An operating lead · currently Emily Ho
You need the seat filled now. The search will take five months.
An operating lead embedded in your team, two or three days a week, owning a piece of the outcome. Currently Emily Ho. A named seat with a written mandate and a set scope, not open-ended advice — senior operating leadership in Asia without the full-time hire. Bilingual in English and Mandarin, based in Hong Kong.
One written mandate, agreed before the start
Monthly retainer · start with a project
English / Mandarin
Start with a project. Keep the operator on a retainer.
Most work starts as a short, fixed-scope project, so you can see how we work. When it goes well, the same operator can stay on a monthly retainer, embedded in your team, owning one piece of the work end to end. Specialists join when the work calls for them. A management consultancy will place an interim at a day rate through a firm you never meet; here the person who scoped the work is the person in the seat. You continue because it's working, not because you're locked in.
One mandate, owned end to end.
The mandate
One piece of the outcome, written down
Agreed before the start: what the seat owns, what it answers for, and what would make it end. Not a list of services you pick from.
The cadence
Two or three days a week, inside the team
Your Slack, your weekly check-in, your meetings. The work happens with your people rather than arriving as advice.
The continuity
The person who scopes it runs it
No handover to someone you have not met. Specialists are named, by agreement, per scope when the work calls for them.
The review
Every quarter, scope can move
The mandate is re-cut or ended on a set date. You continue because it is working, not because you are locked in.
Common questions.
What is a retainer with Signal Collective?
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The operating lead works inside your team every month, owning the mandate you agree on rather than advising from the outside. They join your Slack, run your weekly check-in, and answer for the outcome.
Most retainers run a set number of days a month. Specialists are named, by agreement, per scope when the work calls for them. The person who scopes the mandate is the person who runs it.
Do we have to start with a project?
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Usually, yes. Work starts with a short, fixed-scope project, so you can see how we work. When it goes well, the same operator stays on a monthly retainer. You're not locked in. You continue because it's working.
Do you work in both directions — Asia and the West?
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Yes. We work with Asian brands launching in the US and Europe, and Western brands setting up and selling in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia. Bilingual in English and Mandarin, based in Hong Kong, working across New York and Sydney.
How long does a retainer run, and can we stop?
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Retainers are monthly. We review scope and cadence every quarter so the work can grow or shrink with what you need. There's no long lock-in past the initial scope.
What's included, and what's out of scope?
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The operating lead runs the agreed work end to end, in both languages, with a named specialist brought in by agreement when the work needs one. What the seat owns is written into the mandate, not listed on a page.
Out of scope: regulated work that needs a licensed local firm (legal, tax filings, statutory audit), media budgets, and staff hired onto your payroll. We coordinate with those partners. We don't replace them.
How is this different from hiring a full-time COO?
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Cost, speed, and reversibility. A permanent hire takes months to find and is hard to unwind; a fractional seat starts in weeks and is reviewed quarterly. The full comparison is here, and if the term itself is new to you, here is what a fractional operator actually does.
Five months is not a pause. It is five months of decisions made by nobody.
The seat being empty does not stop the work arriving. It routes it to whoever has capacity, which is rarely whoever has the context.
01 · Decisions default upward
To people with less context and less time
Things that should be settled at the seat get escalated to a founder or a board. They get answered, slowly, by people who were never close enough to answer them well.
02 · The team routes around the gap
The permanent hire inherits the workarounds
Five months is long enough for the workarounds to set. The person you eventually hire arrives into a shape built around the absence rather than the role.
The seat can be filled now and searched for properly at the same time. Those are not competing decisions.