What is an Integrator, and does your practice need one?

Two seats, one founder

Wickman’s argument in Rocket Fuel is that growing businesses are led by two very different kinds of person, and that most founders are only one of them. The Visionary has the ideas, the big relationships, the feel for where the market is going and the energy to start things. The Integrator makes those ideas happen: they run the leadership team, convert the vision into a plan with owners and dates, hold people to it, remove obstacles and integrate the parts of the business into a whole.

In an accountancy practice the founder is almost always the Visionary. They also tend to be the biggest fee-earner, the person the best clients want to see, and the one whose name is above the door. That is three jobs already. Adding a fourth, running the firm, is why the operational side of most practices is done in the gaps: the weekly meeting is cancelled when a client deadline lands, priorities set in January are half-done by March, and the issue about review bottlenecks has been raised at every partners’ meeting for two years.

None of that is a character flaw. It is a seat left empty because the person who should sit in it is already sitting in three others.

What the Integrator actually does in a practice

The role is easier to see as a set of rhythms than as a job description. In a firm running on Traction, the Integrator is accountable for:

• The weekly leadership meeting. Ninety minutes, same day and time each week, run to a fixed agenda: scorecard, quarterly priorities, headlines, to-dos, then most of the time on identifying, discussing and solving the issues that matter. The Integrator chairs it, which means the Visionary does not have to.
• The quarterly priorities, or rocks. Three to seven for the firm and one to three per leader, set each quarter and reviewed every week. The Integrator makes sure they have owners who are not the founder, and that they are either done or honestly declared not done at the end of the quarter.
• The scorecard. Five to fifteen weekly numbers with an owner and a target each. In a practice that usually means jobs delivered on time, work in progress, lock-up, capacity used, fee recoveries, new clients won and clients lost. The Integrator makes sure the numbers exist, are read before the meeting rather than built during it, and trigger action when they go off track.
• The issues list. One list in the open, worked in priority order, where an issue is solved and dropped, scheduled, or killed. The Integrator’s job is to keep bringing back the ones that matter until they are closed.
• The accountability chart. A seat for every function the firm needs, a name in every seat, and an honest view of whether each person gets the role, wants it and has the capacity for it. The Integrator keeps this current and raises the difficult conversations it produces.
• Integration. Accounts, tax, audit, payroll, bookkeeping and admin operating as one firm with one way of onboarding, one workflow and one standard, rather than five teams with five habits.

Signs the seat is empty in your practice

• You chair the weekly leadership meeting yourself, and it is the meeting most often moved or cancelled.
• Quarterly priorities get set, and roughly half get done, usually the ones you owned personally.
• The leadership team reports to you in the meeting rather than running the firm with you in it.
• The same three or four issues have appeared on the agenda for more than a year.
• Your leaders know their targets in the sense that they were told them once, not in the sense that they see them every week.
• You have read Traction, agreed with most of it, and implemented the parts that did not need someone else to run them.

The last point is the common one. The book is persuasive and the tools are simple. What it does not supply is a person whose job is to keep the rhythm when the Visionary’s attention moves on, which it is supposed to.

Integrator, COO, practice manager: which is which

The three overlap and are frequently confused, so it is worth being precise. A practice manager coordinates the day to day: rotas, systems admin, onboarding paperwork, the office. Essential, but it operates below the leadership team, not across it. A COO is a broader operations role that designs and builds how a firm runs, on whatever method the firm chooses; Optivo’s Monthly COO is that role on a retainer. An Integrator is a COO-level seat defined by a specific operating system, Traction, and measured by its rhythm: meeting held and rated, rocks done, scorecard on track, issues closed. If the firm is on Traction, or ready to be, the Integrator label is the right one. If it is not and does not want to be, ask for a COO and skip the vocabulary.

Three ways to fill the seat

Optivo offers the third option: Andy Jackson sits in the Integrator seat on a monthly retainer, runs the weekly meeting, owns the rocks, scorecard and issues list, and keeps everything in the firm’s own portal so it stays when the engagement ends. Optivo is independent of and not affiliated with EOS Worldwide; if you already work with a certified Implementer, the two roles complement each other.