MEET THE TEAM
We believe a business should be able to run without depending on one person.
Not even the founder.
Most of the founders we meet built something good, and then, quietly, became the thing holding it back.
In some businesses, every decision routes through them and nothing moves when they step away. In others it’s the reverse: the team moves constantly, nobody checks with anyone, processes get changed and never written down, and the founder is the last to find out.
That isn’t a personal failing. It’s a missing system.
What we do about it
For fourteen years we’ve helped founder-led businesses replace that dependence with structure — the systems they run on, the operations that hold day to day, and the people who make both work.
We start by watching how the business actually runs — not how it’s described — because those are rarely the same thing.
We’ve learned one thing the hard way: designing a system isn’t the hard part. Getting people to actually use it is. A system nobody adopts is just a document.
So we don’t hand over a plan and leave. We build it, we make sure the team uses it, and — when it’s needed — we stay and run operations as part of the leadership team.
Why it works
We’re not here to add complexity. We’re here to remove it.
Clear priorities. Decisions made on numbers, not nerves. A team that knows what to do. A founder who gets their time back.
And when we bring in technology — including AI — it follows the same rule: the tool serves the people, never the other way around.
That’s the whole job.
THE METHOD
That discipline eventually became a method — and not ours alone.
The 9D is a methodology we built with Clémence Bareth, a Fractional COO who runs her own practice in the Gulf. Between us, more than forty years of operating experience across corporates, startups and founder-led businesses. It reads a company across nine dimensions, because operational problems rarely sit where the founder thinks they do.
It’s grounded in what we’ve watched work and fail inside real businesses, and we keep it in live use — revising it as the ground shifts.
The team
We don’t rely on junior staff left to “figure it out.”
Our team is lean, senior, and highly specialized.
Teresa Cavalla
Founder & Fractional COO
Teresa leads the operational work: the strategy, the decisions, the leadership in the room.
She spent seventeen years in corporate banking operations—including UniCredit—running environments where process isn’t optional, compliance is rigid, and mistakes are expensive.
When she transitioned to founder-led businesses in 2012, she saw a recurring pattern: companies don’t break because the systems fail; they break because the people aren’t ready for the systems. A growing business requires a Founder to transition from ‘doing everything’ to leading, a shift that often triggers deep resistance and executive bottlenecks (like Founder’s Imposter Syndrome).
That’s why her background isn’t just in operations, but in Executive Leadership consulting. She doesn’t just build the machine; she ensures the leadership team is equipped to run it.
Along the way came the technical credentials: ClickUp Verified Consultant, Principles.You partner. Useful. But never the point.
The point has always been the same: systems, operations, and the human structure required to make the business calmer to run.
Tommaso Manno
Head of Technology & Implementation
He turns strategy into working systems.
An expert in automations, integrations, and data architecture, he ensures every platform works together seamlessly.
Tommaso leads the technical team that builds, integrates, and maintains the architecture we design
He doesn’t just connect software—he designs resilient systems where data flows seamlessly, operational risk is minimized, and technology genuinely carries the weight of the business
That means two things for you: the work is executed to engineering standards, and the practice doesn’t rest on a single person.
Clémence Bareth
Fractional COO – Associate
Clémence is a fractional COO based in Qatar, where she has run her own consultancy successfully for a decade.
Together we put real work into building a methodology that is unique to our market. Fractional COO work is still largely unstructured, and we wanted a method that holds. Between us there is more than forty years of operating experience, inside corporates, startups and founder-led businesses.
We don’t do hype. We do order.
If that’s what your business needs at this stage, let’s talk.