Jade Truong · Operating Number Two to Founders

Who this is for

You are growing fast. Your people are carrying the change.

Headcount doubled, new leaders arrived, and the way the company works has not caught up yet. More decisions route through you, and the handoffs between teams take a little longer every month.

You have the capital, the traction and investors who believe in you. You want the next stage to feel as good as the last one.

You sit on a board or hold a portfolio, and you see a strong company starting to strain. You want it steady before the next raise or milestone.

The gap

Growth stretches the connections between your people.

Every new hire, leader and team adds another handoff. The relationships that once carried the company start to thin.

Some people see only their own function, and they report what is visible from that seat.

Others see the whole picture and keep it to themselves, because they are not sure it is safe to say. So the room stays polite and the friction stays in place.

What holds underneath is usually one of three things. A culture that has not caught up with the headcount. An architecture the company is outgrowing. Or processes designed for a smaller team.

None of them appear in a status report. Caught early, each one is a quick fix. Left alone, the company starts organizing itself around them.

Client feedback

She immediately identified a $2M monthly revenue leak that multiple teams had argued about for months. She cleared the bottleneck by asking one very pointed question we were all afraid to ask the C-suite in front of their board of directors, which forced them to let us resolve it under her leadership.

Sandra Williams

VP Sales Operations. Her engagement paid for itself ten times over.

How it works

Three moves. In this order.

No deck. No templates. No agenda. One aim: the highest and best outcome for everyone at the table.

One

Cross every aisle

I meet with anyone and everyone. Every function, every level, from the executive floor to the people carrying the work, and the outside parties nobody thinks to ask. At Xbox that meant sixteen functions daily.

Nothing is sacred, but everything is protected. What is said reaches you clean, without names attached and without blame or shame. That is why people tell me the truth they have been sitting on.

Two

Find the root cause

We get to the root cause. What it costs you every quarter, which symptoms you can stop paying to treat, and the deeper issues in play underneath both.

You walk in with fog. You walk out with clarity, and with the breakthrough that lands.

Three

Hand it back

The solution comes from the people already living in it, because they are the ones who will run it after I leave. You get the sequence: what to repair first, what to change now, what to retire, and decisions pushed back out to the people doing the work.

Why the usual fixes stall

Every fix lands on the same missing piece.

A deck and templates arrive with a clean plan. The people who have to run it were never in the room, so the plan stays on the page.

Internal reviews come from good people inside one function. Each one sees the problem from their own seat, and the whole picture never comes together.

Another senior hire arrives talented and alone. Their first year goes to learning the people, the history and the unspoken rules.

A new platform solves the problem it was designed for. The friction between your people stays right where it was.

More tooling eases the pressure for a quarter. Then the numbers drift back, because trust is the piece still missing.

I work on that missing piece: trust, safety and autonomy. I find the people who actually know, give them room to decide, and hand the answers back so your company runs without needing me in the room.

What I do for a founder

You stay in your zone of genius. So does everyone else.

I’m both an advisor at the top and an operator inside the organization. I listen to the founders, investors and leaders at the top, and I listen to the people doing the work. Then I bridge the gap between them.

I partner deeply with you, so you stay in your zone of genius. Your CFO, CTO, CMO and every department stay in theirs. I connect them so the whole company moves fluidly toward its best possible result, and every person lives up to their potential.

When someone says “that’s impossible,” I toss the ball back: “If you see a puzzle here, what would your solution be? Let’s play with that.” I listen deeply, reframe it in the simplest terms, and let the people closest to it own the answer.

I partner with a CEO who holds the vision and a finance lead who holds the numbers. I hold the people and the operation together.

Client feedback

She asked each of them point blank what caused them the greatest pain, and whether solving it would be enough to give automation another try. Inside three days she automated eight team processes with our longest-serving experts. Because they drove the solutions, they were thrilled.

Christian Peterson

On an operations automation initiative

In practice

Three rooms that say who I am.

A reorg

Eight department heads, one honest hour

I was asked to get eight department heads in line behind a communication mandate in the middle of a reorg. I walked in, named what everyone was thinking, and took every demand off the table. Then I asked what was really hurting, listened as their advocate, and carried their anonymous feedback to the senior vice president.

He backed his teams in good faith. The teams stabilized, a real rhythm of business rolled out, and the knowledge sharing followed on its own.

A 12-branch surgical group

A spa day for the most sensitive part of the body

Eye surgery frightens people. I redesigned the whole experience around that fear: recliners, spa waters and teas, soft light, robes and weighted blankets, a stuffed animal to hold, and a caretaker who held each client’s hand from consultation through aftercare. The only clinical room left was the operating room.

