An operations practice for PE- and VC-backed companies
Embedded operations leadership.
Senior ops horsepower without a full-time COO. I embed with your team, own outcomes, and leave behind systems that outlast the engagement. Operator, not consultant.
Engagement modes
Three ways to work together
Embedded part-time, ongoing
Senior operating leadership woven into your week: in the meetings, on the numbers, accountable for outcomes alongside your team.
Between leaders
Keep momentum through a transition, or build the case and the foundation for your first full-time COO while you hire deliberately.
Defined scope, specific outcomes
A procurement diagnostic, a margin-leakage fix, a KPI system stood up. A clear mandate with a finish line and a measurable result.
What I do
Stabilize. Build. Scale.
The operational backbone of a scaling business, built in three moves.
Stabilize
Stop solving the same problem every Monday.
- Cost structure and margin diagnosis: growth often masks margin opportunities
- Reactive operations to repeatable systems: processes that hold without heroics
- Retention and performance management: keep your best people, raise the floor on the rest
Build
Stand up the functions nobody got around to.
- Procurement and vendor functions from scratch: leverage you're leaving on the table
- Operating rhythms and KPI systems: make performance visible and inevitable
- AI and automation in workflows: your team should be solving problems, not clicking buttons
Scale
Grow revenue without growing costs linearly.
- Multi-site and international expansion: replicate what works across locations
- Unit economics and cost-to-serve: optimization that shows up in the P&L
- Customer experience infrastructure: turn retention from hope into a system
Results
Representative outcomes
The pattern: diagnose fast, fix with the team, leave a system behind.
Revenue growth as COO of a tech-enabled logistics business, roughly $20M to $200M
Gross margin added via pricing discipline and billing & collections accuracy
Procurement savings in key categories, with nearly 10% across the full spend base
With missed SLAs cut by more than half, via a data-driven operating system
Ben Kozy
Founder & Operator, OpsRay
Naval Academy engineer and Navy nuke, Columbia MBA, former McKinsey Engagement Manager, and most recently a startup COO who helped scale a tech-enabled freight forwarder 10x, from one US office to a dozen global offices, while standing up an AI- and analytics-driven operating system.
I now spend my time helping PE- and VC-backed companies stabilize, build, and scale their operations: embedded with the team, accountable for outcomes, whether fractional, interim, or project-based.
My approach blends disciplined execution from the military, analytical rigor from consulting, and hands-on operator judgment from years inside high-growth environments. I like hard problems and believe most operational complexity is addressable.
Based in Redondo Beach, California. Off the clock, I'm an avid runner and usually at either a local park or the beach with my wife and two daughters.
Have an operations problem worth solving?
The first conversation is a free working session, not a pitch.