You raised. Now your hair is on fire.

The amount of chief of staffing your business needs.

We know you need help. Half Staff tightens your operation and gives you more capacity. Our team of experienced founders knows what it’s like to drop what matters to deal with what’s on fire. Sign up for 5 to 15 days a month. We adjust to your needs and if they grow, we help you find a full-time hire and get out of your way.

Work out how much you need See pricing

For venture-backed companies from Seed to Series B.

A founder alone in a dark office late at night, head in hand beside a wall of sticky notes

SANITY

Increase focus

You stay on the things only you can do. We take the rest.

HALF THE COST

Save money

A full-time Chief of Staff or COO costs $250,000 to $350,000 a year with benefits, plus an equity grant and a recruiting fee. Save your runway and invest in the product and the GTM team you need to hit your targets.

FLEXIBILITY

Adjust

We shift up or down as your needs change and never send you a surprise bill.

The problem

Important work is piling up.

Every unexpected fire drill prevents you from planning ahead, investing your time in the things that will pay dividends next quarter. And then you get smacked in the face by a board meeting that you haven’t had time to prepare for.

A man stands calmly in a room buried in paper, holding a single sticky note

A week in the CEO’s inbox

Handled 0 Waiting 0 Oldest 0d Never got to 0

Tomorrow’s Tasks (Tomorrow Never Comes)

Simple pricing

$1,000 a day, minimum five days a month.

A flat monthly fee. You are buying a level of coverage every month. We don’t bill hourly. And we work together to scope each three-month phase to determine the right level of support for your needs.

OVERAGE

We don’t bill for it

If a month runs long, we talk about it before the next one starts and either move the level up or cut something back. You will not get an invoice you didn’t agree to first.

SCOPING

Set together, phase by phase

We agree the number of days for each phase before it starts, and revisit it at the end. If the need grows past what a fractional arrangement can carry, we help you hire and step back.

Start with a conversation.

Let’s take 30 minutes to see if you even like us. If the answer is that you should hire full time, you’ll get that.

Get in touch About Jason

A founder holds the doorway with one raised hand, keeping a crowd of interruptions out of the room

About

Jason Abromaitis

I’ve founded two companies, taken one to profitability without outside capital, and spent seven years in strategy consulting before that.

I haven’t been a Chief of Staff. I needed one and I get how you feel about turning over important work to someone else. I know how overwhelmed you can feel (but you can’t show it). You can complain to me and it won’t kill company morale. But I’ll also kick you in the ass to stop complaining and do something about it, because that’s the voice you need.

I will use too many basketball analogies (I can do baseball or golf if that’s your language). Basketball was my first passion. I was the Gatorade Player of the Year in Connecticut, a McDonald’s All-American nominee, and played at Yale … where I also ran a refrigerator rental business. I’ve spent countless hours in empty gyms because that’s what it took. I know you’re putting in those hours that your team doesn’t see, and you need them to get shots up after practice too.

Track record

Where I’ve done this work.

Corus — co-founder and CEO

Denver · 2013–2021

A software platform for agencies and enterprises to collaborate on collecting customer data and generating insight reports. We rapidly informed key executive decisions.

I recruited the team across engineering, design, marketing, sales, account management and statistics. Corus hit positive free cash flow in 18 months. We grew to $1M in annual revenue within 3 years with no outside capital.

Launchpad — co-founder and CEO

Denver · 2019–2022

Connected fitness hardware for young athletes, built on open-source computer vision. We raised a Pre-Seed and shipped a prototype on a fraction of the budget that comparable products required. We ran a successful pre-order campaign, but…

When the market moved away from at-home connected fitness we pivoted to an iOS product. I use that experience more than any other in this work. Changing direction and maintaining the support of investors and your team requires transparency and integrity. I don’t hide from failure and there are many lessons from Launchpad that can help your business.

