What a Fractional COO Actually Does (Besides the Spreadsheets)
If you’re new here, I’m Johanna Voss, a fractional COO and consultant who’s spent close to a decade inside the talent management industry, the last seven years specifically doing fractional COO work for boutique talent management agencies. Before I was on the operations side, I ran my own small roster and closed nearly $7M in brand deals as a one-woman show. I’ve built out rosters, org charts, hiring processes, and growth systems for agency owners across this industry, and along the way I’ve learned that the job description only covers half of what actually gets an agency unstuck.
This post is about the other half.
Why I Do This Work
I’ve been on both sides of this industry. I run my own small roster and have closed nearly $7M in brand deals as a one-woman show, managing talent, managing brand relationships, managing everything myself with no team behind me. I know what it feels like to be up against a decision with no one to call.
That’s exactly why I do this work now. I spend my time inside other people’s agencies as a fractional COO, watching the same patterns repeat across different owners, different rosters, different crises. Every agency owner thinks their situation is the one nobody’s dealt with before. Almost none of them are. I’ve usually seen a version of it, and I know what tends to actually work.
This job exists because agency owners shouldn’t have to figure all of this out alone the way I did.
What a Fractional COO for Talent Management Agencies Actually Handles
If you asked me what I do, I’d tell you: I build systems, I improve client and talent onboarding, I examine roster health, I figure out whether an agency needs to hire a manager before scaling the roster or scale the roster before hiring the manager. I build out org charts and job descriptions. All true. All the stuff that’s easy to put on a website.
But that’s not why my phone rings.
The questions that don’t make it onto any list of “COO services” are the ones agency owners actually call me for. And almost none of them are operational. They’re human.
1. Encouragement
A lot of what I do is tell someone they’re thinking about a hard decision the right way, and that it’s time to move on it.
More often than you’d think, that decision is firing someone. Talent or team. And the emotions around it are enormous. Owners will tell themselves “I’ll give them two more weeks, one more shot, maybe it’ll work out.” Sometimes what they actually need is someone to say: no. Cut the cord. You’ve been burning time and money trying to force a fit that isn’t there.
I told a client recently that she was playing small. She was shrinking her own business to accommodate a talent manager who wasn’t doing the job well, and it was costing her real money and real time. I had to reflect that back to her plainly: this is your business, and you need to make business decisions based on what’s good for revenue and growth, not decisions built around protecting one person’s feelings.
That’s not a system. That’s a nudge someone needed, from someone who wasn’t inside the situation.
2. Confirming and Affirming Decisions
Agency owners are making calls constantly that nobody trained them for. There’s no manual for “an employee I invested three years in just quit on a random Wednesday and took three clients with her to start a competing agency.” There’s no manual for “how do I navigate maternity leave when I’m a five-person boutique agency with no financial cushion, and I want to support this new mom but I also have to keep the lights on.”
They don’t always need me to solve it. A lot of the time they need me to confirm they’re not crazy, that the instinct they already had was the right one.
3. Being the Person to Think It Through With
Most of my conversations aren’t about spreadsheets. They’re about people. A talent manager who doesn’t want the promotion you were about to offer them. A creator with a huge food following who suddenly wants tech and travel partnerships that have nothing to do with their actual audience, and you have to figure out how to explain that pivot doesn’t work, or what a real pivot would actually require.
This is the part of talent management nobody prepares you for: managing humans who have full lives, feelings, ambitions that don’t always line up with the business plan you built for them. My job in these calls is to help pressure test the decision before it’s made, not just react to it after.
4. Asking the Questions You Can’t See From Inside It
You can’t read the label from inside the bottle. That’s the whole reason agency owners hire someone like me. Between running my own roster and closing nearly $7M in brand deals myself, and years spent since inside other people’s agencies as a fractional COO, I’ve watched the same patterns repeat across different owners, different rosters, different crises. That combination is what lets me spot the thing an owner is too close to see.
Sometimes that’s telling someone their team member is worth investing in, worth better training and clearer expectations. Sometimes it’s telling them the opposite: this isn’t panning out, cut your losses, move on. Either way, it takes someone outside the day-to-day to see the full landscape.
5. Tough Love
Some of the hardest conversations I have aren’t with agency owners about their team. They’re about situations nobody hands you a playbook for. I’ve talked a client through how to support her team after a former employee died by suicide, someone who used to work alongside people still on staff, still grieving, still showing up to work. That’s not in any operations manual. That’s just being present enough, and having enough perspective, to help someone navigate something genuinely hard.
Talent management is people management wearing a business suit. And people management means sometimes the job is just sitting with someone in something difficult and helping them find the next right step.
The Sentence I Say More Than Any Other
If you asked my clients what they hear from me most, it’s some version of this: you’ve got this, and I’m here for you. Then the next part: I’m here to talk it through. I’m here for the next steps.
That’s not a system either. But it might be the most valuable thing I offer.
Why Talent Management Agencies Hire a Fractional COO
I’ve spent nearly a decade in this industry and close to seven years doing this specific work: building rosters, org charts, hiring processes, and growth systems for boutique talent management agencies. That’s real, necessary work, and it’s what gets me in the door.
But the reason agency owners keep me around, the reason they text me outside scheduled calls, the reason they call me crying and ask if they’re doing the right thing, is because someone finally understands both the operations and the emotional weight of running a talent agency. Root cause, not just symptoms. That’s the difference between a fractional COO who manages a checklist and one who’s actually run this exact kind of business from the inside.
About Johanna Voss
Johanna Voss is a fractional COO and consultant with close to a decade of experience in the talent management industry and seven years specializing in fractional COO work for boutique talent management agencies. Before moving into operations consulting, she ran her own talent roster and closed nearly $7M in brand deals as a one-woman operation. She now helps talent management agency owners build systems, roster health, and team structure so they can grow without burning out.