Institutional-grade operations leadership. Built for professional services firms.
For accounting and professional services firms that have outgrown their operating infrastructure.
Free · No commitment · Immediate download
Most professional firms reach a point where the operational infrastructure they built to get to where they are is no longer adequate for where they're going. The signs are familiar.
Contracts auto-renew. Vendors get comfortable. Nobody owns the renewal calendar. The stack grows through addition, never subtraction — until costs are materially higher than they should be and nobody knows exactly what you're paying for or why.
Technology decisions get made in the moment — by the partner who knows someone, the office manager who researched options, the IT vendor whose proposal landed first. The result is a stack assembled by circumstance, not designed for where the firm is going.
Nobody sat down and designed the operating model. It evolved. Workflows exist because that's how it's always been done. Vendor relationships persist because switching feels risky. There's no owner of the infrastructure as a whole — and everyone feels the friction, but nobody has the mandate to fix it.
The firms that feel this most acutely are usually the ones doing well — growing fast enough that the gaps have started to matter, but not yet large enough to justify a full-time COO and CTO. That's exactly who Anthracite Advisory is built for.
Fractional COO & CTO services for accounting and professional services firms
Anthracite Advisory is the practice of Joseph Narvaez — a technology and operations executive who held the CTO and COO roles simultaneously at a regulated investment management firm for over fifteen years. He built the technology stack from inception, ran operations, managed vendors, oversaw compliance readiness, and led the teams responsible for making it all work. The stakes were real. Control gaps had consequences. Vendor decisions had to be defensible.
That experience spans both sides of the house: technology infrastructure, cybersecurity, and systems architecture on one side — operations, vendor oversight, service provider management, and governance on the other. Professional firms get both, integrated, from a single advisor who has done it at scale.
What kept drawing me to professional services firms was a consistent observation: the problems were familiar, the judgment required to solve them well was genuinely hard to access, and the gap between what these firms had and what they needed was entirely closeable. Anthracite Advisory exists to close it.
"Professional firms deserve the same caliber of operational thinking as an institutional investment manager — without needing to build a full leadership team to get there."
Each tier is designed to stand alone or sequence naturally into the next. Most clients begin with an Assessment and never need to look elsewhere.
Every engagement follows the same sequence. Each step earns the next — and most retainer relationships begin with a single Assessment.
We map your current state — vendors, workflows, costs, control gaps. You receive a clear diagnosis and a prioritized blueprint. Most clients find enough savings to cover the engagement fee in year one.
We execute the blueprint. Vendor selection, contract renegotiation, stack redesign, workflow modernization. You get infrastructure that fits where your firm is going — not just where it is today.
We stay in the room. Quarterly reviews, renewal negotiations, automation improvements, and scaling advisory. A fractional operating partner who knows your infrastructure and knows what good looks like.
The right starting point is a brief call — not a proposal. If we can help, we'll tell you what that looks like. If we can't, we'll tell you that too.