Stop being the escalation manager for your own delivery team.
Your PMs are supposed to handle delivery. Some days they do. Then a client calls you directly — and you're the last to know the project was already in trouble. That's not a PM problem. It's a delivery control problem. And it has a fix that doesn't require a full-time hire.
Projects don't fail at the end. The problems were there earlier.
Status looks fine until it doesn't
Weekly reports say green. Then a client calls, or a deadline slips, and suddenly there's a crisis that apparently nobody saw coming. Somebody saw it — it just wasn't surfaced.
Each PM tracks things their own way
You can't compare project health across engagements because every PM reports differently. Getting a true picture of the portfolio means calling four different people and doing the analysis yourself.
Scope drift eats margin quietly
Small out-of-scope additions get agreed to informally. Nobody flags them because nobody wants to be the one slowing the project down. By the time it shows up in numbers, the damage is already done.
Forecasts don't survive contact with delivery
What sales promised and what delivery can actually do diverge from day one. The gap only becomes visible when it's too late to close it without either eating the cost or damaging the client relationship.
Delivery unpredictability isn't a process problem. It's a business problem.
Margin that disappears
Scope drift, unapproved changes, and re-work from unresolved risks all hit margin directly. You find out at invoice time, not when it could still be addressed.
Client trust that's hard to rebuild
One escalation handled badly costs more in referral pipeline and renewal risk than most people account for. Clients don't always tell you when they're unhappy — they just don't renew.
Leadership time pulled into delivery
Every hour you spend as the escalation manager for a project is an hour not spent on growth, sales, or strategic decisions. It compounds — and the delivery team learns to wait for you.
Growth that requires you to stay small
Delivery unpredictability limits how many projects you can run without personally holding things together. You can't scale what you can't hand off.
Senior delivery leadership before you need a full-time hire.
I work embedded with your PM team — running weekly delivery reviews, owning the risk process, and making sure leadership sees a consistent picture of project health across all active engagements.
The goal isn't to fix your PMs. It's to build the operating layer that means you stop being the person who holds delivery together when things get difficult.
Weekly project health review — same format, all projects
Risk log with named owners before clients notice
Scope changes reviewed before they eat margin
Monthly summary of what decisions need founder attention — and what doesn't
Starts with a 2-week diagnostic. Before any ongoing engagement, I spend two weeks reviewing your projects, PM setup, and delivery risks. You get a plain summary of what I found and a recommendation on whether to continue. If the findings aren't useful, you stop. No invoice for the rest of the month.
Three situations that show up in most engagements.
A project that had been silently deteriorating for two months — scope expanding, client getting more impatient with each update. Within three weeks: a reset scope baseline, a new communication cadence with the client, and risks clearly owned. Founder stopped getting direct calls.
A 12-person PM team, each reporting in their own format. Leadership couldn't compare project health at a glance without reading four different status formats. After six weeks: one report format, one risk log, one weekly leadership summary that took 10 minutes to read and actually flagged problems early.
Sales estimates consistently underestimated delivery complexity. The gap only became visible mid-project. Fixing the handoff process — clarifying what sales could commit to and when delivery needed to be involved — reduced post-contract scope surprises across the next quarter.
The fractional cost. The full-time function.
A full-time Head of Delivery costs $120k–$180k per year, plus recruiting time and onboarding risk. You also don't know upfront whether you'll have enough delivery complexity to justify the role long-term.
The fractional engagement runs at $3k–$4k per month — 8–10 hours a week, embedded with your PMs. Same delivery control function, without the commitment.
Won't my PMs feel like they're being watched?
Some might, at first. The framing matters. This isn't a performance review — it's removing the ambiguity that makes their jobs harder. PMs who've been trying to manage in a chaotic setup tend to welcome structure faster than you'd expect. The ones who push back usually have a specific concern worth hearing, and it gets addressed in the first two weeks.
How quickly does this actually change anything?
The diagnostic gives you a clear picture by end of week 2. Quick wins — reporting format, risk log, escalation routing — can go into effect immediately after. The goal in the first 30 days is one thing: leadership stops being surprised by project status. That's usually achievable.
What if the problem turns out to be bigger than fractional can handle?
The diagnostic will show that. If what you need is someone daily — active escalations, a missing Head of Delivery, a portfolio in recovery — I'll say so directly and we can discuss an embedded engagement instead. I'd rather have that conversation after two weeks of actual data than guess at it upfront.
What's the exit if it doesn't work?
The diagnostic is part of the first month. If what I surface by end of week 2 isn't useful enough to justify continuing — you stop. No invoice for the rest of the month. If the ongoing engagement stops making sense, there's no long-term contract holding you in.
One call to find out if this is the right fix for what's breaking.
Tell me about your project load, your PM setup, and what delivery has been costing you lately — in margin, in client trust, or in your own time. If there's a fit, we start with the 2-week diagnostic. If there isn't, I'll say so on the call.