Techstars — Senior Product Manager

Denver · 2022–2023

I supported dozens of founders at the same time. I learned what each one actually needed, took the highest-impact work off their plates, and turned it into a repeatable offering inside Techstars Universe, the platform serving companies during and after the accelerator. Techstars staff picked up the delegated work.

It is the closest thing to Half Staff I have done, and it is where I learned how fast you have to move to be useful to a founder.

Investing and advising

2021–present

I serve as a venture partner running diligence on deals in areas I know, a scout sourcing early-stage sports technology, and an advisor to a number of startups.

How I work

What you’re getting.

An empty gym at night, a figure at the free-throw line with a towel, bottle, notebook and laptop laid out in a row on the floor

No excuses

If something I own doesn’t happen, you hear it from me first, along with what I am doing about it. I don’t bring you reasons.

I’ll tell you what I think

In private, and usually before you ask. You are not paying me to agree with you.

Your team can talk to me

The 1:1s I hold with your leads are confidential. I bring you what matters without saying who said it, unless they want it said.

Denver is close to everywhere

We come to you as needed because problems shrink face to face. We take a few companies at a time, and the founder who meets you is the one who does the work. We don’t pass it to junior people who don’t understand your business.

Get in touch Work out how much you need

Before you post the job

A full-time hire doesn’t just cost the salary and benefits.

You run the search yourself for months. You may pay a recruiting fee. Then it’s another quarter before they’re useful. We start in about two weeks, and when you do hire, they walk into a company that already runs. Put your own numbers in below.

Your numbers

Base salary

Benefits, payroll tax and overhead

Recruiting fee, as a share of base

Months to fill the role

Months to get up to speed

Equity grant

Current valuation — leave at 0 to skip

Half Staff days a month — minimum 5

days

The other side

When you should make the hire instead.

Cost is not the only question. If any of these describe you, we’ll encourage you to hire someone on the first call and can connect you with our partner headhunters.

You need a functional lead

If more than half the job is running sales operations, finance, or engineering delivery, you need a functional executive.

You need someone there every day

A physical operation, a turnaround, or a company that works in person all week cannot have a fractional executive who looks different from the culture you need to build.

You’re past about 100 people

It is unlikely that you only need part-time support if you’re already at some scale. You need someone with internal authority you can delegate to.

Nothing’s broken

If you have a process that works for you, we will only support you if you are about to grow or change something about the business.

An empty office chair alone under a spotlight, facing one person at the far end of a boardroom table

Worth a conversation either way.

Get in touch Work out how much you need

For investors and outside counsel

Help your companies run better without adding headcount.

Half Staff works with Seed to Series B companies where everything goes through the CEO. There is nothing for you to sell and no fee to you either way.

Start a conversation

Where we help

What you’re seeing in your portfolio.

Four investors seated in a row, fingers steepled, expressions unreadable

If you’re an investor

These companies are usually doing fine, especially if they just raised. We help them manage the challenges that come from the new funding, growth, and the stress of hitting their next milestones. If you see the CEO spending too much time on tasks they could delegate, we can help.

Your advice lands like “clean your room” from a parent
The board meetings are a mess
You aren’t getting clear and frequent updates
The data room was a mess and won’t cut it for the next round

If you’re a lawyer or outside counsel

Clients don’t pay you to do operations, but you see the mess and you know the risks are piling up.

Gathering documents takes too long
You don’t get board consents and minutes (on time)
The cap table isn’t clear
You’re too involved in diligence requests
You are billing hours for what could have taken minutes if the company planned ahead

One condition

We won’t be forced on a founder, including by you.

If you introduce us and the CEO doesn’t want the help, we decline, whatever the fee. Someone the founder didn’t choose ends up reporting to the board instead of helping the company.

We need a trusted relationship with the founder, and we want them to build more trust with you.

What that means for you

Your founders can take our calls without wondering whether you sent us to check up on them.
Your advice has a chance of being considered.

No referral fees

Nothing changes hands between us.

No finder’s fee, no revenue share, no rebate. We are there for the founders, and that comes back to you when they succeed.

