You are doing £15 an hour work with a £500 an hour brain
Client updates, chasing the team, fixing delivery errors, approving everything. Your calendar is full. Your pipeline is not.
Fractional COO for founder-led agencies
Your agency runs on you.
That is the leak.
Penguin Ops embeds a senior operator inside paid media and marketing agencies, maps where the hours and margin go, builds the systems and automations to plug it, and hands back an agency that runs without you in every decision.
- £200kMRR, up from £50k, inside one embedded engagement
- <10%client churn, down from 40%, over eight months
- 90 daysto take the founder out of day-to-day delivery, systems handed over documented
How much is founder-led delivery costing you each month?
Five sliders. No email needed to see the number. The maths is on the page so you can argue with it.
Move the sliders to see your number.
Show the maths
- Founder cost = your delivery hours × 4.33 × £150/hr. That is a conservative founder rate for an established agency. Sales, hiring and strategy are the work only you can do.
- Team cost = team size × admin hours × 4.33 × £38/hr blended loaded cost.
- Churn at risk = MRR × annual churn ÷ 12. The monthly revenue you are currently replacing just to stand still.
- Recoverable = 50% of founder cost + 60% of team cost + 40% of churn risk. Half the freed founder time goes to sales and account growth, 60% of manual work is automatable, and roughly 40% of agency churn traces back to delivery inconsistency. Your audit replaces these with real figures.
The leak has four shapes.
Nothing moves unless it goes through you
Nothing is written down. No one owns the process. Every decision routes back to you, so nothing happens when you are not there.
Onboarding is improvised, delivery is inconsistent
New clients feel the cracks before month two. Inconsistency becomes distrust. Distrust becomes churn, and churn becomes the sales target.
You have not had a real week off in months
Sales, delivery, ops, hiring and finance, all on one desk. That is not a business you own. It is a job you cannot resign from.
How we work
We remove the founder from delivery. Then we hand the business back.
One embedded engagement in three stages. We take on a small number of agencies at a time, and every one of them starts with a diagnostic, not a pitch.
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01
Diagnostic
Two weeks inside your agency
We trace every workflow end to end: how a lead becomes a client, how work is briefed, built, checked and reported, and every point where it routes back to you. You get a written leak map and a prioritised build plan.
You keep: the leak map and the build plan, with or without us.
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02
Founder Removal Programme
90 days, embedded
We build the spine and run it: onboarding, delivery cadence, reporting, team management and the automations behind them. First systems live inside 30 days. By day 90 the team runs delivery and you are out of it. Documented as we go, handed over clean.
You keep: every SOP, workflow and automation, and a team that no longer needs you in the loop.
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03
Operating Partner
Ongoing, for the agencies that want it
A senior operator in the business after the programme: team management, hiring, systems upkeep and the AI layer once the process is clean. Most agencies keep us on. None of them have to.
You keep: an agency that runs when you are not in the room.
Apply for a diagnostic call
A 30-minute call to confirm fit and scope the diagnostic. If we are not the right operator for your agency, we will say so on the call.
How an engagement runs: Map, Gap, Loop, Free
01 / 04
Map
We sit inside your business and trace every workflow end to end: how a lead becomes a client, how work gets briefed, built, checked and reported, where the founder gets pulled in. No assumptions, no templates.
02 / 04
Gap
The map shows the gaps: missing owners, undocumented steps, tools doing half a job, reports built by hand every Monday. We rank them by hours and margin recovered, not by how interesting they are to fix.
03 / 04
Loop
We build, test and refine with your team in the room. Onboarding, delivery cadence, reporting, automations in n8n, ClickUp and Slack. Each loop closes with the team running it without us.
04 / 04
Free
You step back from delivery and into the work only you can do. Pipeline, hiring, partnerships, taking a week off. The systems outlive the engagement. That is the test.
One embedded operator. Everything ops.
Client onboarding
Kick-off to first report in a repeatable flow: intake forms, access collection, account setup, welcome sequence, internal handover. New clients feel organised from day one.
Delivery cadence and team management
Daily standups, weekly reporting, clear owners, blockers surfaced before clients notice them. We run it first, then your team runs it.
Reporting that builds itself
ROAS, spend pacing and KPI scorecards pulled from the ad platforms into one place, on a schedule. Nobody builds a deck on Monday morning.
Automation in n8n, Make and Zapier
Research, briefs, approvals, invoicing chases, Slack updates. We remove the repetitive work so the team spends its hours on the clients.
AI workflows, after the systems
Research agents, reporting assistants, RAG over your own SOPs. Practical tools that save hours a week, layered on once the process underneath is clean.
n8n, ClickUp, Notion, Slack, Make, Zapier, Google Ads, Meta Ads, Looker Studio, HubSpot, Xero
Real numbers from embedded engagements.
