Large Fraction

I'm Dave Estey, a fractional COO for founder-led agencies. My operations background goes back to Propel Marketing, a digital agency owned by GateHouse Media, where I built the SEO and analytics practice from the ground up as the company scaled from roughly 30 to 150 employees. From there I moved into agency leadership — six years at a digital content agency, the last as COO, before that as Director of Operations and GM — building the systems that let 600+ pieces of content ship every month without the wheels coming off. Now I do that work for agencies who haven't built it yet.

Here's the pattern I keep seeing: the founder is still the bottleneck. Every decision, every handoff, every "how do we actually do this" question runs through them. Growth feels heroic instead of repeatable, because nobody's built the system that makes it repeatable.

That's the work. I find the specific thing that's actually stuck — the missing handoff, the workflow held together by one person's memory, the process that only works because you're still doing it by hand — and I build the fix with your team, not around them. Then I train them to run it, hand over the documentation, and leave. No forever-retainer. No black-box consulting. You end up with a cleaner operation than the one I found, and people who know how to keep it that way.

I also bring hands-on fluency in AI-assisted workflows and technical SEO/GEO/AEO — not as a buzzword, but because I've used these tools daily to eliminate the operational noise that eats a founder's week. One recent build: a six-dashboard analytics suite for a client that turned raw GA4 data into a system their marketing and editorial team could actually run themselves, no analyst required.

If your agency has stalled somewhere between "we used to be scrappy" and "we still are, and it's a problem" — that's exactly where I work. First conversation is always free.