Colton Weeks: a career of enterprise delivery, applied to businesses that have to run.
years helping Fortune 500 companies modernize how they operate.
Thoughtworks, as Lead Consultant and Delivery Principal. Technology, retail, automotive, airline, financial services, healthcare and digital platforms, in several countries and at every level of an organization.
Since then, operating work rather than advisory: fractional COO at 10Xnewco until it wound down this year, fractional COO for my family's food business, and operating leadership inside a non-profit food services department. That means being accountable for whether the operation runs on a Tuesday, not just whether the software shipped.
I replaced the system that department runs on. In production about a month after the first commit, refined for three more. 35,858 lines of application code, 11,299 lines of tests, 418 merged pull requests and 1,059 commits, on my own. It is in daily use and they own it: the repository, hosting and domain sit in their accounts, not mine.
The enterprise years left the tools I still use: systems and design thinking, requirements gathering, change management, value-stream mapping, continuous improvement. What changed is that the client is now a small business rather than an enterprise, from founders working alone to companies of about 200. Concierge is the system I run my own practice on, Case Study Zero.
Colton Weeks
Fractional COO. AI advisory and implementation.
- Thoughtworks, Lead Consultant and Delivery Principal
- Industries: technology, retail, automotive, airline, financial services, healthcare, digital platforms
- Fractional COO, a family food business
- Operating leadership inside a non-profit food services department, current
- Certified Agile Coach
- Certified Scrum Master
- PMI / PMP certified
- 35,858 lines of application code and 11,299 of tests, solo, on one production system
- 418 merged pull requests and 1,059 commits, one contributor
- Live systems in daily operational use, with backups, CI and documentation
Where I'm not the right call.
Pre-revenue, or looking for a co-founder.
I work on businesses that already have customers and cash coming in.
A business in trouble.
If the next ninety days are about survival, you need a turnaround person, not a measurement.
You want hands, not a method.
If what you need is someone to take tasks off a list, hire that. I'm here to change how the work runs.
You want it bought and installed this week.
I measure first, and that takes one to two weeks. If that's too slow for the decision in front of you, say so and I'll tell you what I'd do in your place.
You need a high-throughput distributed platform, hand-built.
I haven't built one. The systems I've personally built and maintained are single-tenant, for small teams, at modest scale, and that is a deliberate choice about the size of business I serve rather than a ceiling I'm hiding. My enterprise experience is in leading and delivering programs at that scale, not in personally writing them. Tell me which of the two you need and I will tell you whether I am the right fit. If the job is bigger than me, I'll say so and tell you who to call.
What the practice stands on.
The mission is simple: bring enterprise-grade systems, and the practice that keeps them running, to the businesses that could never buy them before.
Measure before we touch.
Nothing changes until it's been listened to and measured. The Current State Assessment ships as a finished piece of work you keep, and you decide what happens next.
Leave the method behind.
The goal is never dependence. Every engagement ends with the playbook, the documentation, and the practice in your hands.
Reversible by design.
Live systems stay live. Changes are staged, reviewed, and undoable. Nothing is auto-applied to real data, least of all by an AI.
Calm is the outcome.
The point of a system is the attention it gives back. If the work doesn't lower the load on the person running the business, it isn't done.
Some jobs are not mine.
Some problems aren't mine to solve, and I'll say so on the first call. A cheaper answer early beats an expensive one late.
Show the wrong turns.
Every case study includes what went wrong and what it taught. Work with no wrong turns in it is marketing.
Where I am in this practice.
I am early in this practice under my own name, and still building the public client list for the Current State Assessment. That changes the deal in your favour: a senior person does the work personally, the fee is fixed, and the assessment is yours to keep whatever happens next.
For more than 30 years I've modernized how organizations work, from global enterprises to the businesses on main street. The scale changed. The standard didn't.
Enterprise delivery across seven industries, several countries, and every level of an organization, now available through one person.
Start with the Current State Assessment.
A short call first, to work out whether there's something here worth measuring. If there isn't, I'll say so.