FAQ
Common questions.
What it costs, what it asks of your team, how long it takes, and how it fits with what you already have in place.
The basics
How is an engagement priced?
The Diagnostic is a fixed fee, scoped after the Discovery call. Ongoing work is a monthly engagement rather than hourly billing.
We share pricing on the Discovery call, once we know what the work requires.
What is Vantage10?
Vantage10 builds the operating capability a growing organization is missing.
The work is finding out why execution breaks down, building the structure that fixes it, and handing that structure to your team.
The name comes from the framework: ten operating capabilities every organization needs in order to focus, align, own, and execute.
How long does an engagement last?
Most run twelve to twenty-four months.
Long enough to build something that holds, and structured so it ends. What you are left with is a leadership team that owns execution and someone inside the business who can run what was built.
There is no long lock-in. After the Diagnostic the work runs month to month, and either side can end it with thirty days' notice.
How much time will you spend on our business each week?
We don't bill by the hour. We focus on outcomes.
That said, we typically dedicate one to one and a half days per week to each client. You get consistent, senior-level leadership with the flexibility of a fractional engagement.
Is the work remote or on site?
Week to week, remote. On site is optional, typically for quarterly and annual planning, and arranged by agreement.
Where are you based, and do you work with companies outside your area?
Vantage10 is based in St. Petersburg, Florida, and works remotely with companies across the United States.
How it works
How does an engagement start?
With a Discovery call. Thirty minutes, no cost, to get clear on what is happening and whether this is a fit.
From there, the Diagnostic: three to five weeks of interviews, observation, documents, and data, triangulated and scored across all ten capabilities. It ends with a scorecard, findings, and a prioritized roadmap.
Implementation builds what the roadmap says to build.
What should we expect in the first ninety days?
The Diagnostic comes first: three to five weeks from the first interview to the readout, ending with findings and a prioritized roadmap.
From there, the pace follows what the roadmap calls for. Oftentimes, we build the infrastructure, elevate accountability, and fix the obvious breakpoints.
What do you need from us to get started?
Access and candor.
Time with your leadership team, whatever documentation and data already exist, and permission to see how the business actually runs rather than how it is supposed to run. The Diagnostic is only as good as what people are willing to say out loud.
Who inside the company do you work with?
A member of the executive team, and the full leadership team alongside them.
The executive sponsor is whoever can change how the business operates. The leadership team is in it from the start, because ownership and operating rhythm get built with the people who will carry them rather than handed over at the end.
How do you measure whether this is working?
By whether the business needs you less over time.
More concretely: decisions stop routing back through one person, priorities survive the quarter, issues close instead of recurring, and your leadership team can tell you where the business stands without going to find out first.
How this compares
How is this different from hiring a full-time COO?
A full-time operations executive is a significant salary, plus benefits, payroll taxes, and a recruiting fee. Months to find one. Months more before they are useful. If the fit is wrong, you have lost a year and started over.
With Vantage10 the seat is filled now. The work starts in the first month instead of after a search, and the engagement is built to hand off. When the time comes, that seat goes to someone permanent, either a person you hire or someone already inside the business who grew into it.
If what you actually need today is a permanent executive, we will tell you that on the call.
How is this different from a VP of Operations, Head of Ops, or GM?
A VP of Ops or GM runs the day to day. They sit on the leadership team and are accountable for delivery.
Vantage10 works a level up from that: whether the leadership team is aligned, whether ownership is clear, whether the rhythm surfaces problems in time to solve them. Often part of the work is making a VP of Ops role succeed rather than replacing it.
We already work with a coach or a consultant. Does this conflict?
Usually not.
A coach works on the leader. A consultant advises on a problem and hands back recommendations. Vantage10 works on the operating capability underneath both, and stays involved while it gets built.
If there is real overlap, better to find it on the first call than three months in.
Can you work with us if we already have a COO or Integrator?
Yes. We often support businesses in transition. If you have someone in the seat already, there are a few ways this can go:
Coach and develop them
Serve as a resource while they grow into the role
Help you assess whether a different fit is needed
Do I have to use EOS?
No.
You can run on EOS, OKRs, Scaling Up, something you built yourself, or nothing formal at all. Vantage10 looks underneath whatever system you are using and asks whether the operating capabilities are there.
Companies with excellent framework discipline still turn up serious capability gaps. Companies with no framework at all sometimes execute beautifully. The framework is not the thing being assessed.
Fit
What size company do you work with?
Growing organizations where execution is getting harder as the business gets more complex.
There is no headcount or revenue threshold. A forty-person company can be well past the point where informal coordination works. A two-hundred-person company can still be running on the founder's memory. Complexity is the trigger, not size.
One practical floor: there has to be a team for ownership to transfer to. In practice that usually means at least five people, with leaders who own an area rather than a task list.
Who is this for?
You are likely a fit if:
Decisions keep routing back through you
You have a leadership team, but they are not fully owning their areas
The strategy is clear and the execution is not
You are willing to change how the business operates, not just add process on top
Who is this not for?
Being direct about this saves everyone time.
Companies looking for a meeting facilitator or a project manager
Leaders who want the problem solved without changing how they operate. If decisions keep coming back to you because you want them to, no operating system will fix that.
Organizations where the top leader is the only leader. There has to be a team for ownership to transfer to.
Businesses that need minor tweaks rather than structural change
How do we know if we're ready?
You are probably ready if you have outgrown how the business operates and you already know it.
The clearest signal is a leadership team working hard and still not moving things forward, because the problem is rarely effort. If you are not sure, that is what the Discovery call is for.
What if we tried something like this before and it didn't stick?
That happens often, and it usually means the change was installed rather than built.
Someone rolled out a meeting cadence or a scorecard, the team used it for a quarter, and it decayed because nothing underneath it changed. That is why the Diagnostic comes first. Fixing the wrong capability produces exactly that result.
Afterward
What if the Diagnostic says we don't need you?
Then you have a clear picture of where you stand and a roadmap you can run yourself, and that is where it ends.
What happens when the engagement ends?
Building Internal Capability is the final stage, planned from the beginning rather than offered at the end. Someone on your team takes over what Vantage10 has been running, with coaching through the transition.
You keep the structure, the systems, and the rhythm. Vantage10 steps out.
Who owns this work after you hand it off?
Someone inside the business. We name that person early in the engagement, not at the end.
Usually they are already doing part of the job without the title. A VP of Operations, a chief of staff, a strong functional leader, whoever the team goes to when something is stuck. Sometimes it is a new hire brought in partway through.
They learn the work by doing it alongside Vantage10 while the engagement runs. Nobody gets handed a binder and wished well.
If there is no one internal who could grow into the seat, we would rather know in the first quarter than the last. It changes the plan. You either hire toward it, or we build a rhythm light enough to hold without a dedicated owner.
What if it isn't working?
You will hear it from us before you have to raise it.
An operating problem that is not improving is information. The right response is to change the approach rather than defend it. If the engagement is not producing what it should, we will say so and tell you what we think the answer is, including if that answer is ending it.
Still have a question?
Ask it on a Discovery call. Thirty minutes, no deck, no pitch.