The full story

It started with five professional athletes. We paid for their surgery and walked them through the whole experience. They loved it, and they sponsored us.

Once a week we held an aftercare night: sparkling water, champagne and high fives from their caretaker, the receptionist, the surgeon and the call center staff. Any issue in the first year was covered free of charge.

The call center became a spa too: nap pods, a fountain, soft music, softer colors, a pod each person decorated as their own safe space, a monthly massage for every employee, and surprise quarterly bonuses once profits rose.

Call center turnover fell 60%. The price moved from $299 to $2,999 per eye, and profit rose more than 230%.

Key-person risk

Lunch with the expert

A critical engineer held knowledge nobody could back up. I took him to lunch, my treat, and learned about his life and his family. Then I asked who covers for him if something ever happens.

He walked me through the backup order and process, because he knew I meant the care that came with the question.

Current practice

I use the tools I recommend, every day.

I keep current with the latest models and work inside them daily, for clients and for my own operations. The systems themselves, in production, with people using them every day.

I have been at the bleeding edge of technology since the start of my career, and I am endlessly curious. I practice what I advise. That is the only reason I can tell you what is worth automating, what is nowhere near ready, and what should never be handed to a machine at all.

Platforms delivered

A Chief of Staff application, CRM systems, and internal and external platforms, taken from architecture through launch and adoption. I have carried the consequences of my own design decisions.

Automation in strategic execution

Lead, vendor, and partnership processes running live. The unglamorous places where companies quietly lose weeks every quarter, and where the failures are instructive.

Applied research

Investor research systems that surface what matters before the meeting. Diligence gathering that used to take days now arrives ahead of the room.

The record

Handed the impossible. Delivered anyway.

$1.18BValue delivered

$3.5BProject value managed

Nearly 100Companies

11Industries

230%

Profit increase

Promoted from VP Operations to COO to Interim CEO of a 12-branch surgical group. Repositioned from $299 to $2,999 per procedure. Revenue up $4.2M, $3M in savings.

80%

Support calls automated

Led 19 teams through the Nuance and Dictaphone merger. Natural language IVR from concept to certification and launch in four months, with churn contained through the transition.

$579

Authority at the front line

AT&T care representatives could resolve up to $2,000 per customer without escalation. The average stayed around $579, and the one rep who went over it had found the company triple billing her customer. The bottleneck was approval, never capability.

100+Teams aligned

Microsoft. 100+ teams and 50 department heads behind 38 product plans and a three-year global roadmap, approved at the top of the company.

1,528Retained of 1,800 hired

AT&T Sacramento. A call center workforce recruited, trained, and onboarded in six months, alongside the care support portal and the technology requisition system that equipped them.

$650MeBay Mobile revenue

Revenue reported the year after the engagement, up over 200%. First iPhone application and a thirteen-country revamp in six months across twenty-four teams.

$200MXbox division profit

Certification, licensed content, micropayment, and indie producer strategy, with the execution framework and full roadmap across 20 teams.

2 daysFrom thirty

Webex. Support backlog cut from a month to two days through automated outage messaging and a restructured escalation path. Satisfaction up 58%. International corporate retention up 23%.

Teams and clients: Microsoft · eBay · PayPal · AT&T · Nuance · Webex · Xbox · iPass

Read the case studies

Jade Truong

Founders bring me in when the company starts changing shape.

Microsoft. AT&T. eBay. Nuance. Xbox. iPass. A twenty-three company investment portfolio. Thirty-nine stealth and first-round startups. A surgical group run as COO and interim CEO. A nonprofit co-founded that opened five boarding schools for children rescued from trafficking.

I see patterns fast, and I learned the hard way that being right too early costs people. So I listen first, and we get there together.

Trust is power. Power is execution. Execution is the outcome.

Where I do my best work

Beside a CEO who knows the janitor’s name.

A healthy, growing company that cares for its people
A seat as the operating number two: COO or VP of Operations
Real conversations, in small rooms and one on one
San Jose, the Bay Area or Orange County, on site or hybrid

Client feedback

Employee turnover was killing us. Her analysis identified three core issues we had not even thought about. She worked with us top down on the first two and taught our team how to automate the third. Turnover dropped from 28% to 13.8% within eighteen months.

Margaret Chen

Chief Executive Officer

When the company changes shape

I know why the template feels safe.

When your company is changing fast, a template feels like solid floor. You can see it, it looks good in a board deck, and nobody’s feelings are involved.

