How To Use Fractional Resources For Your Business Effectively With Suraya Yahaya

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Fractional resources are people who are often freelancers, consultants and contractors whose involvement with a company falls outside the standard 9 to 5 or 40-hour a week setup. Through her company, Khazana Inc., Suraya Yahaya provides fractional resources at the executive level for companies looking to scale their businesses up. Suraya allows founders/ CEOs to focus on growth and investment while she runs the day-to-day operations using the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS). In this conversation with Stephen Jaye, Suraya discusses fractional resources, as well as other aspects of work culture important towards achieving employee satisfaction and growth. --- Listen to the podcast here How To Use Fractional Resources For Your Business Effectively With Suraya Yahaya I am a big fan of the idea of fractional resources. In our work culture, we oftentimes assume that every single job needs to follow the same format and what people call the 9:00 to 5:00, 40 hours a week when not every need matches that exact paradigm and not every person necessarily wants to work in the same way. My guest has started a business that has a new feel to the idea of a fractional resource. I tend to think of the fractional resource as your freelancer who does twenty hours a week digital design. My guest, Suraya Yahaya, started a business where she acts as a Fractional Chief Operating Officer. Her business is Khazana Incorporated. --- Suraya, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me, Stephen. I appreciate it. This is an amazing idea. You are a Fractional Chief Operations Officer. Tell us about how that works? It's a little bit of a niche business now. Typically, you see chief operating officers in a company on a full-time basis because the chief operating officer is effectively running the company while the CEO is off doing market impact, talking to investors, large customers and the board is the face of the company. A fractional chief operating officer is to serve businesses that are pivoting, transforming, going through a ton of change and/or growing really fast so they need immediate support but not in a full-time scenario yet. There’s so much change, transformation and growth happening that they don't quite have a niche carved out for a full-time person for a variety of reasons. There are cashflow issues and a lack of clarity on what a full-time person would do as the business continues to change, grow and transform fast. There are also a lot of transformation that needs to happen with a growing team. The idea is bringing someone on a fractional basis, still have them do all the work that a full-time COO would do, and help the company grow, transform, scale and work very closely with the CEO on the timing of when the business is at an inflection point to take the next step. Am I correct in characterizing this as people will talk about the entrepreneurial experience in starting a business? The common phrase you hear is that people are “wearing many hats,” or if it's individual, it’s you starting the business. As you build it out, you are maturing and eventually, if you build it up to a large business, all your C-Suite leadership is going to be full-time people but there's a period of transition in between when you are growing from 1 to 300 people. Is that the correct understanding of how this works? I came from a very diverse background myself. I started as an attorney, went into operations strategy and ran big P&Ls. I had GM responsibilities growing and scaling a variety of different functions. The benefit of having someone come into a company that is itself growing and scaling so quickly is someone like myself can wear multiple hats. That's a great benefit of other fractional resources. That person is not coming in and saying, “Stephen, you hired me to be an accountant. That's all I'm going to do.” That person coming in is going to be like, “How can I help you with whatever you need?