Last week I asked my AI notetaker: "How would you describe me?"

I expected something diplomatic. A list of skills. Maybe a polite mention of my writing style or how often I say ‘like’ (cuz it’s, like, a lot).

What it actually said is I’m "simultaneously strategic and deeply operational. Able to zoom out to design a client management system from scratch, and zoom in to fix a broken Zapier trigger the same afternoon. Pragmatic, precise with language, and allergic to unnecessary complexity."

That’s fancy AI talk for: I think big, spot the small stuff, and cannot leave a misnamed tag alone.

Most fractional COO’s fall into one of two camps.

Camp One is the strategist. They’ll sit with you for two hours and brilliantly diagnose what's broken, send you a beautiful slide deck documenting it all, then they'll wave goodbye and leave you holding a list of things you don't know how to actually do (and they don’t know either).

Camp Two is the doer. They'll get into your tools, fix the thing, ship the thing, send you the Loom. But ask them why your offer ladder is wobbly or whether you should hire next or productise first, and you get a polite shrug.

The two camps don't usually overlap. And the gap between them is where most of my clients find themselves stuck.

And that gap is exactly my area of expertise. I own that gap. I live there full time (I just redecorated and everything!).

Because I can see the operational “here’s how to do x” layer very clearly from my “we need to do x” strategy seat. Which means I can direct you or your team to the simplest fix so you don’t have to spend three weeks finding it yourself.

Most fractional COOs walk into a team meeting and say, "We've received reports that the Zapier automation keeps failing. Someone needs to look into that. Sarah, can you take it?" Then Sarah comes back a week later with a four-day back and forth transcript from her Zapier Customer Service adventure, and a Loom explaining next steps. She spent ten hours on this problem, and it's still not resolved.

Meanwhile, I’ll walk into the same meeting and say, "We've received reports that the Zapier automation keeps failing because the form that's triggering it needs to have the first name field set to required. Sarah, can you update that after this meeting?"

Do I always know exactly what has to happen to fix any issue? Of course not. But I almost always know what it isn’t and that’s just as useful.

I’m sure this skill is partly learned behaviour.

I came up in operations the long way around. Bookkeeping. SOPs. Inboxes. Watching what broke when a founder grew past their own bandwidth. By the time I started getting hired for strategy, I'd already touched every wire in the engine.

But it’s also in my DNA; at least according to every personal assessment I’ve ever taken anyway. StrengthsFinder. Kolbe A. DISC. Enneagram. Human Design. They all say the same thing. I’m the one always looking for the cause, the reason, the actual problem that’s causing the system to fail.

It’s the reason my clients stop getting stuck at the same revenue ceilings over and over again. Because the ceiling was rarely about sales or marketing or the shape of the offer. It was about the sluggish or broken systems that those things were trying to run on.

It’s the reason I keep getting referrals even though I am, on my best day, exceedingly terrible at asking for referrals.

If you’ve been thinking you could use a little bit of Sandra in your business, hit reply and tell me. What’s feeling stuck or sluggish or out right broken in your business.

I’ll write back to point you at a solution, whether that solution be me or something else entirely.

xo,
Sandra

P.S. My AI notetaker also labeled me as

• 🧩 The Systems Thinker Who Meets People Where They Are
• 🎓 The Teacher Who Builds Independence, and
• 🗂️ The Naming-Things-Right Person

I felt a bit called out on that last one. “You have an almost compulsive need for clarity in language and structure” felt a bit judgy to me. But I can’t argue with the truth I guess.