So I make my work as clear as any system, and a lot more open.

A published method. Relational authority first, and fast: two weeks with everyone I can reach. Then I find the real issue, strengthen the trust underneath it, clear the first blockage with solutions your teams lead themselves, and hand the answers back.

Published prices. They’re on this page, below. No discovery call to find out what it costs.

Something you can hold. A one-page summary within 48 hours of our first session: the real issue, the reframe, and your first three moves.

Measured the way your board measures. Revenue, profit and churn against your milestones.

Designed to run without me. Teams at Microsoft were still adopting my frameworks after I’d gone.

The safety you’re reaching for comes from people who trust each other enough to tell you the truth. That’s the solid floor, and it’s the work I do.

Client feedback

What the people who hired me wrote afterward.

What surprised me most was the level of initiative you took to reach out and investigate best practices across other divisions throughout Microsoft, and to distill a great deal of our company’s wisdom into a practical best practices strategy in a compressed period. Two teams in Windows and a program management group want to adopt the framework you developed as a solution for their own planning. You have made a real impact here.Bill Shaunnessy
General Manager, Microsoft
The Book of Insights is the most thorough and solid start to the planning process for a multi-year release roadmap that we have had to date. Synthesizing the inputs across our entire organization during a time of shift may not have been the easiest project, but you kept our departments focused on the end goal. As an aside, my communications team informed me you had taught them new strategies for our own communications. Where did you find the time?Blake Irving
MSN / Windows Live Platform, Microsoft
She managed four major program initiatives simultaneously in a year with unbelievable success rates across the board. Consider her if you are looking to streamline business systems, synthesize a vision, or have a program that needs a champion to drive it forward. All of her work was exceptional, and she achieved results far beyond our expectations in every initiative.Abhisht Arora
Product Organization, Windows Live, Microsoft
She emerged as a solutions-oriented individual with cross-departmental insight, developing a hiring and onboarding process at scale, then filling gaps across IT and facilities so the center was ready for launch. The skill to bridge the gap between collaborative leadership and function made her an excellent facilitator between our department heads. She works with a high level of integrity, openly gives credit where due, and seeks practical solutions that stand the test of time.Scott Sanford
Director of Customer Care, AT&T Wireless
Together with her board we formed NomaData, where we delivered the first SaaS practice management and marketing platform. Her vision back then is very similar to what I have seen Salesforce and other companies go on to create. She is a visionary with enough savvy to figure out who the real experts are and empower them. If you can dream it, she seems to be able to take it farther than you imagined.Kenny Flegal
Technical Architect, NomaData
She caught the one bottleneck we didn’t see. She understood bottlenecks before we had the definition for them. The missing piece was not process. It was whether new people felt safe enough to speak up, meet anyone, and offer an idea. The changes in our business were immediate.Jen Nguyen
On an automated onboarding system

Ways to work together

Start with one real conversation.

Start here

$500

Let’s Really Talk

90-minute diagnostic session

Diagnostics, with no pitch. You bring one real issue you’re grappling with. I listen, ask the questions no one has asked yet, and reframe it until the real problem and the simplest path are clear.

Within 48 hours you receive a one-page summary: the real issue, the reframe, and your first three moves.

The fee is credited toward an Operating Reset booked within two weeks.

Book the session

From chaos to ease in 30 days

From $15,000

30-Day Operating Reset

One company, one month

For the first two weeks I listen in, tune in, and meet everyone I possibly can. Then we clear the easiest blockage standing between your people and their zones of genius, with real solutions your teams lead themselves, so they have the autonomy to thrive.

You feel the relief, and a new kind of trust in your teams.

Ask about a Reset

Monthly, in your corner

$3,500

In Your Corner

Per month, advisory

For founders and CEOs who want me on call without a fractional seat. Two 90-minute working sessions a month, a one-page summary after each, and direct access by message in between.

Month to month. Bring the issue while it’s still small.

Ask about In Your Corner

Fractional and ongoing

From $10,000

Your Number Two

Per month, fractional

I partner with you as your number two: the teams, the customers and the operation, held together so you stay in your zone of genius.

Fractional to start, with a path to a full-time seat when it feels like home for both of us.

Ask about Number Two

Chaos to Ease

Grow fast. Stay whole.

Stories and lessons from nearly 100 rooms: what’s really going on underneath, and how founders and companies find their flow.

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Let’s talk

Tell me what’s changing in your company.

Let’s see what it’s like working together. Tell me a little about it here, and I’ll reply personally.