When we started working with Bloom & Co., the founder was stuck.
She’d built a successful DTC skincare brand from nothing. Year over year, revenue climbed: $1.2M (Year 2), $2.1M (Year 3), $4M (Year 4). But at $4M revenue with 18 employees, she wasn’t celebrating. She was exhausted.
She was working 65-hour weeks. She was in every critical meeting. Payroll decisions, vendor negotiations, customer disputes, operations planning—it all landed on her desk. Her team of 18 was efficient in their individual roles, but the business itself was held together by the force of her constant attention.
She couldn’t scale to $10M this way. Something had to change.
The Company: Bloom & Co.
Annual Revenue: $4M (Year 4) Team Size: 18 employees Structure: Founder + COO (unfocused), Head of Marketing, 3 marketing specialists, Head of Customer Success (4 CSRs), Fulfillment Partner Liaison (2 coordinators), Accounting, Administrative
Business Model: DTC skincare sold directly through website. Also sold through 8 retail partners and 1 wholesale distributor. Most revenue came from DTC repeat customers (subscription model for core product line).
Geography: US-based headquarters, fulfillment through two LATAM-based partners (one for DTC, one for wholesale), customer service handled in-house.
The business was lean and growing, but it was growing despite the operations, not because of them.
The Challenge: The Founder Bottleneck
In our first meeting, I asked the founder to list everything she did that someone else could or should do.
The list took up three pages.
The Problem:
- No standard operating procedures. When new team members joined, they had to ask how to do everything. The way things were done varied by day and by person.
- Vendor chaos. She negotiated directly with fulfillment partners, negotiated pricing, handled disputes. One partner was overcharging by 8-12% on shipping. Another was shipping with 10-15% error rates. No one had reviewed the contracts in 18 months.
- No financial visibility. The accounting system worked, but there was no dashboard. She didn’t know her unit economics by product. She didn’t know which customer acquisition channels were actually profitable. She couldn’t tell if the business was getting more or less efficient.
- Customer escalations flowed to her. Any customer complaint of significant value got escalated to her for resolution. This took 5-7 hours per week and prevented her team from owning customer relationships.
- No documented processes. When a crisis happened—a fulfillment delay, a quality issue, a customer complaint—the response was ad-hoc. Sometimes it was good, sometimes it wasn’t. There was no standard playbook.
- Team felt unsupported. People had unclear responsibilities. They didn’t know what “done” looked like. They over-communicated to the founder because they weren’t sure if they had the authority to make decisions.
The founder’s availability was the rate-limiting factor on growth. She’d hit a ceiling at $4M, and the only way forward was to unblock herself.
The Solution: A 90-Day Operational Reset
We broke the work into five concurrent initiatives, each with specific outcomes and timelines.
Initiative 1: The Operations Audit (Week 1-2)
We mapped every process. Not by asking people to describe them, but by following the work.
What we found:
- Fulfillment process took 3-4 days from order to shipment (industry standard: 1 business day). Why? Orders were batched daily at noon, then printed, then sent to partners via email. Partners processed overnight, then shipped next day.
- Partner communication was entirely email-based. No dashboard, no real-time visibility. The founder checked three different email addresses (one for each partner) multiple times daily to see what was happening.
- Customer refund decisions took 24-48 hours because the founder reviewed them. For refunds under $200, there was no technical reason a CSR couldn’t approve.
- No inventory sync between DTC and wholesale. They’d come close to double-selling inventory twice in the past 18 months.
These weren’t small inefficiencies. They were core operational problems that directly affected revenue, customer experience, and the founder’s workload.