Get in touch See how the engagement works

Internal — go-to-market

Positioning, pricing, the ICP matrix, investor strategy, pipeline and the launch plan. Not linked from the public site.

Worth knowing: this is a single HTML file, so the strategy content ships inside it and anyone who opens the page source can read it without the passphrase. The gate is a deterrent rather than security. Keep the URL unshared, and put anything that genuinely can’t be seen in a separate file that never gets published.

Internal · not for distribution

Go-to-market strategy

A–C

Sweet-spot stage

$5K

Diagnostic, the wedge in

$12K

Target core retainer

5–8

Clients for a real practice

The positioning decision

Getting the words right

Avoid

“Fractional Chief of Staff for startups.”

Use

“Fractional Chief of Staff for venture-backed CEOs — the operating partner who turns strategy into execution.”

Once there’s some proof behind it:

Your company’s operating system between founder and leadership team.

And eventually, the version that’s hardest to compare against anyone else:

The AI-native operating partner for venture-backed founders.

The distinction to hold onto in every conversation is that you aren’t there to make decks, manage calendars or run a ticket queue. You’re there to own the loop below.

01Founder

02Priorities

03Leadership

04Decisions

05Execution

06Accountability

07Board

The wedge — why you, specifically

What a career Chief of Staff doesn’t have

You’ve been the founder. Founders trust someone who has sat in the same chair more than someone who has spent five years next to it.
Consulting background. You can walk into a messy company, work out what’s wrong quickly, and put structure in without needing six months of context first.
Built a B2B software company. Product, sales, enterprise customers, hiring, fundraising, pricing and operations, which is roughly the breadth this role needs.
You know how investors think. Enough exposure through Techstars and the VC ecosystem to know what a board wants to see and what the founder is dealing with underneath it, and to sit between the CEO, the executives and the board without being intimidated by any of them.
Real AI experience, which is probably the biggest differentiator. Not note-taking, but building the reporting and summarising layer that sits around the CEO and the leadership team.

On competitors. Fractional Chief of Staff is already a recognised category. Meridian Fractional in Denver and firms like CoSyndicate sell to venture-backed founders explicitly, so competing on the category itself won’t work. The market already believes it exists. The job is convincing a founder that you specifically are the person they want next to them when the company gets complicated.

Qualification matrix

Green / yellow / red

Green — take it

VC-backed
25–100 employees
Founder-led
$3M–$30M revenue
Growing quickly
CEO spending too much time internally
Leadership team exists
No strong CoS
No strong COO
3+ major initiatives underway
Board demanding increasing sophistication

Yellow — maybe, at $6K

10–25 employees
Under $3M revenue
Founder still doing everything
Unclear leadership structure

These work at the entry tier. They rarely justify $12K and they take more hours per dollar than green accounts, so take them selectively and only when the founder is coachable.

Red — decline

Under 10 employees
Pre-product
Founder needs an EA
Company needs a COO
Fundamentally broken financially
Founder wants consulting rather than execution

Turning these down protects the case studies. One bad engagement out of the first three is expensive well beyond its fee.

Target customer definition

Series A through Series C is the sweet spot

20–100 employees
Roughly $2M–$30M revenue, or meaningful institutional funding
Founder/CEO still deeply involved in day-to-day operations
Strong functional executives but weak cross-functional execution
Growing fast enough that coordination has become expensive
Not quite ready for a $250K–$350K+ full-time senior operator

The market already recognises this gap — existing fractional CoS offerings target venture-backed founders at exactly this stage, at roughly $8K–$20K/month depending on scope and seniority.

Live pricing. $6,000 for the first half day a week, plus $2,000 for each additional half day, up to three days at $16,000. Two days lands at $12,000, matching the core tier below. The hourly model and the $300/hr overage are gone. Public framing: a month is about 4.5 weeks, so each half day a week is roughly 2.25 days of work, and the marginal rate is under $900 a day. Overage is never billed. If a month runs long it gets discussed before the next one and the level moves up or the scope comes down. Above three days a week the site tells the founder to hire and offers help doing it.

