Twenty years inside a Fortune 50 operation, from the frontline to vice president, running the side of the business where failure was public and ownership was unclear: regulatory escalations, executive complaints, privacy and accessibility response, customer security assurance, and the breakdowns that happen at the seams between teams.
I now run Greenbaum Labs, a diagnostic practice with a working instrument: seventeen named failure modes, a structural scan that runs on real company evidence, and an AI tool bench I built and operate myself.
Fractional Chief Customer Officer or COO for customer operations. Two days a week, embedded, accountable to the CEO. PE-backed and founder-led services or subscription businesses that have outgrown their operating structure or are putting AI into an operation that was not designed for it.
With evidence, not a leap. A two-to-three week fixed-fee diagnostic maps your decision rights, escalation paths, exception load, and what your metrics actually measure, then names what it finds in plain language. If the findings warrant a seat, we both know exactly what the seat is for. If they do not, you keep the map.
The scan, a decision-rights map, findings to the CEO straight.
Outcomes get owners, the two worst escalation paths get repaired, recurring exceptions become root-cause fixes.
An operating cadence that survives without me, governance rails for AI in the operation, and a written handoff plan.
Automation may summarize, suggest, and predict; it never decides. The seat is designed to make itself unnecessary, which is why it works.
Most fractional operators bring experience. This seat comes instrumented: a structural diagnostic that shows you the organization the org chart hides, and an operator who has run AI against real operations rather than read about it. The experience tells us where to look. The instrument proves what we find.
If your operation has outgrown its structure, the diagnostic will show you where. Start there.