You Can't Scale Complexity | Derek Fredrickson on What a Fractional COO Actually Builds

The Operating System Show · Sep 25, 2026 · 40m

Derek Fredrickson left Wall Street in 2008 to run operations for his wife's coaching company, which she describes as having been built on toothpicks and band aids. Sixteen years later he runs The COO Solution, putting fractional COOs inside founder led companies between seven figures and twenty million. His rule for all of it: you can't scale complexity, but you can scale simplicity. The work is making a business process driven instead of people driven, so the founder can stop white knuckling the day to day and move from the operator seat into the owner seat. He is also living it himself. He…