Don’t sell hours

The most important business-model decision

Hourly benchmarks for this work sit around $150 to $190, averaging roughly $171. Selling at that rate makes the work a commodity and caps the business at the size of your calendar. An outcome-based retainer is the alternative.

Component	Operating Advisor	Fractional CoS	Embedded CoS
Monthly	$6K	$12K	$18K
Time commitment	~1 day/week	~2 days/week	~3 days/week
Founder cadence	✓	✓	✓
Leadership meetings	—	✓	✓
Company priorities / OKRs	✓	✓	✓
Cross-functional execution	Limited	✓	✓
Board preparation	—	✓	✓
Strategic projects	Limited	✓	✓
Executive team support	—	✓	✓
AI operating-system implementation	✓	✓	✓
Minimum term	3 months	3 months	3 months

The $12K tier is expected to become the core product. Comparable offerings run $8K to $20K a month for serious fractional Chief of Staff work, and more embedded fractional executive roles reach $12K to $25K.

Launch economics

Year one model

Metric	Target
Diagnostic	$5K
Core retainer	$12K/mo
Embedded	$18K/mo
Minimum term	3 months
Target clients	5–8
Target utilisation	60–70%
Initial annual revenue target	$500K–$750K
Year-2 potential	$1.5M–$3M
Gross margin once leveraged	60–75%

The economics work because the diagnostic is paid, so the sales process funds itself, and because delivery gets more systematised over time.

The MRR ladder

At $12K per client

$36K MRR

Three clients. Enough to show you can deliver the outcome yourself. Don’t hire yet.

$60K MRR

Five clients, and a real business. Worth starting to think about leverage.

$96K MRR

Eight clients, roughly $1.15M annualised. Time to decide between a solo practice and a small firm.

Phase 1 — Operating Diagnostic

2 weeks · $5,000

Selling the diagnostic instead of asking a founder to hire you on faith is the whole sales mechanism, and it’s also the best qualification tool you have.

Interview

CEO
Leadership team
2–4 key employees
Optionally a board member or investor

Analyse

CEO calendar
Leadership meetings
Company goals and KPIs
Board materials
Org structure and decision-making
Major initiatives and communication
Recurring operational failures

Deliverable — Founder Operating Assessment:

01Where the CEO is the bottleneck

02What isn’t getting executed

03Which decisions are stuck

04Which meetings are useless

05Which initiatives lack ownership

06What the leadership team doesn’t agree on

07What the board is likely to ask

08What should change over the next 90 days

The sales process

Deliberately simple — six steps

01VC introduction

0230-minute founder conversation

03Offer the Founder Operating Review — $5K

04Deliver the diagnosis

05Recommend the 90-day engagement — $12K/month

06Renew at month three, on measured results

Much easier to sell than asking for $36K up front.

The seven questions for step 02:

What is consuming your time?
What isn’t getting done?
What keeps coming back to you?
Where does your leadership team get stuck?
What are the three most important things the company needs to accomplish?
What is preventing those things from happening?
What would you do with another 10 hours a week?

Baseline every engagement

Your own product needs measurable ROI

CEO metrics

Hours/week in internal meetings
Hours/week on strategic work
Hours/week firefighting
Number of CEO escalations
Decisions waiting on the CEO

Company metrics

Initiatives on track
Initiatives overdue
Decision cycle time
Leadership meeting duration
KPI reporting cadence
Unresolved cross-functional issues

Business metrics

Revenue
Pipeline
Churn
Hiring
Burn
Runway

The renewal conversation you’re working towards sounds like this:

“Before I came in, you were spending 14 hours a week coordinating the company. That’s now 6. Seven major initiatives were red; now one is. Your leadership meeting went from 90 minutes to 45. Board prep went from three days to four hours.”

At that point you’re selling a result rather than time.

How to open with a fund

How you frame it matters

Don’t say

“I started a fractional Chief of Staff business. Do you know anyone who needs one?”

