Fractional COO · Leadership Mentorship

The problem is rarely where the symptom showed up.

Run the Rooms is a fractional COO and leadership mentorship practice for companies of 10 to 150 people. We look at how the business actually runs and what is really happening with the people, trace the problem to its root, and help you build a business your people can run.

The core idea

Most consultants look at one system. We look at both.

A company can have great people and still struggle because the systems are broken. It can have great systems and still struggle because leadership or culture is broken.

The symptom usually shows up on an employee. The cause is usually structural, cultural, or leadership. If you fix the person and leave the system, you will be having this conversation again in six months.

So we go where the work happens. We listen to the people doing it, follow how information and decisions actually move, and find the problem underneath the problem. Then we help you fix that one.

The flagship

The 90-Day Run the Rooms Diagnostic

Rooms 01, 02, and 03 together. Ninety days inside your business, ending with two written reports, an implementation roadmap, and a leadership conversation most companies never get to have.

Days 1–30

Enter the Rooms

Onsite. Observe how work actually happens, interview leadership, listen to the frontline, and capture a baseline before anything changes.

Days 31–60

Read the Rooms

Map the workflows and the informal organization. Trace each recurring problem to its root. Find where the intended culture and the lived one diverge.

Days 61–90

Reset the Rooms

Findings delivered privately to leadership first, then to the room. A roadmap, success measures, and a clear picture of what to build next.

Vision doesn't come to life at the top of an organization. It comes to life at the bottom, in the hands of the people doing the work.

Ashley Bourgeois, Founder

Why the ongoing work is called Run the Room

Our whole method is a ladder. Enter the room. Read it. Map it. Name the gap. Reset it. And then, for the companies that want an operator in the leadership team rather than an advisor outside it, run it.

That last rung is the fractional COO engagement. Not a consultant with a slide deck. An embedded operations partner with a seat at the table and ownership of the operating rhythm.

About the fractional COO partnership

How we work

The ladder every engagement climbs.

01
Enter the RoomGo where the work happens. Watch it, don't ask about it.
02
Read the RoomListen to the people doing the work, in confidence.
03
Map the RoomFollow how information and decisions actually move.
04
Name the GapSay the true thing, privately first, with the chain of evidence.
05
Reset the RoomBuild the system with the team that has to live in it.
06
Run the RoomStay embedded until the change holds without you.
An honest note before we start

Sometimes the root is leadership. Including yours.

Run the Rooms traces problems to their root. Sometimes the root is a process. Sometimes it is a structure. Often it is a leadership pattern. If we find that, you will hear it privately and directly before it appears in any report.

Hiring us means agreeing to hear it. We say this on the first call because finding out at the proposal stage is a gift for both of us.

The question we ask on every discovery call

“If the assessment finds that leadership is part of the constraint, how do you want to hear that?”

The answer tells us both whether this is going to work.

Ashley Bourgeois, founder of Run the Rooms About the founder

Ashley Bourgeois

Ashley spent her career inside one of the most operationally complex organizations in the country. At Pacific Gas & Electric she managed a $22 million budget and the coordination of crews, resources, and work programs across a utility serving millions, where a scheduling failure is not an inconvenience. It is an outage.

That work taught her what most consultants learn secondhand: the distance between how leadership believes work gets done and how it actually gets done is where organizations lose their money, their time, and their people.

More about Ashley and how we work

Next step

Start with a 30-minute conversation.

No pitch. We ask what made you reach out now, what you have already tried, and what it costs if nothing changes. You leave with a clear next step or a clean no.