Fractional Coordinator turns one in October. The first letter in this series explained why the firm exists. This one is about what a year of running it has taught me, including the parts I got wrong.
I am writing it now rather than at the anniversary because the useful lessons are already in, and because the people this firm serves are heading into the busiest stretch of their year. If something here saves a coordinator a week in October, it has done its job.
What held
The thesis held. We built the firm on one idea: that every engagement leaves a record that someone who was not in the room will eventually read, and that the record is the only place a claim to have acted fairly can still be examined. A year of investigations, seats, and training has not produced a single matter where that turned out to be the wrong standard. It has produced several where it was the only standard that mattered.
Declining conflicts cost us work, and it was right every time. We said at the outset that we would not investigate a matter we had advised on and would not manage a conflict we should decline. That rule has sent engagements elsewhere. Not one of them is a decision I would reverse, and more than one institution came back later with a matter we could take cleanly, because they remembered which firm had said no.
Publishing our terms changed the conversation. Rates, the conflicts policy, the records schedule, our position on artificial intelligence, the protections that sit around an engagement: all of it is on the site, where a procurement office can read it before anyone picks up the phone. The effect was not fewer questions. It was better ones. Institutions arrive knowing what we charge and ask instead how we would run their matter, which is the conversation worth having.
Small held. We take two fellows at a time and we turn down work we cannot supervise properly. There were months this year when a larger firm would have said yes and we did not. The standard survived those months because the size did.
What did not
I underestimated institutional time. A coordinator can decide in an afternoon that they need help. The institution around them can take a season to agree. Our first engagements taught us to scope for the calendar the institution actually runs on, to have the service agreement and the insurance certificates ready before they are asked for, and to say plainly, at the first call, how long procurement usually takes. None of that is complicated. All of it was learned the slow way.
I assumed people would have time to read. The playbooks are long because the work is long, and I still believe that. But the person who needs the Title IX volume most is reading it at eleven at night with a hearing in the morning, and the first edition asked too much of that reader. The second edition is organized around the decision in front of you rather than the framework behind it. That change came from practitioners telling us, in detail, where they got lost.
I assumed the word fractional explained itself. It does not, and a name that needs a paragraph is a name that costs you the first two minutes of every conversation. We have kept it, because the alternative names describe consultants, and a consultant is precisely what we are not. But we now lead with what the model does before we say what it is called: a senior practitioner holds your seat, carries your caseload, and is accountable for the record while they hold it.
The Digest went quiet when the work got loud. We publish a few times a month by design, and there were stretches when the matters we were carrying pushed the writing aside. That is the wrong trade. The Digest exists for the coordinator who is not our client and never will be, and that reader does not stop needing it because we are busy. The cadence is now protected on the calendar the way a hearing date is.
What I would tell someone starting a compliance firm today
People ask, more often than I expected. This is the honest answer.
- Publish your terms before you publish your services. A rate card and a conflicts policy on a website tell an institution more about how you will behave than any description of what you do.
- Hire the person who corrects you. The most valuable people in this firm are the ones who read my drafts and send them back marked up. If nobody in the building can tell the founder a finding does not hold, the firm has no standard, only a reputation.
- Take the smaller matter. The engagement that teaches you how an institution actually works is rarely the largest one. The district with one coordinator and no budget will show you the whole problem faster than the university with a general counsel and a committee.
- Write for the person who will never hire you. Most coordinators will not engage a firm. They will read what firms publish. If what you publish only makes sense as a sales document, it does not raise the standard, and raising the standard was the point.
- Stay small longer than feels comfortable. Every pressure on a young firm pushes toward growth. Every failure I have seen in this field came from a firm that grew past its ability to supervise the work being done in its name.
What the second year is for
The first year proved the model could hold a seat and hold a standard at the same time. The second year has to prove it can teach. The Learning Institute calendar for 2027 is published, the fellowship is taking its next intake, and the playbooks are being rewritten from the coordinator's chair. If the firm succeeds, it will be measured by the practitioners who can carry this work without us, not by the number of institutions that cannot.
I said in the first letter that what you are given, you give forward. A year in, I can add that the giving is also where the learning is. Everything in the middle section of this letter, every correction, came from someone who took the time to tell us. Keep doing that. It is the most useful thing a reader can do for a firm that has promised to be held to what it publishes.
We are still open. Tell us what you are carrying.
