Doer Leaders and Manager Leaders

In terms of your size and scale, I’ve seen two major types of businesses engaging the help of a Fractional Leader® (FL). I’ll call them small businesses (SBs) and mid-sized business (MSBs).

If you’re a SB, you’re probably in the 5-20 person size range. You have one person or no-one besides yourself, the business owner, you’d consider to be on your leadership team. You need help with organizational structure, processes, and better data, but you also need someone to simply get ‘er done – but on a higher level. I call this kind of FL a Doer Leader.

Rachel Beider, founder and CEO of Press Modern Massage and author of Massage MBA, worked to scale a massage practice in Brooklyn, New York. She fought tooth and nail over the course of about seven years to expand into 9 massage suites in two locations. But she was stressed out, overwhelmed, and anxious all of the time. Everything required to supervise her staff, expand to new locations, furnish them, lead marketing, and everything else that went into running a business she felt was actually running her into the ground.

She could not afford a full-time COO so she finally connected with another woman who could act as her FCOO to take over supervision of the staff and execute on the various moves so Rachel could focus more on building the business and marketing, as well as the clinical supervision and culture, things she loved doing and was great at. She credits her FCOO with restoring her sanity and her ability to expand her practice to five locations in less than a third of the time it took her to open just that second location.

If you’re a MSB, you’re probably in the 20-250 person size range and have a leadership team of two or more people. Your main need for an FCOO is the leadership of someone who’s built a business as big as or bigger than yours before.

You need their leadership and experience to put in place the structure, data, management systems, and processes you need to get healthy, successful, scalable and strong. You need an FCOO to hold your and your leadership teams’ hands and for their leadership, management, and ability to create accountability and discipline than as someone to personally get stuff done. I call this kind of person a Manager Leader.

There are Doer Leader and Manager Leader FLs custom-made for both SBs and MSBs.

Doer Leaders

FLs of this type typically come at a lower price point relative to Manager Leaders. Business owners often engage them for more than one day per week. Because they’re doing more tactical  leadership or getting multiple major projects done so you don’t have to, they may work two to two and a half days per week.

Manager Leaders

This brand of FL typically has experience with larger organizations and engages with their clients at a higher level to determine the right structure for an organization, define its goals and the right metrics it must use to ensure it achieves those goals, and then drive implementation of those goals at the leadership team level of the organization.

These FLs typically, though not always, work for about one day per week or less and come at a higher price point relative to Manager Leader FLs, because of the more strategic leadership they offer MSBs.