Every episode,
built for operational leaders.

The conversation covers the importance of aligning sales and operations, the need for customer experience mapping before scaling up, and the significance of knowing when to bring in the right help, whether fractional or full-time, to transition out of the operator's seat for effective scaling. Reach out to Penny Cook or Sarah Wilson on LinkedIn to connect!

Sarah Wilson and Penny Cook, both fractional CEOs and operational turnaround partners, answer listener questions on operational challenges. They provide insights on managing projects, navigating political issues, and standing out as a future ops leader. The conversation emphasizes empathy, communication, and process improvement as key strategies for success in operations. Reach out to Penny Cook or Sarah Wilson on LinkedIn to connect!

The conversation explores the transition into ops leadership, emphasizing the shift from being an individual contributor to an orchestrator, building a map for the first 90 days, and leading with intention and purpose. Reach out to Penny Cook or Sarah Wilson on LinkedIn to connect!

The conversation delves into the drawbacks of update culture, emphasizing the need to shift focus from excessive meetings to meaningful actions. It highlights the importance of celebrating successes, taking action on red numbers, and coordinating with other functions for effective teamwork. Reach out to Penny Cook or Sarah Wilson on LinkedIn to connect!

The conversation explores the critical aspects of leading a team through a pivot, emphasizing the importance of communication, decision-making, and realignment of organizational priorities. It provides valuable insights into the challenges and strategies for navigating a pivot effectively. Reach out to Penny Cook or Sarah Wilson on LinkedIn to connect!

The conversation delves into the complexities of the pricing function in business, exploring the challenges, strategies, and key considerations for effective pricing. It emphasizes the need for a clear owner, logical rules, and a systematic approach to pricing decisions. Reach out to Penny Cook or Sarah Wilson on LinkedIn to connect!

The conversation focuses on the strategic relationship between operations teams and vendors, emphasizing the value of treating vendors as partners rather than just suppliers. It provides insights on negotiating vendor relationships, leveraging vendor expertise, and building a strong, mutually beneficial partnership. Reach out to Penny Cook or Sarah Wilson on LinkedIn to connect!

The conversation delves into the challenges of managing cash flow and inventory, emphasizing the importance of understanding inventory turns, leveraging business size, and owning the number. It also highlights the narrative behind inventory numbers and the impact on cash flow. Reach out to Penny Cook or Sarah Wilson on LinkedIn to connect!

In this conversation, Penny Cook and Sarah Wilson discuss the challenges of overdelivering and the importance of launching a minimum viable product (MVP). They provide insights on defining the scope, avoiding feature overload, setting a realistic timeline, and establishing clear decision authority to protect the MVP line. Reach out to Penny Cook or Sarah Wilson on LinkedIn to connect!

The conversation explores the impact of silence during periods of uncertainty, emphasizing the need for early and transparent communication. It delves into the fear of losing control, the burden of leadership, and the importance of vulnerability in decision-making. The key takeaways include the impact of silence on speculation, the burden of carrying information alone, and the importance of creating an environment for moving forward. Reach out to Penny Cook or Sarah Wilson on LinkedIn to connect!

The conversation explores the challenges of operations within growing companies and provides three key questions for ops leaders to ask regularly. These questions focus on system adaptability, information capture, and continuous improvement. Reach out to Penny Cook or Sarah Wilson on LinkedIn to connect!

The conversation delves into the critical factors for ERP project success, emphasizing the importance of scope management, change management, and resource protection. It highlights the role of leaders in making key decisions and setting the tone for successful ERP implementation. Reach out to Penny Cook or Sarah Wilson on LinkedIn to connect!

The conversation explores the essential prerequisites for leveraging AI in business operations. It emphasizes the importance of providing context to AI, using AI for high-leverage tasks, and maintaining human oversight in AI operations. Reach out to Penny Cook or Sarah Wilson on LinkedIn to connect!

The conversation explores the concept of a 'try harder' culture and its impact on organizations. It delves into the identification of this culture, reframing errors as system signals, and designing operations at the right pace for sustainable growth and success. Reach out to Penny Cook or Sarah Wilson on LinkedIn to connect!

