BIZ OPS CONSULTING FOR SAAS
Bridging strategy, systems, and growth for ambitious teams
I design interconnected systems and processes that align every part of your business, allowing teams to move faster, smarter, and with greater results. My holistic approach empowers decisions that drive scalable growth, with data and strategy seamlessly integrated across your organization.
I work closely with your teams on an interim, fractional, or project-to-project basis. Engagements generally run 6 to 24 months.
SaaS Startups & Scale-ups
Get flexible and tailored support that unburdens your team and equips them to scale more effectively.
Interim COO
I dedicate my time to one funded startup for 6 to 24 months. I’ll then stay on a few hours a week to a few days a month, as needed, to hire and train a new Head of Operations and ensure a smooth transition.
Fractional COO
I work on a fractional basis when I’m dialing down a previous role or dialing up a personal project. Most often, this is with past clients who’ve made a large pivot and need an operational ‘booster shot’ to realign.
Ad Hoc Support
I lead and execute strategic projects that need a dedicated resource, and teams are already stretched thin. I also provide strategic guidance to new leaders and mentorship to operational up-and-comers.
0-1 systems and strategies
Designing from the big picture to granular details, you can expect thoughtfully crafted, cleanly executed solutions that connect the dots across people, processes, and data to power scalable growth.
Operational infrastructure that drives momentum
- Tool stacks that talk to each other so sales, marketing, and client success can work together more seamlessly.
- Thoughtful configurations that power ease of use today, and informed decisions down the road.
- Hand-offs that make sense so things like product requests make their way to the dev team in a format and language that works for everyone.
- Templates that reduce cognitive load, maintain consistency, and springboard important tasks.
- Automations that eliminate redundancy and make time for more creative endeavors.
- Client & employee onboarding programs that boost adoption and speed time to productivity.
- Smart OKR systems that align teams to shared strategic goals.
Financial models you can actually use
Most budget and forecasting models are designed for investor and end-of-year tax reporting. But they don’t easily show you where your revenue is coming from and exactly where (and by whom) your cash is spent each month.
The models I build have summaries that will make your investors and accounting team happy while letting you and your teams see the ins and outs of the business in an incredibly digestible way.
I call them “high-utility financial models ” because they are fully functioning planning tools that let you play around with “what-if” scenarios to make decisions on pricing, revenue goals, hiring, and more.
Dashboards that tell the stories you need to hear
There will always be a need for ad hoc analytics. But reporting systems quickly become chaotic when “ad hoc” is the norm.
And that is not scalable.
I create dashboards that map to an organization’s functional hierarchy to guide decisions from executive-level planning to granular optimizations.
The structure of each dashboard follows a logical flow so that users can unpack trends and KPIs in a practical way. It also lets them spot issues and opportunities more easily, share goals across teams (e.g., sales & marketing), and push decisions to those closest to the work.
My dashboards are also beautifully designed and uncluttered, making them (dare I say) enjoyable to use.
Organization where there once was chaos
Chaos doesn’t scale.
I untangle the pandemonium of documentation, reporting, sprint planning flows, product roadmaps, shared file drives, spreadsheet gymnastics, and whatever else is preventing your teams from eating dinner at a reasonable hour.
I also deep dive into your tools and across systems to troubleshoot and fix complex issues that are getting in the way of productivity. Like, when the numbers reported by one system don’t match the numbers of another, and no one knows which one to trust. (I get that one a lot. It usually stems from some combination of a hasty tool setup, a lack of clarity or training, and how/whether info flows between the systems.)
Sheryl Ryan 
Interim COO | Fractional COO
I’ve successfully planned and executed key company initiatives across sales, marketing, client success, HR, finance, and business intelligence/analytics for fast-growing startups and scale-ups (e.g., Savings.com, Vacasa, HomeBay, Impact.com, GloballyHired, Revvable), mid-sized consumer products (e.g., Teleflora, Fiji Water), and large multinationals (e.g., Toyota).
I hold a B.S. in Finance from Rutgers University’s School of Business, an M.S. in Computer Information Systems from Boston University, and a Ph.D. in “Figure it out, kid!” from the prestigious school of hard knocks. I am conversational in Spanish (or at least I used to be) and have lived and worked in Australia, South America, and across the US.