Say

“I’m building a small operating practice specifically for VC-backed founders who have outgrown founder-led coordination but aren’t ready for a full-time CoS or COO. I’d like to make it available to a handful of your portfolio companies.”

The magic question — ask this instead of asking for referrals:

“Which CEOs in your portfolio are currently acting as the routing layer for the entire company?”

Any experienced investor recognises that problem straight away, and the follow-up is simply that those are the companies you’re set up to help.

Portfolio Operating Partner program

Make it an explicit product

Offer selected funds free operating reviews across their portfolio. The fund tells its founders there’s an experienced founder-operator available if they want a look at how their company is running. No obligation. You do the review, and if there’s a real problem you recommend the paid engagement.

The important part is that the fund doesn’t have to sell anything.

The fund gets

Portfolio support
Founder help
Operational leverage
Better execution
No additional headcount
No hiring process

You get

Trusted distribution
Warm introductions
Credibility by association
Potentially dozens of qualified companies

Outreach tiers

30–50 investors, not hundreds

Tier A — Personal

People who know you well.
Goal: a 20-minute conversation. Not a sales pitch — ask for feedback on the thesis.

Tier B — Warm

People who know you but haven’t worked closely with you.
Goal: introduction to the fund’s talent or operating partner.

Tier C — Strategic

Funds whose portfolios contain many ICP-matching companies.
Goal: a portfolio resource relationship.

The referral loop

10 fund relationships × 2–5 qualified opportunities each per year

01VC

02Founder Operating Review

03Paid diagnostic

0490-day engagement

05Measured result

06Founder becomes a reference

07VC gets another success story

08VC refers more founders

You don’t need hundreds of clients. You need this loop to close cleanly about ten times.

Don’t pay referral fees. Commissions create awkward economics and change how the fund’s recommendation is received. Give them a quarterly anonymised Portfolio Operating Brief instead, covering the bottlenecks, hiring problems, operating gaps, leadership issues and board-preparation failures you’re seeing most. It keeps the relationship reciprocal and makes you useful to the investor in a different way.

Investor pipeline

0 investors

Week two of the launch plan is building this list: fifty investors with fund, partner, relationship strength, portfolio focus, relevant portfolio companies, last contact, introduction status and outcome. The rows below are editable and save to this browser only.

Fund	Partner	Tier	Portfolio focus	Relevant portfolio cos	Last contact	Status	Outcome

Saved in this browser’s local storage only. Copy the CSV into a real sheet before you rely on it — clearing site data wipes this, and it won’t follow you to another machine.

The biggest risk is scope creep

Not demand

It arrives as a series of reasonable requests:

01“Can you just take care of this?”

02“Can you help with this hiring process?”

03“Can you jump into this customer meeting?”

04“Can you help us think through fundraising?”

Four yeses later you’re a $12K a month COO, doing a full-time job at part-time pay with no case study at the end of it. The boundary needs writing down before the engagement starts.

You own

CEO leverage. Company coordination. Strategic execution.

You don’t own

Sales, product, finance, HR, engineering, customer success — unless explicitly scoped as a project.

Team, in order

Don’t build a firm immediately

Start as Jason plus tooling plus contractors, and prove you can deliver the outcome yourself before adding anyone.

The shape it scales into:

01Jason — Founder / Principal

02Senior Fractional CoS

03Operating Associates

04AI / automation layer

You retain

Client relationship
Diagnostic
Strategy
CEO relationship
Major decisions

Associates handle

Research
Meeting preparation
Dashboards
Follow-up
Project management
Documentation

That’s the route from a $1M solo practice to a professional services business worth several times that.

The strategic choice

What this is, and isn’t

Not a traditional consulting firm, but a high-trust operating service delivered by a senior founder-operator, with tooling doing more of the work over time.

At the start the business is you selling judgment. Later it’s the methodology, your reputation, the VC distribution, the tooling and a bench of trained operators. The second version could be much larger, but it only exists if the first three engagements go well.