Operator · Fractional Executive · Consultant
Chief Operating Officer, operations manager, consultant. Twenty-five years running operations across six industries — an international NGO, live events, pub and music venues, a record label, web agencies, education — and in business for myself since 2008. Different rooms, same job.
Operations
A business that used to run fine has stopped, and everyone inside it is too close to say why.
I've run operations as a COO, an operations manager and a consultant — a national venue operator, a record label, web agencies, live music venues in Bangkok, and seven years inside World Vision Australia building a youth movement from nothing. Plus the operations behind a 750-delegate international conference in Beijing.
What I'm hired for is unglamorous: find out why it's broken, decide what gets fixed first, and stay accountable while it happens.
Send me the bottleneck in a paragraph. I'll tell you whether I'm useful and what I'd do first. No call, no pitch. If I can't help, that's the reply you'll get.
Music
A two-way bridge between Asia and the West, and a network that took two decades to build.
I've brought Saosin, Simple Plan, Tiny Moving Parts and Hawthorne Heights into Thailand. I ran artist relations for Defiance Entertainment and event operations for AB Entertainment Asia, and handled artist visas for Rolling Loud 2024. I'm a member of the Worldwide Independent Network's APAC Alliance.
COO of an independent hip hop record label, and I launched the music media outlet that ran alongside it. I've built and run events for fifteen thousand people and done most of the jobs in the room doing it — front of house, monitor engineer, live production director, right up to event manager. Livestreaming shows since 2009, before the platforms offered it. I still spend a lot of my time managing a mate's band and thinking: why is this so hard? It shouldn't be this hard.
This side runs through Lemon Squeezy Digital, my Thai company — Asian artists heading west, Western artists heading into Asia. Artists, managers, labels and distributors all end up at the same door, so tell me which one you are and we'll skip the part you already know.
Tell me where you're stuck. If I'm not the right person, I'll point you at who is.
AI
Everyone says you should be using AI. Almost nobody will tell you where it doesn't pay for itself.
I don't advise on this from the outside. I run FL3P, an Australian agency that implements it — real deployments, in production, this month. Which is exactly why I'll tell you when the honest answer is to leave a process alone.
Nobody gets replaced. Your people keep every judgement call and the machine takes the repetitive work. If you need AI because the board asked for AI, there's a fair chance I'll talk you out of it.
Tell me the task that's eating your team's week. I'll tell you whether AI actually helps. Including when it doesn't.
Why the range is the point
Specialists know one industry's answers. I've solved the same problem in a venue, a boardroom, a label and a codebase — it's nearly always the same problem wearing different vocabulary.
Which is why I get called after the obvious answer has already been tried. If the obvious fix hasn't been tried yet — try it. I'm expensive for obvious.
Where the twenty-five years went
Worth saying before you write
You already know what to build. Then you want a contractor, and they'll be cheaper than me. I'm useful while the decision is still open.
You need a yes. I'm not it. If I think the plan is wrong I'll say so in the first conversation — which is either exactly what you want, or exactly what you don't.
How I think
In practice it means I hold the whole system in my head at once and notice the join between things that look unrelated. It's why the three above are one job rather than three careers — and it's usually the part people end up hiring.
Getting started
All of it ends in a conversation. Fifteen minutes will tell you more than this page can.
aaron@aaronwinning.com