Rules for Success with Susan Fennema

Jun 3, 2026 | Rules for Success

Rules for Success Susan Fennema

 

Here’s our interview with Susan Fennema, Chaos Eradicating Officer of Beyond The Chaos, speaker, and co-author of Your Business Is Holding You Hostage and Efficiency Amplified: Maximizing Business Value, on her rules for success.

Susan Fennema has spent her career doing something most people cannot see: walking into businesses that look successful on the outside and finding the exact place where the owner got trapped. The business grew. The team grew. The revenue grew. And somehow, every decision still lands on the same desk. Her work is not about adding more tools, more meetings, or more motivation. It is about building the operational structure that lets a business run without the owner as the bottleneck.

What makes her story specific is the combination. She is both the visionary and the operator, a rare configuration that most entrepreneurs either cannot do or have never tried. She built that ability by sorting buttons into color-coded rows on the floor as a three-year-old, by running operations at an ad agency for a decade, and by eventually deciding she would rather serve multiple business owners than keep rebuilding one at a time. Since 2016, that decision has become Beyond the Chaos, a fractional operations firm that has worked with more than 250 businesses.

 

Background of Susan Fennema

Susan Fennema did not arrive at operational excellence through a course or a certification. She arrived there through decades of being the person in the room who could not stop seeing how things could work better. At three years old, while her mother sewed, she sorted buttons by color, size, and quantity, building small visual graphs on the floor. She did not know what a process was. She was just doing what came naturally.

That gift followed her through a journalism degree, which taught her to write with precision and economy, and into a ten-year run as Director of Operations at an advertising agency. She became the right-hand person for small business owners again and again, not because she was told to, but because the role kept finding her. She was the one who saw the gaps, filled them, and built systems that held when she was not in the room.

In 2016, after years of doing that work for others, she made the decision to build something of her own. She launched Beyond the Chaos as a fractional operations firm, and COVID eventually gave the industry a name for what she had already been doing: fractional COO. The firm now serves clients across industries, deploying a small, highly structured team that works across multiple businesses simultaneously, giving each client the feeling of a full-time operator without the cost of one.

Her firm’s approach starts with a simple but disciplined question: what is actually on the owner’s plate, and which of those things should not be there? From that audit, Beyond the Chaos builds the systems, installs the tools, fills the operational roles, and in some cases hands owners back enough space to remember why they started the business in the first place.

In this episode of Rules for Success, Susan Fennema shares his insights with Joseph Varghese about the moment business success becomes a prison, and how delegation done with trust, structure, and kindness is the operational key to breaking out of it.. 

 

Questions and Discussions with Susan Fennema

Here’s a bullet-point summary of the questions and discussions from our interview with Susan:

 

1. How Susan Fennema Built a Career Around Operational Instinct

  • Process orientation was not learned. It was innate from childhood.
    • At age three, she sorted her mother’s buttons by color, size, and quantity on the floor
    • She built small visual graphs with buttons before she had words for what she was doing
  • A journalism degree added precision and economy to her natural systems thinking
    • Writing succinctly translates directly into building clear, usable process documentation
  • Ten years as Director of Operations at an ad agency gave her practical operational depth
    • She was consistently the right-hand person for small business owners throughout her career

 

2. Why Susan Started Beyond the Chaos in 2016

  • In 2016, she chose to serve multiple owners rather than rebuild trust inside one business at a time
    • She had already worked from home for six years and refused to return to a traditional job
    • The fractional model allowed her to have greater impact across more businesses simultaneously
  • COVID eventually gave the industry a name for what she had already been doing: fractional COO
    • The language shift helped her better position and communicate the value of the work
  • The firm currently runs with a team of four highly structured fractional operators
    • Each team member serves multiple clients concurrently, creating a full-time presence on a part-time cost basis

3. The Pattern Susan Fennema Sees in Every Overwhelmed Business Owner

  • Owners feel isolated, as if no one else is experiencing what they are going through
    • The reality is that the pattern is nearly universal among small business owners
  • The business grew because the owner was exceptionally good at their craft
    • Success created more clients, more people, more decisions, and more weight on the owner
  • At a certain point, the owner is no longer running the business. The business is running them.
    • They have likely ruined themselves for traditional employment
    • They cannot walk away, and they do not know how to build themselves out of the situation
  • Recognizing that the problem is common and that a solution exists is the first step out of burnout

4. The Case Study: From Burnt-Out Owner to Acquisition

  • A client came to Beyond the Chaos already burnt out. She had waited too long to ask for help.
    • She had been told she needed an integrator but was still handling everything herself
  • Beyond the Chaos first simplified and restructured her technology stack
    • Moved her from Asana as a CRM to a proper CRM and migrated her to Teamwork.com for project management
    • Added automation and set up budget tracking for better business data
  • The team then stepped into multiple roles simultaneously: fractional ops manager, chief of staff, and HR support
    • The business scaled to 50 people during the engagement
  • The owner took three months of near-complete operational distance and recovered her energy and love for the business
    • She returned to focus on growth and marketing, then successfully sold the company

5. How to Start Delegating When You Do Not Know Where to Begin

  • Start with the two easiest questions: what do you hate, and what are you genuinely bad at?
    • Remove those things from the owner’s plate first
    • Early wins build confidence and appetite for further delegation
  • Then identify what should not be on the owner’s plate at all, even if they are capable of doing it
    • Admin-level work that is consuming strategic time is a common target
  • Match the role to the actual need, not just the most obvious hire
    • Virtual assistant, project manager, ops manager, chief of staff, and integrator are all different roles
    • Cycling through five or six virtual assistants and calling it a failure usually signals the wrong role was hired, not that delegation does not work
    • Project managers follow process. They do not write it. Those are different functions requiring different people.