Initiative 2: SOP Development (Week 2-8)
We created SOPs for 12 core processes:
Customer-facing:
- Process a customer refund request
- Handle a damage/defect claim
- Manage subscription changes
Operational:
- Daily fulfillment process
- Partner performance review process
- Inventory management and reconciliation
- Vendor escalation and resolution
Financial:
- Month-end close process
- Profitability reporting by product
- Pricing review process
People:
- New hire onboarding
- Performance check-ins
- Decision authority matrix (who can approve what)
Key detail: The founder and the relevant team member co-wrote every SOP. Not the founder alone, not the team member alone. This took longer but created ownership and ensured accuracy.
The refund SOP, for example, clearly stated: “CSRs can approve refunds up to $300 without escalation. Use this decision tree. Document your reasoning. The founder will review weekly for patterns.” This empowered the CSRs while maintaining the founder’s oversight.
Initiative 3: Vendor Renegotiation (Week 4-8)
We audited every vendor relationship—fulfillment partners, software tools, service providers.
Key findings:
- Fulfillment Partner A was charging $3.15 per order. Market rate: $2.40. At 25,000 orders/month, they were paying $18,750/month instead of $15,000/month. Annual difference: $45,000. This was due to an old contract from when they were processing 5,000/month.
- Fulfillment Partner B (wholesale) had 15% error rate. Competitor offered 3% error rate at 4% lower cost.
- Shipping rates were through a limited negotiated partner. Direct negotiation with UPS and FedEx would save 12-15%.
Actions taken:
- Renegotiated Partner A: $2.65/order (saving $15,000/year)
- Switched wholesale fulfillment to Partner C: 3% error rate, 4% lower cost (saving $8,000/year)
- Set up direct negotiated shipping rates (saving $22,000/year)
- Moved 90% of fulfillment API-based instead of email, creating real-time visibility
Total vendor cost reduction: $45,000/year
This was 12% of their annual fulfillment spending.
Initiative 4: Team Restructuring & Empowerment (Week 6-10)
We created a decision authority matrix that clearly stated who could approve what:
- CSR: Approve refunds up to $300; issue store credits up to $150
- CSR Manager: Approve refunds up to $1,000; make emergency decisions on customer escalations
- Fulfillment Liaison: Negotiate rate increases under 8%; escalate quality issues to vendor management
- Founder: Strategic decisions; vendor relationships; financial policy changes
Impact: The founder went from reviewing every refund to reviewing weekly reports. Her involvement shifted from daily operational decisions to weekly pattern review.
We also clarified role responsibilities. The “COO” title had been empty. We redefined it: one of the customer success team was promoted to Operations Manager with clear responsibilities for vendor relationships, process improvement, and operational metrics.
Initiative 5: Dashboard Implementation (Week 8-12)
We built a simple operational dashboard (Google Sheets, updated daily):
Key metrics:
- Daily orders, revenue, average order value
- Fulfillment times by partner
- Error rates by partner
- Refund rate and average refund size
- Unit economics by product
- Customer acquisition cost by channel
- Customer lifetime value by channel
The founder went from unknown/unsure to seeing the truth every morning. Within 4 weeks of seeing the data, she made three decisions that had been pending:
- Paused paid ads in one channel that looked good but had terrible CAC/LTV ratio
- Increased marketing investment in a channel everyone had doubted but that had 4x LTV
- Adjusted pricing on two slow-moving products
Just from having visibility.
The Results: What Changed in 90 Days
Cost Reduction: 35% ($140,000/year)
- Vendor renegotiation and optimization: $45,000
- Reduced fulfillment processing time (labor): $28,000
- Eliminated redundant software subscriptions: $8,000
- Reduced customer escalations requiring founder involvement: ~$35,000 in her time (valued at her hourly rate)
- Wholesale partner switch: $12,000
- Shipping optimization: $22,000
Most of this came from vendor renegotiation and efficiency improvements, not from laying anyone off. In fact, they hired one additional person (Operations Manager) and everyone else stayed.
