Saif Akhtar

Working with me

Hiring a fractional operator should not feel like a leap of faith. Here is what an engagement actually looks like, from the first week.

• Weeks 1 to 2: Plug in and find the bottleneck I join your Slack and your standups, get access to your CRM and analytics, and audit your positioning, pipeline, and lifecycle end to end. In these first two weeks I complete two things. First, an analytics pass: I check what your tracking, attribution, and CRM data actually say, where the instrument panel is lying or missing, and I set a baseline snapshot of your funnel before anything changes, so later results can be measured against where you started. Second, a round of conversations: you and your leadership, the people on your team closest to the customer, and, with your introductions, customers themselves, including recent wins, deals that stalled or were lost, and accounts that churned. Then I come back with a short written plan: what is broken, what I would fix first, and what it should produce. No 60-slide deck, and no rebuilding your stack for the sake of it.
• Weeks 2 to 4: Build the first systems and ship I build inside your existing tools: pipeline stages that reflect reality, outbound and lifecycle programs that actually send, reporting a founder can trust. I do this work myself, with AI-assisted tools and agents where they help, so progress does not wait on a roadmap or a hiring plan. If you already have a team, I work through them and with them.
• Ongoing: A cadence you can see Weekly priorities, a short written update on what shipped and what is next, and the numbers that matter in one place. You always know what I am working on, what it is producing, and what I need from you. Engagements run 10 to 20 hours a week, remote across the US, or in-office and hybrid within the San Francisco Bay Area.
• How you will know whether it is working You should not have to take my word for it, so I report against the baseline from week one. The scorecard I keep with you covers, depending on your motion: pipeline created and qualified meetings booked; conversion at each stage of the funnel, and how fast deals move through it; outbound performance, reply and meeting rates, not just emails sent; and lifecycle indicators such as activation, expansion, and churn signals. You also get a simple log of what shipped each week, and a check on the data itself: how complete your CRM records and attribution are, because decisions are only as good as the numbers under them. If something is not moving, the report says so, and says what I am changing next. The first version of this scorecard is part of the weeks 1 to 2 baseline, so effectiveness is never a matter of opinion.
• When it wraps: You keep everything Everything I build is documented as a playbook your team can run without me: the systems, the processes, and the reasoning behind them. If a project needs more hands than I have, I can also plug in a small team of trusted advisors and contractors I have worked with for years. The goal is a revenue system that keeps running, not a dependency on me.

Tell me where growth is stuck. I read everything myself, and I will tell you plainly whether I am the right person for it, and who is if I am not.

Work with me

Track record

• Co-founder and COO, Horizon Labs Marketplace development agency and official Sharetribe Expert Partner, building client marketplaces since 2019.
• Co-founder and COO, SimplyHRA ICHRA benefits administration platform for small employers, quoted on ICHRA in BambooHR News.
• First employee, OrionCKB First hire (2012 to 2014); helped grow the team from 2 to 30. Tinuiti acquired the agency in 2017, after my time there.
• VP Operations, Intellus.ai Part of the founding team (as Cresance, an Alchemist Accelerator and StartX company). Built the GTM and RevOps playbook the company used toward its first enterprise demos.
• Investor and accelerator co-founder, Pakistan Co-founded the 10xC accelerator and was founding COO of Planet N Group, backing early-stage startups across fintech, commerce, and media, partnered with AWS, IBM, Microsoft, and Google.
• Fractional growth work, Nostra.ai and PolymerSearch Reported to Rand Owens, now Head of Marketing at GrayMatter Robotics.
• Education B.S. Mechanical Engineering, San Jose State University, 2011.