Frequently asked questions

Scale Impact charges £375-575 a day, on a sliding scale based on your organisation’s income – smaller organisations pay towards the lower end. A defined piece of work like the Operational Maturity Assessment starts from £700. You’ll always know the day rate and the number of days before anything starts, and there are no hidden extras. Most fractional arrangements run to a few days a month, so senior operations support typically costs a fraction of a full-time hire.

A fractional operations lead gives you senior operations leadership for a few days a month, without the cost or commitment of a full-time hire. In practice that means translating strategy into plans people can act on, fixing the systems and processes that have grown messy, building reporting your board and funders actually find useful, and giving the leadership team someone senior to think with. At Scale Impact this is the Impact & Operations Partner engagement, which runs from three to twelve months. There’s a fuller explanation in What Is a Fractional Head of Operations?

The clearest sign is that work which used to be simple now needs workarounds – information lives in several places, and nobody is quite sure which version is right. Other signs: spreadsheets multiplying, the same data typed into more than one tool, reporting that takes days rather than hours, new starters taking weeks to learn how things really work, and too many decisions still waiting on one person. If several of those sound familiar, your systems were probably built for the organisation you were, not the one you’ve become. The free self-assessment will show you where the strain is concentrated.

For most organisations of 5-50 people, a specialist who has worked inside charities and social enterprises will get you further, faster. Corporate frameworks tend to assume budgets, teams and data you don’t have, and their day rates are usually far higher. A sector specialist understands trustees, restricted funding, funder reporting, and what it’s like to run a small team stretched across many roles – so recommendations arrive sized for your reality rather than scaled down from a corporate template. Large consultancies come into their own for mergers and programmes far bigger than most mission-led organisations ever need.

It’s a structured assessment, delivered over two to three days, that benchmarks your organisation across six dimensions of operational maturity – governance, finance, people, systems, impact measurement and strategy-to-operations alignment – and costs from £700 on a sliding scale. You get a facilitated session with your leadership team, a scored maturity scorecard, a prioritised development roadmap, and a written report you can put in front of your board or funders. If you’d rather start smaller, there’s a free self-assessment that uses the same six dimensions and takes a few minutes.

Scale Impact works with charities, NGOs and social enterprises of roughly 5-50 people, across the UK from bases in Glasgow and London. It was founded by Luke McBeath Smith, a fractional operations lead and strategic advisor. Recent work includes supporting SaniTap as it scaled from five people to sixty, giving AIM Progress an integrated data stack that runs on under £5,000 a year – with sixteen years of impact finally evaluated – and moving Inherently Human from scattered tools onto one Microsoft 365 backbone. You can read more on the case studies page.