The conversation explores the transition from managing individual contributors to managing managers, highlighting the challenges, one-on-one check-ins, cultural check-ins, and performance check-ins as key aspects of effective leadership. Reach out to Penny Cook or Sarah Wilson on LinkedIn to connect!

The conversation delves into the connection between culture and performance, emphasizing the importance of teaching the number before chasing the number, making recognition bigger than the reward, and building a rhythm for success. Real-life examples and practical insights are shared, highlighting the impact of operational excellence on business metrics and the role of culture in driving performance. Reach out to Penny Cook or Sarah Wilson on LinkedIn to connect!

The conversation highlights the critical role of project sponsorship and the impact it has on project success. It emphasizes the need for sponsors to define and protect the project mission, know when to step in and when to step back, and ask the right questions to support the project team effectively. Reach out to Penny Cook or Sarah Wilson on LinkedIn to connect!

Penny Cook and Sarah Wilson, fractional COOs, share insights into their backgrounds, philosophies, and operational superpowers. They also reveal surprising facts about themselves and discuss their childhood business experiences, providing a unique perspective on operational leadership. Reach out to Penny Cook or Sarah Wilson on LinkedIn to connect!

The conversation explores the limitations of annual surveys and the need for real-time feedback. It delves into the implementation of pulse surveys and the utilization of AI for feedback analysis, emphasizing the importance of timely and actionable feedback for organizational improvement.

Most growing companies have more data than ever and fewer decisions to show for it. This episode breaks down how to choose the right metrics and define them precisely, how to set guardrails that tell you when to pay attention, and how context determines the right response when a limit is crossed. One example, three lessons, and a practical framework you can start using this week.

Accountability is one of the most talked-about and least-understood parts of leadership. Penny and Sarah dig into why accountability breaks down in growing businesses, how to address the root causes — not just the symptoms — and what it looks like when leaders model the vulnerability that makes accountability culture real.

Everyone is selling AI. Not everyone is selling AI that will actually work for your business. This episode gives you a practical framework for navigating vendor conversations, asking the right questions before you commit, running a real pilot, and managing the internal pressure to adopt tools before your team is ready.

Change is constant in growing businesses — but most founders have no framework for managing it well. This episode covers how to communicate change in a way that builds buy-in, how to identify and empower change champions inside your organization, and how to give managers the tools to lead change authentically rather than just comply with it.

Your vendors are a strategic lever most businesses underuse. This episode walks through how to evaluate and select the right partners, negotiate with clarity and confidence, set expectations that stick, and measure vendor performance in a way that holds both sides accountable. Intentional vendor management isn't just good housekeeping — it's a competitive advantage.

Data visibility without execution is just noise. This episode gets into the gap between having data and using it — why dashboards often fail to drive behavior change, how to avoid the data trap of measuring what's easy instead of what matters, and how to build operational feedback loops that actually shift how work gets done on the ground.

The operational blind spots that quietly eat your margin are almost always hiding in plain sight. This episode identifies the most common culprits — hidden complexity that compounds as you scale, decisions made without the right data, and team misalignment that creates invisible drag. If your business is growing but the numbers aren't reflecting it, this one is for you.

Leadership courage is a skill, not a personality trait. This episode gives you a practical framework for approaching difficult conversations — with performance, with conflict, with hard truths — in a way that's both timely and respectful. The conversations you avoid are often the ones costing your business the most.

Busy and productive look the same from the outside — but they feel very different inside a business. This episode gives you a diagnostic lens for telling them apart: the signs that your organization is caught in activity loops rather than making real progress, what recurring problems and constant firefighting actually signal, and how to start shifting toward work that compounds.

Before AI can help your business, your business has to be ready for it. This episode covers what readiness actually looks like — the emotional preparation your team needs, the process documentation that has to exist first, how to think clearly about which roles AI will touch, and the data cleanup that most companies skip and later regret.

The inaugural episode. Penny Cook and Sarah Wilson dig into what separates businesses that scale smoothly from those that scale chaotically — and it comes down to operations. Clear goals with real execution plans, communication and tracking that keep teams aligned, and the organizational resilience to handle the unexpected without everything falling apart.