4×
Revenue growth during one embedded engagement, £50k to £200k MRR.
40% <10%
Client churn for a retained agency client over eight months.
30 days
From kick-off to daily standups, weekly reporting and a documented onboarding flow.
Kam's made sure I'm not spending every single day stuck in operations. He's absolutely revolutionised the back end of the business.
Before you came in things were a mess, the team was weak, operations weren't optimal and as a founder I was feeling overwhelmed 24/7. Fast forward to now: team is 100% dialled in, clients are super happy, agency is growing without things breaking.
Within 30 days the team was running daily standups, weekly reporting, and a fully documented onboarding flow. I stopped being copied on every email.
The systems they built outlived their engagement. That's the real test.
Why a pharmacist's son runs agency ops.
I learned operations in my father's multi-site pharmacy business, where a missed step is not a late deliverable, it is a patient. Then e-commerce across the UK and US, then machine learning team ops in private healthcare, then Head of Ops at a paid media agency, taking it from £50k to £200k MRR and churn from 40% to under 10%.
Penguin Ops is that discipline applied to agencies. Systems before AI. Map, Gap, Loop, Free. Built in the room with your team, documented as we go, handed back clean.
Kam Syed, founder, Milton Keynes
Who this is for, and who it is not.
A good fit
- Founder-led paid media, performance or marketing agency
- Established recurring revenue, UK or US
- Founder still in delivery, client comms or approvals most days
- Team of three to thirty who need structure more than headcount
- Ready to hand the operational side to a senior operator for 90 days
Not a fit yet
- Pre-revenue or only a handful of clients: you need clients before you need systems
- Looking for a tool to buy rather than a process to fix
- Want AI agents before the underlying workflow exists
- Need a full-time, on-site operations director in the building every day
- Not willing to give an outsider access to the tools and the team
Fractional COO versus the alternatives.
| What you need | Full-time ops director | Generalist consultant | Automation freelancer | Penguin Ops |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Commitment | Full-time salary plus hiring | Day rate per engagement | Per project | A defined 90-day programme, then optional |
| Time to first result | Three to six months including hiring | Depends on scope | Weeks, for one workflow | First systems inside 30 days, founder out of delivery by day 90 |
| Runs the team day to day | Yes | No, advises | No | Yes, then hands it over |
| Builds the automations | Rarely | No | Yes | Yes, inside the process |
| Has done it in an agency before | Sometimes | Sometimes | Rarely | Yes, £50k to £200k MRR, churn 40% to under 10% |
| Lock-in | Notice period, redundancy risk | Per contract | None | None, cancel any month |
Questions agency founders ask first.
What does a fractional COO do for a marketing agency?
Runs the operational side of the agency part-time: delivery cadence, team management, onboarding, reporting and the systems and automations behind them. Penguin Ops embeds inside the agency, builds the infrastructure, and hands it over documented so the agency runs without the founder in every decision.
How much does a fractional COO cost compared with hiring an operations director?
A full-time UK operations director typically costs £70k to £110k a year plus months of hiring and the risk of a wrong hire, and most have not built an agency before. Penguin Ops is a senior operator who has, embedded for a defined programme and scoped to the size of the leak on the diagnostic call.
What size of agency does Penguin Ops work with?
Founder-led paid media, performance and marketing agencies with established recurring revenue, mostly in the UK and US. Usually they are either scaling fast or stuck at a ceiling because the founder is still in delivery.
What is the Ops Diagnostic?
Two weeks inside your agency mapping every workflow end to end: founder hours in delivery, manual admin, onboarding gaps and churn risk. You get a written leak map and a prioritised build plan you can act on with or without us. It is the first stage of every engagement.
How long is an engagement?
The Founder Removal Programme runs 90 days. After that, agencies either run the systems themselves or keep us on as an operating partner month to month. We work with a small number of agencies at a time, so every engagement starts with a diagnostic call to confirm fit.
How is this different from hiring an ops manager?
An ops manager executes. A fractional COO designs, builds and executes, and has already seen what works across several agencies, so you do not pay for the learning curve. When the systems are stable, an ops manager is often the right hire, and we help you make it.
Which tools does Penguin Ops build with?
n8n, Make and Zapier for automation. ClickUp, Notion and Slack for delivery and team cadence. Looker Studio and the ad platforms for reporting. Practical AI workflows such as research agents and reporting assistants once the process underneath is clean.
Do you work with the whole team or just the founder?
Both. You stay in the loop on decisions that need you. Your team gets the structure, accountability and clarity to move without you.
Stop being the most expensive person in your own business.
Run the calculator, then apply for a diagnostic call. We will tell you on the call whether we are the right operator for your agency.