// COO time-back calculator

The dollar value of every reporting hour.

Plug in your COO loaded cost and the hours they spend stitching dashboards. The math runs live. The comparison against a fractional AI Ops Department is at the bottom of the page.

// Inputs
$280,000
$100,000$600,000
6 hr
1 hr30 hr
$35,000
$0$100,000
1
05
$85,000
$50,000$150,000
Hours back to your COO this year
300 hr
6 hours a week across 50 working weeks. At a loaded COO rate of $135 an hour, that is $42,000 in opportunity cost recovered.
COO hourly loaded rate
$135
annual / 2080 hr
Weekly reporting cost
$808
hourly × hours/wk
Annual reporting cost
$42,000
weekly × 52
Additional hires cost
$110,500
headcount × salary × 1.30
AI Ops annual cost
$96,000
single monthly retainer
Year-1 saving
$91,500
current motion minus AI Ops
// vs Fractional AI Ops Department
Your current motion
$187,500/ year
COO hours + dashboard tools + 1 additional ops hire
AI Ops Department
$96,000/ year
Single retainer, COO time freed, 300 hours returned
Year-1 saving
$91,500
Effective hourly for AI
$320/hr
// What now?

Six hours a Sunday is a senior salary nobody books.

If the numbers above look right and the gap is meaningful, apply for a 14-day ops sprint. If you want to talk through the loaded cost assumptions first, see how the department runs.

Apply for an ops sprint →See AI Ops Department →
// How the math runs

COO hourly rate: loaded annual cost divided by 2,080 working hours. A $280K loaded COO lands at $135 an hour. A $400K COO at a larger team lands at $192. Use your own loaded number for an honest figure.

Hours returned annual: weekly hours times 50 working weeks. We assume two weeks of vacation. If your COO does not get vacation, the bill is worse, not better.

Additional hires cost: base salary times 1.30 covers benefits, equipment, software seats, and management overhead. This is the same loaded factor used in every honest finance model for headcount planning.

Dashboard and BI tools: Looker, Tableau, Metabase, Notion dashboards, Mixpanel boards, Geckoboard, Domo, Power BI. The graveyard usually adds up to $30K to $50K a year of licensed software that is not in active use. Add what you actually pay.

AI Ops comparison: $8K monthly retainer for the full ops function. Source consolidation, live dashboards, auto-narrative weekly note, anomaly flags, Slack copilot. Live in 14 days. Same kind of output a $130K finance analyst produces, on a fraction of the budget, without the eighteen-month tenure risk.