How I Built a COO Agent with GPT-4 to Run My Fractional Marketing Business

About The Author: Katie Perry, a fractional marketing leader, specializes in corporate and brand marketing, commercial strategy, and business development. She works with B2B clients ranging from startups to enterprise businesses. Featured in outlets like The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and Forbes and a speaker at Nasdaq and Advertising Week, she shares how AI tools help streamline and grow her business.

Running a fractional business demands a lot. You’re delivering for clients while juggling the business operations that keep everything moving. There’s scope to manage, deadlines to hit, invoices to send, and growth to plan. 

As your fractional business grows, scaling yourself becomes a necessity. One common approach is to start hiring people, effectively building out an agency. But there’s another option.

This is where AI tools can come in.

Fractionals, like anyone else, need systems. And while hiring more team members sounds great to some, I’m taking a different approach. I’ve been testing out custom AI tools and agents for the better part of the year, so I decided to play around with the concept of creating a custom “COO Agent” for my business using GPT-4. 

I wanted this tool to help me manage my business—everything from tracking client scopes to prioritizing tasks and optimizing my time. It took some time to set up, but it’s surprisingly effective, and, in my view, worth every bit of effort. Here’s how I did it.

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Why Fractionals Need a COO (Even an AI One)

The operational side of your business matters. Without a plan, you’ll overcommit, miss deadlines, or spend hours chasing clarity you could have had with better organization. Fractional work means wearing every hat—strategist, executor, bookkeeper. And while you might thrive in the work, running the business part might not come as naturally to you.

At a larger company, the COO oversees daily operations, ensuring efficient processes that align with the company’s goals and strategic vision. They focus on driving KPIs like operational efficiency, revenue growth, and customer satisfaction through activities like process optimization, team management, and cross-departmental coordination.

Fractionals can use this role, too. Fortunately, tools like GPT-4 are customizable and fully affordable. For $30/month, you can educate and train a custom AI agent that knows everything about your business and help you be more efficient.

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Step 1: Preparing & Structuring Your Data

Before you start building your COO agent, you’ll need to give it a foundation. AI works best with context, and the better the information you feed it, the more useful it becomes. Think of this step as creating an operational blueprint for your business.

Before evening opening GPT, I created a main document where I did a data dump containing key information about each of my committed clients and projects

Here’s what I included:

Client Profiles

Document the scope of work, hours allocated, deliverables, and the type of engagement for each client (strategy, content creation, or otherwise).

Include nuances like communication preferences (casual or formal) and feedback expectations.

Schedules

Note recurring meetings: days, times, and frequency.

Future Goals

Outline what each client is trying to achieve—scaling, maintaining stability, or hitting specific milestones.

Remember to Add Yourself as a Client

Treat your own business as a client. Document tasks like invoicing, bookkeeping, and business development, and estimate how much time these take each month.

Don’t Forget Advisory Roles and Other Obligations

Include any advisory work: hours per week, compensation (equity or otherwise), and scope.

This document became my COO agent’s knowledge base. Not for nothing, putting pen to paper on all of this was also a very helpful exercise on its own.

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Step 2: Setting Up the Agent in GPT-4

I used GPT-4’s custom prompt builder to create my agent. I called it “COO Agent” and gave it a clear job description:

• Manage client scopes, workload, and operational tasks.
• Help prioritize work and identify time-saving opportunities.
• Serve as a thought partner for scaling my business.

I uploaded my operational document file and provided additional context about my business, including how I structure engagements (retainers, projects, or hybrids) and key workflows. This setup gave the agent the perspective it needed to start helping immediately.

Make sure to save the contextual information you provide (document, other notes) in Canvas when using GPT. This will ensure you don’t have to re-enter the background information each time you use the tool.

Note: You may save more time by simply uploading contracts and SOWs. I opted to take the time to create the custom brief, though, because I wanted to capture details and nuances not included in the agreements, for example, meeting schedules and client expectations around communication style, frequency of status updates, and preferred formats.

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Step 3: Conducting a State of the Business Audit

The first task I gave my COO agent was to audit my business. The prompt:

"Assume you’re a new COO stepping into this company. It’s week one. Prepare a memo on the state of the business, including the total number of clients, total hours allocated, remaining bandwidth, total income expected, and the average hourly rate based on scoped hours and income."

The output:

• A breakdown of my time across clients.
• My blended hourly rate. 
• Insights into whether I had capacity for more work—or was already overcommitted.

This exercise was straightforward but invaluable. It confirmed that I was underestimating how much time my operational tasks (invoicing, business development) were taking and reinforced the importance of treating myself as a “client” in the scope.

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Step 4: Managing Time with a Modular Weekly Schedule

Next, I asked the agent to help me map out my time:

"Based on my recurring meetings and deliverables, create a modular weekly schedule. Block time for client work, include buffer time for unexpected tasks, and make the plan flexible enough to adjust."

The agent delivered a day-by-day breakdown:

• Specific blocks of time for client work.
• Existing meeting commitments.
• Buffer windows for rescheduling or last-minute tasks.

I then applied this recommendation to my aggregate calendar tracker. I have many different client emails and aliases, so I use the Motion app to map them in one place. There are probably ways to use AI to automate the mapping step, but I went ahead and filled the blocks in manually on my calendar.

I customized this further by:

• Color-coding work blocks and meetings by client.
• Adding visual cues (📝 for work blocks, 📅 for meetings).
• Setting everything as recurring to create a repeatable weekly template.

Now, my calendar gives me a clear game plan for the week ahead. All the events are set as recurring, so I don’t need to think about what I am working on and when. Of course, things come up and schedules need adjusting, but from this starting point you’re simply dragging and dropping content blocks around. It’s structured but flexible—perfect for someone managing multiple clients.

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Step 5: Identifying Efficiency Opportunities

Now that I had my business audit and schedule, I wanted to see if the tool could generate some ideas around how I could be more efficient. You could ask a general tool to give you similar information in a standard, non-customized prompt, but for me, I wanted the tool to understand the nature of my work and my clients when giving me recommendations.

"Knowing my business and workflows, give me recommendations for ways to streamline, automate, or save time. Think big."

The agent suggested:

• Reusable templates for client updates, proposals, and other recurring tasks.
• Automation tools for invoicing and scheduling.
• AI-powered solutions for summarizing notes and drafting content.
• Task batching to minimize context switching.

Some ideas were obvious. Others were things I hadn’t thought of but implemented immediately. The result? I’m spending less time on repetitive tasks and more time on high-value work. These recommendations also yielded additional workstreams – helping me actually create the templates on a client-by-client basis, for example.

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Exploring AI Agents for Fractionals

My COO Agent is a $30/month investment (the cost of GPT-4’s subscription), but the value it’s delivered is far greater. These tools are accessible for most fractionals, offering a smart, scalable way to manage your business.

Beyond the COO agent, I’ve also used GPT-4 to create:

• A Writing Assistant: Trained to draft copy in my voice, cutting down on revision time.
• A Research Assistant: Designed to gather and summarize insights quickly.

For fractionals, AI agents like these can act as force multipliers, helping you focus on the work that moves the needle while automating the rest.

This is just the beginning. I’m experimenting and refining as I go, and I’d love to hear from others doing the same. If you’re using AI to streamline your fractional business—or have ideas to offer up—reach out. Let’s compare notes!

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‍And if you’re looking to hire a fractional leader across one of 10+ different function areas, that’s what Fractional Jobs is for (the site you’re reading this on). Feel free to get in touch at hello@fractionaljobs.io