owns the outcome: writing the SOP, configuring the system, training the manager, and running the weekly meeting until the process holds on its own. You get a document either way. The difference is whether anyone operates it afterward.
What size business is a good fit?
Typically owner-run companies between roughly $2 million and $30 million in revenue with 10 to 200 employees, where the owner is still the bottleneck for daily decisions. Multi-location businesses and trades or home-services companies that grew faster than their back office tend to see results fastest.
Which areas of Florida do you serve?
On-site from the Treasure Coast down to Fort Lauderdale — Vero Beach, Fort Pierce, Port St. Lucie, Stuart, Jupiter, Palm Beach Gardens, West Palm Beach, Delray Beach, Boca Raton and Fort Lauderdale — plus Naples, Bonita Springs and Marco Island on the southwest coast. Engagements run as a mix of on-site days and remote work, and remote-only engagements are possible for businesses with distributed teams.
How long does an engagement last?
Most retainers run six months with a 30-day exit clause — long enough to build systems and see whether they survive a full operating cycle. Many clients start with the four-week diagnostic first, so both sides can see the real scope before committing to a longer term.
What if I need an executive assistant more than a COO?
Then hire that. Plenty of owners don't have an operations problem — they have a leverage problem, and what they need is someone reliable holding the calendar, the inbox, the follow-ups and the vendors. I take that work as a part-time executive business partner starting at $3,000 a month, and it often turns into COO-level work later once the obvious time drains are gone.
Can you work alongside our existing GM or bookkeeper?
That's usually the point. A fractional COO sits above the day-to-day and makes the people already in place more effective — clarifying who owns what, giving managers real standards to manage against, and connecting the bookkeeper's numbers to operating decisions. I'm not there to replace your team.
Sec 09 — Contact
Book a 30-minute ops call
Tell me what's breaking. If it isn't an operations problem, I'll tell you that too.
Email
lillian@lilliandembinski.com
Phone
239-200-7102
LinkedIn
linkedin.com/in/lillian-dembinski
Based in
South Florida · on-site from the Treasure Coast to Fort Lauderdale, and in Naples