Seed → Series C Startups

Your churn won't wait
for a six-month exec search.

Fractional Chief Customer Officer, embedded in your team and backed by an AI platform I built. Senior post-sale leadership before you're ready for the full-time hire. Measurable results from week one.

22% → 7%
Churn Reduction
85% → 115%
NRR Improvement
+20% Faster
Time to Value
The Problem

When growth speeds up, retention falls apart

You closed the deals. Built the product. But customers keep leaving, and nobody knows how to stop it.

📉

Churn is eating your growth

You spend $50K+ to acquire each customer, then watch them walk after 8 months. Your board is starting to notice.

$50K+ CAC wasted per churn
🔥

Your CS team is firefighting

No playbooks. No health scores. No early warning system. You find out about churn when the cancellation email hits.

Zero visibility into at-risk accounts
💸

You're not ready for a full-time CCO yet

Most Series A-C companies need senior CS leadership before the budget supports a full-time hire. The work cannot wait, but the burn rate cannot absorb a full executive package either.

Stage-appropriate leadership, week one
The Solution

You get the executive and the platform

Not advice on a slide deck. A battle-tested CS leader who taught himself to build production AI, and has the working system to show for it.

👤
Fractional CCO
The Executive

25+ years of C-suite customer success leadership, from Oracle to high-growth startups, embedded in your team at a fraction of the cost.

CS org design & hiring strategy
Churn root-cause analysis & remediation
NRR & expansion revenue playbooks
Board-ready CS metrics & reporting
Team coaching & process documentation
Executive Business Reviews (EBR/QBR)
🧠
CCOPilot.ai
The Lab

CCOPilot.ai is where I learned to build modern AI, by shipping it: 15+ agents, predictive scoring, and automated EBRs, designed and built end to end by me. It's not a product I sell. It's how I stay sharp, and it's why the AI guidance you get from me comes from experience instead of theory.

Predictive health scoring & risk alerts
15 AI agents for CS automation
Automated EBR/QBR generation
Workflow orchestration engine
Customer journey & lifecycle tracking
ROI & value realization dashboards
🤖
AI Operating Model Advisory
The New Muscle

Trying to figure out where AI actually fits in your customer organization? I build production AI systems every day, so this isn't theory. I'll get real AI-assisted workflows into your team's hands: agent-drafted renewal briefs, automated executive summaries, health signals that surface their own alerts. Available as standalone advisory or built into a fractional engagement.

AI readiness assessmentAgent & workflow designCost-to-serve modelingHands-on team enablement
CCOPilot.ai

I didn't read about AI in CS. I built it.

CCOPilot.ai is my working lab: the production-grade platform I built end to end to master modern AI engineering. Explore what's inside, then imagine what that skill set does for your team.

Under the Hood

What building it taught me

Every feature above forced a real architecture decision. This is the AI engineering I learned by shipping, not by reading about it.

Agent Architecture

15+ autonomous agents with tool-calling contracts, confidence-aware escalation, and human-in-the-loop approval before anything touches a customer.

RAG & Retrieval

A dual-mode assistant grounded in a curated knowledge base, with retrieval scoped per tenant so answers stay accurate and never leak across organizations.

Multi-Provider LLM Ops

A centralized LLM service layer with provider abstraction. Model migrations handled behind one interface, weighing cost, latency, and quality per workload.

{ }

Prompt & Output Engineering

Structured output contracts, template systems, and fallback handling, because a prompt that works in a demo is not one that survives production.

Predictive Signal Design

Composite health scoring and churn prediction that aggregate product usage, support sentiment, engagement, and billing into signals a human can act on.

Multi-Tenant Architecture

Tenant isolation, role-based access control, and per-tenant feature flags. Every capability keyed to the organization, nothing hardcoded to one customer.

🛡

Security & SOC 2 Posture

Secrets management, audit logging, CSRF protection, and cross-tenant isolation testing, designed with a CISSP holder's paranoia from day one.

Full-Stack Integration

React, Node.js, PostgreSQL, and Prisma wired into the messy real world: OAuth, Stripe, Twilio, calendar and meeting intelligence, and email deliverability.

How It Works

From diagnosis to results in weeks

01

Diagnose

Deep-dive into churn data, customer journey, team structure. Root causes identified within two weeks.

02

Deploy

Playbooks, health scoring, and AI automation go live fast, accelerated by tooling I've built and documented so it all stays with your team.

03

Scale

Optimize, measure, and build the self-sustaining CS engine. When ready for a full-time CCO, I help you hire and transition.

Proven Results

Real numbers. 25 years of operating seats.

Outcomes from the executive roles where I ran post-sale: Oracle, Tanium, Manta, Onapsis, and data.world. The same playbook I now run fractionally.

Customer Churn
22%7%
Net Revenue Retention
85%115%
Time to Value
Baseline+20%
MTTR
Baseline-15%
🚀

Seed / Series A

PMF but no CS function. Foundation needed fast.

📈

Series B

Growth is real but churn scaling. Investors asking about NRR.

Series C

Enterprise-grade CS ops needed before next round.

🔄

Turnaround

Churn is a crisis. Need someone who has done this before.

What People Say
M&A Case Study Real engagement, real exit

Manta → Acquired by IBM

Built the entire CS organization from zero, implementation engineering, TAM, and professional services. IBM's due diligence cited the CS org as a key asset in the acquisition.

96.5%
CSAT Score
80
Employee NPS
+20%
Faster TTV
Read the Full Case Study →
Your Fractional CCO

I've built this before.
Multiple times.

25+ years leading Customer Success, Professional Services, and Support, from Oracle's enterprise CS division to high-growth cybersecurity startups. Two successful Fortune 500 acquisitions (IBM and ServiceNow).

I also built CCOPilot.ai because I got tired of watching startups manage customer health in spreadsheets.

These days I split my time between client engagements and building. I write production AI systems every day, which means the AI-augmented operating model I bring to your team is one I actually run, not one I read about in a newsletter.

Book a CallEmail Me
Shane James
Shane James
Fractional CCO & Founder
Reduced churn 22%→7%NRR 85%→115%2 Fortune 500 exits
📍 Apollo Beach, FL
📖
Author Buy on Amazon →
"Your Customers Are Lying to You: How AI Exposed Everything Wrong with Customer Success, and What to Do About It"
Want the first chapter free? Email me →
Hiring a VP of CS or CCO?

Run me in parallel with your search

That search will take four to six months. Your churn will not wait. I can be embedded 10 to 15 hours a week, delivering results while you interview. Either way, you win.

🗓️

I start Monday

Health scoring, risk alerts, and save plays go live while your recruiters are still screening resumes. Results in weeks, not quarters.

🤝

If we click, search over

Plenty of fractional engagements convert. You get months of a working interview instead of a gamble on a stranger's references.

📦

If not, clean handoff

I help you evaluate finalists, then your new hire inherits playbooks, health scores, and documented systems instead of a blank page.

Talk Through Your Search →

Stop losing customers you didn't need to lose.

Book a 20-minute strategy call. No pitch, no pressure, just an honest look at your churn data.

Book Your Strategy Call →
or watch the 2-minute pitch →
⏱ 20 minutes📋 No commitment📞 (813) 666-8427