Duct tape is not a business operations strategy.

I’m a big fan of duct tape. It’s super useful. It just shouldn’t be (metaphorically) holding your business together.

If you’re a founder reading this, you probably already know what I mean.

You know the cycle.

A problem crops up. You find something that works to fix it. You know it’s temporary, but you’re slammed.

Another problem crops up. Maybe you hire someone to handle it. Maybe you patch it yourself. Either way, the fix gets layered on top of the last fix. Who has time to figure out how it all fits together?

It usually shows up in one of two ways.

You’re the one holding it together.

The whole operation runs on what’s in your head. You can’t take a real vacation. You can’t delegate without it coming back to you. New hires can’t get useful without you in the room.

Everyone’s holding their own piece together.

You hired smart, capable people. But each one duct-taped their own version of how things work, and now nothing connects. Onboarding is a guessing game. Handoffs leak. Nobody can answer for the whole.

Either way, every time you try to grow, something cracks.

Hi, I’m Kristen.

I started my grown-up life as a civil engineer. When people hear that, the #1 question I get is, “Oh, so you designed bridges?”

Bridges are cool. But I have never been cool. I did not design bridges.

I designed hidden infrastructure — drinking water, wastewater, storm water systems. All the stuff we expect to work and be there in civilized society.

Designing that infrastructure means understanding what you need right now and what you’ll need in the future. The last thing you want is to redo a bunch of work when the community expands.

Which is exactly what happens with small businesses: duct-tape fixes that get you by — until growth hits and you’re rebuilding under pressure.

That’s the work I do now. I help founder-led businesses build operations that fit who they are today and hold up when the company is twice the size.

How I work

If you’ve ever wished you had a senior right-hand person — someone who actually understands how your business works, owns real outcomes, and can think alongside you about what comes next — but you don’t have the budget (or the work) for that as a full-time hire, that’s the gap I fill.

That’s really what fractional work is. Typically a few days a month per client — embedded enough to actually understand your business and accountable for real results. Not a consultant handing you a strategy deck and walking away. Not a contractor running tasks off a list. Not a coach asking what you think you should do.

The math usually works out, too. Most small businesses don’t need a full-time COO or Chief of Staff — they need someone with that experience for a few days a month. And when you add up what a full-time hire actually costs (salary plus benefits, taxes, equipment, software seats, management time, and the overhead of finding work to fill 40 hours a week), fractional usually comes out ahead by a wide margin. You get the senior thinking without paying for someone to invent ways to look busy.

A typical engagement starts with a clear-eyed look at where the duct tape is. Where work bottlenecks on you, the founder. Where decisions are getting made twice. Where new hires can’t get useful without you in the room. Where systems exist on paper but everyone’s actually working from memory.

Then we replace the duct tape, one piece at a time, with something built to last. Sometimes that’s a process. Sometimes it’s a hire. Sometimes it’s just naming the thing nobody wanted to name.

What it’s not is a 60-page operating manual no one reads. It’s the smallest amount of structure that lets you, your team, and your business actually work.

Who this is for

You’ll get the most out of working with me if:

You run a 5–50 person business and you’re still the bottleneck for too many things
Your team is talented but spends a lot of energy waiting on you, guessing, or redoing work
You’ve tried frameworks (EOS, Traction, etc.) and they either didn’t stick or felt like wearing a costume
You’re not looking for a 60-page strategy deck — you want someone in the trenches with you

You’ll not get the most out of working with me if you’re looking for someone to run L10 meetings, manage your calendar, or keep a scorecard updated. That’s important work. It’s just not what I do.

What this looks like in practice

Three examples from past engagements where the duct tape was hiding something bigger.

Cracking the black box

Three projects in one county kept hitting the same wall, and nobody could explain why. So I dug in. Turned out two departments that worked together every week had no idea how their own processes affected each other — same words meant different things in different offices. I mapped the whole workflow, documented it, and handed it back to them. The CEO called it cracking the black box.

Arcola Towers, 2021–2023

When the data says stop

The company’s instinct was to say yes to everything. Saying no to a carrier felt like risking the relationship. But sometimes the data was clearly telling us a project would be a money pit, and we kept taking it anyway. I built a due diligence framework that made the honest calls visible. The harder work was getting leadership comfortable acting on them — including, eventually, walking away from a jurisdiction entirely.

Milestone Towers, 2013–2018

A system people actually used

Two $5M investment funds were being tracked on Post-it notes and a spreadsheet that got updated once a week. Leadership needed real-time visibility. The team needed something they wouldn’t abandon. I built a Salesforce tracking system that looked like what the team was already used to seeing. Adoption was immediate — not because it was sophisticated, but because it was built for the people who had to use it.