Time Reclamation: 20 hours/week
- Founder went from 65-hour weeks to 45-hour weeks
- Time freed up (20 hours):
- 5 hours: No longer reviewing individual refunds
- 4 hours: No longer managing vendor emails directly (handled by Operations Manager)
- 3 hours: Fewer escalation decisions (empowered CSRs and managers to decide)
- 5 hours: Less time in firefighting meetings (things ran more smoothly with clear processes)
- 3 hours: Admin and approval time (decisions were pre-authorized)
NPS Improvement: 42 to 71
This surprised everyone. How did customer satisfaction improve when the focus was on internal operations?
Two reasons:
- Faster fulfillment (3-4 days to 1 business day, matching or beating competitors)
- Better empowered customer service (CSRs could solve problems immediately instead of escalating)
Net Promoter Score went from 42 (mediocre) to 71 (excellent) in 4 months.
Readiness to Scale to $10M
The founder could now see a clear path to $10M:
- Operations were documented and delegatable
- Vendor relationships were optimized and managed by the Operations Manager
- Decision authority was clear
- Financial visibility was real-time
- The founder was no longer the bottleneck
In Year 5, they grew to $6.2M (55% growth). The founder’s plan was $8-10M in Year 6.
What Made This Work
This wasn’t magic. Several things aligned:
- The founder was willing to let go. This is the hardest part. She had to trust that things would work without her.
- Team buy-in was strong. When CSRs saw they could make decisions, they owned them. When the Operations Manager had clear authority, she stepped up.
- The work was visible. The dashboard made the impact undeniable. Everyone could see fulfillment times improving, error rates dropping, costs decreasing.
- Quick wins created momentum. The vendor renegotiation happened in 4 weeks and saved $45K. That got the founder’s attention and the team’s belief.
- We didn’t over-complicate it. The SOPs were practical, not pretty. The dashboard was a spreadsheet, not fancy software. The system was designed to work, not to impress.
What Didn’t Work Immediately
This wasn’t all smooth:
- The first iteration of SOPs was too detailed. We had to simplify them after the first month.
- Team members defaulted to the old way initially. It took 6 weeks before the fulfillment process change stuck.
- The founder kept jumping back in. We had to literally put her decision authority in writing to remind her to step back.
But these were tuning issues, not fundamental problems. By month 3, the systems were working.
The Ongoing Cost of Operations
After the initial 90-day reset, we shifted to a maintenance engagement: $6,000/month for ongoing support.
This included:
- Monthly operations review (2 hours)
- Quarterly process audits (4 hours)
- Help with new hires and process updates
- Strategic consultation on scaling
For context, the Fractional COO engagement for the first 6 months was $10,000/month (more intensive). The first-year total investment: approximately $96,000.
The payback period was about 8 months. The cost reduction alone paid for the investment, plus they got time back and a path to scale.
Is This Your Business?
You’re probably recognizing parts of your own situation here.
The operational patterns are nearly universal in $2M-$10M companies:
- Founder doing too much
- Missing or incomplete SOPs
- Vendor relationships that haven’t been reviewed
- No financial visibility
- Team that’s capable but not empowered
The specific numbers will vary. Maybe it’s a service business, not e-commerce. Maybe it’s $1.5M or $7M. Maybe your fulfillment partner is actually great, but your customer service is chaotic.
But the framework is the same:
- Audit what’s actually happening
- Document and improve the core processes
- Review vendor relationships and optimize
- Empower the team with clear authority
- Create visibility with simple metrics
If you’re in that $2M-$10M range and feeling like operations are holding you back from growth, it might be time to audit your own situation.
We offer a comprehensive operations audit service that walks through exactly what Bloom & Co. went through. The audit itself takes 3-4 weeks and costs far less than the results typically generate.
Or if you want to move straight to implementation, we offer Fractional COO services that work exactly like this engagement did.
Either way, the path forward is clear: systematize, optimize, and empower. Everything else follows.
Note: Bloom & Co. is a composite case study based on real client work. Details have been changed to protect client privacy. The results and timeline are representative of typical transformation engagements.