Nicole Gallicchio-Elz

I've been in this field for over 20 years, though the term fractional COO has evolved significantly over that time.

I started young. My foundation came from working inside my father's construction business at an age when computers, Excel, and QuickBooks were just emerging. I got an early, unfiltered look at what it actually takes to run a business — the sacrifices, the pressure, the weight a family carries when everything depends on one person's decisions. I also learned what not to do. My father was exceptional at his craft — booked out two to three years in advance — but he refused to hire, refused to expand, and carried everything himself. That stayed with me. It was my first real lesson in what happens when a talented person won't delegate.

Early in my career I was an office manager — streamlining surgical scheduling, building employee handbooks, and creating billing processes for insurance companies. I moved into corporate retail managing cash operations, front-end teams, and district-level responsibilities. In college I was drawn to atmospheric science, and I accumulated more credits in atmospheric science, mathematics, and physics than most people would know what to do with — all while working two jobs. Through a collaboration that grew organically, I co-authored a university textbook in atmospheric science that is still being published and used in universities well over a decade later.

Outside of college I co-founded a business that took off quickly. I sat in the COO seat for a long time, and when my partner stepped away from the business entirely, I kept going. That experience shaped everything about how I operate today.

I made the decision to work remotely about 15 years ago — deliberately and with intention. I was consulting and spending two hours on a train home from Manhattan, and I knew that wasn't the best use of my time or my life. I also knew that when I was ready to build a family, I didn't want proximity to an office to be the thing standing between me and that choice.

Today I serve as COO of a virtual assistant company I partner in, I do fractional COO work through a fractional COO firm, I carry my own fractional COO clients, and I run my own practice where founders come to me directly — either to consult or to have me diagnose their business and hand them a clear roadmap forward.

Diagnosis is where I live. I can look at a business as a whole and quickly understand what the owner is actually feeling — the frustration, the pressure, the specific places where things are leaking — and then show them exactly where the opportunities are and how to get there. My days are heavily calendar-driven and deliberately structured, built around a system that lets me serve multiple clients well without losing the depth any of them deserve.

What fulfills me is watching chaos become calm. Most of the people I work with are solopreneurs or have a small team — they're not $10 million companies, they're somewhere under $5 million and they can feel the weight of that. Watching their business go from overwhelmed to structured, knowing there are real solutions to what feels unsurmountable — that's what keeps me in this work. I'm not just building systems. I'm helping people fulfill their own vision. That matters to me deeply.