My work has grown and changed significantly since I first incorporated with the name Max Wenneker Consulting two years ago. What started out as operations and scaling consulting for two-sided marketplace startups has expanded over time to include a fractional COO service supporting the busy founders of all types of pre-seed, seed, and Series A companies. While the work has expanded and shifted, it has ultimately boiled down to two main themes: simplicity and efficiency for founders and their companies.
To better align the brand with those themes and the problems I am solving for founders of early-stage startups, I’ve decided to rebrand. I’m excited to announce that Max Wenneker Consulting is now SimplifyCOO! SimplifyCOO continues to offer the same great service (though I am admittedly a little biased) that I always have doing fractional COO work for busy founders at pre-seed, seed, and Series A startups. And the company will continue to offer these services with no long-term commitment required.
Some things besides the name are new too:
Logo
New name, new logo! The MW with a checkmark will be relegated to the status of vintage SWAG and anywhere it’s posted on the internet that I’ve forgotten to update. If you’re looking for the deeper meaning behind the new logo, I’m sorry to disappoint you. In the interest of efficiency (that is my entire business, after all), I paid someone on Fiverr the tidy sum of $25 and asked for something unique and consistent color-wise with the previous branding.
Packages
Historically, I have sold my work in hour chunks. For X amount of money per month, you get Y hours of my time per week. That time was flexible between weeks (startup life is anything but consistent, after all), so long as it generally averaged out.
This setup generally worked well, but it had one problem that I felt was inconsistent with the offering I was making to founders: it required them to figure out how to fill my time. Any founder will tell you that’s probably the last thing they want to deal with. Doubly so when they’re specifically hiring someone to free up their time.
The other challenge that this setup inadvertently created for founders was that they had to reach out to find out about my pricing. Again, I felt I needed to put my money where my mouth was: I’m trying to save founders time. They should know pricing up front.
With this rebrand, I am switching to a package model, with pricing published directly on the site. Instead of paying for my time and figuring out how to best fill it, now you pay for specific activities to be taken off your plate. Let me worry about how much time those things take. The packages range from basic day to day business operations of payroll, accounts payable/bills/cash management, and systems access for employees (the “Remove My Distractions” package), to more complex work like equity grants, team prioritization and planning, team member onboarding, and legal service and bookkeeper management (the “Bring Order to My Chaos” package), all the way to an integrated executive doing interim team management, performance management, company strategy development, and strategic vendor implementation and management (the “Be My Right Hand” package). Of course, every company is a little bit different, so I will still offer custom packages that are bespoke to founders wanting a little bit more personalization.
What isn’t changing about the packages is that I’ll continue to offer no long-term commitments and speedy onboarding. And what isn’t changing about the service is that I will still feel like a part of your team.
Are you a busy founder? I’d love to chat.
As the founder of a startup or the owner of a business, you have a lot on your plate. You are HR, Finance, Marketing, Legal, Compliance, and Operations, sometimes all in the same day. Not to mention that you’re responsible for keeping the company pointed in the right direction and achieving its goals. Keeping all those balls in the air is a full-time job, and often that leaves very little room for doing the one thing you actually wanted to do when you started this business: solve a real problem for real people. Whether you’re building a SaaS tool for hospitals to find nurses for open shifts, or running an HVAC business managing the air quality of large office buildings, you probably didn’t start your company so you could spend a whole day figuring out how to pay contractors in a legally compliant way, or a whole week designing a performance management plan for an underperforming employee.
Want help getting back to what you love and making your company perform better than ever? Let’s talk.