6. Delegation Requires Structure, Not Just Trust

  • Delegation without documentation does not work
    • If the information only lives in the owner’s head, no one can meet their expectations
    • Most people want to do a good job. They fail when expectations are never made clear.
  • Getting information out of the owner’s head is the operational foundation of a scalable business
    • Tools like Fathom for call recording, Claude for process generation, and project management platforms all support this
  • A business that depends entirely on the owner cannot be sold
    • Buyers are not purchasing a job. They want a business with systems and a team that functions independently.

7. Susan Fennema on AI as an Operational Tool, Not a Replacement

  • Beyond the Chaos uses Claude as their primary AI tool for process documentation
    • Record a process conversation using Fathom, send the transcript to Claude, generate the first draft of the process
    • Human review then focuses on streamlining, not starting from zero
  • AI is still better at documenting processes than streamlining them
    • A payroll client had a 20-page process document. Beyond the Chaos reduced it to two pages and saved roughly $3,000 a month in labor costs.
    • That kind of operational analysis still requires a human eye
  • The biggest AI benefit is enabling work that would otherwise never get done
    • Susan used Claude to reposition her firm’s offerings and pricing in days instead of months
    • Claude Cowork now automates the end-of-week client summary emails that previously required hours of manual work across ten clients
  • AI resistance is not new. The same arguments were made about the internet in 1993 and the computer before that.
    • If you are not using AI, you are falling behind every minute

8. Building a Team with Clarity, Standards, and Grace

  • Hiring requires knowing what role you actually need, not just that you need help
    • Personality assessments like High Five can be useful during hiring if you know what you are looking for
    • Using them as a replacement for deeper evaluation produces inconsistent results
  • Delegation requires that the team understands the owner’s vision and the expected end result
    • Withholding information out of fear of competition or replication almost always backfires
    • Most people who want a job do not want to own a business
  • Give team members the same grace as you give yourself
    • Owners fail regularly and do not fire themselves. Apply the same standard to the team.
    • Chronic failure in the same area is an accountability issue. A single mistake is part of the learning curve.
  • Taking work back from a team member does them an injustice
    • It removes their chance to succeed and trains the business to stay dependent on the owner

9. Removing Bad Fits Is an Act of Leadership

  • Keeping a poor performer on the team is not kind. It affects the entire team.
    • Leadership that comes from a place of fairness and kindness will naturally know when to let someone go
    • Helping someone move to a role where they can succeed is also an act of care
  • The goal is not to punish underperformance but to protect the team and the standard
    • One client complaint may be the client. Four client complaints is a pattern that needs action.
  • AI and automation raise the stakes on accountability
    • Quality control over AI-generated output is now a leadership function
    • Teams that are not trained on brand voice and standards will produce output that is off-brand at scale

10. Daily Structure as a Business Strategy

  • Susan anchors her days with consistent routines at both ends
    • Morning ritual includes spiritual reading and a calm breakfast with no multitasking
    • Movement, whether walking the dog or going to the gym, is part of the structure, not optional
  • She does not subscribe to the 4 a.m. grind culture
    • Efficiency comes from combining activities where possible, not from adding hours
  • Transitioning from work to home life is a designed practice, not an accident
    • She cooks dinner as a creative, family-oriented activity that signals the shift out of work mode
    • A half-hour blocked lunch break is non-negotiable every day
  • Calendar blocking is how intention becomes reality
    • Time blocked in advance is time protected from reactive demand
    • Sleep is the start of the next day. Going to bed at a reasonable time is an operational decision.

 

Today, Susan Fennema continues to grow Beyond the Chaos with a small, tightly structured fractional team that serves business owners who have built something real and are ready to stop running it from the inside out. Her focus has not shifted: find the operational gaps, build the structure, and give the owner their business and their life back.

Her co-authored books, Your Business Is Holding You Hostage and Efficiency Amplified: Maximizing Business Value, are available for business owners who want to go deeper into the operational frameworks she and her team apply. Both reflect the same practical, no-nonsense approach that has defined her work across more than 250 client engagements.

If you want to work with Susan Fennema or learn more about her books, visit https://beyondthechaos.biz.

 

💬 Notable Quotes

“So many of us feel like we’re isolated, like there’s no one else like us, like we are suffering through something no one else understands. And I’m going to tell you: there’s a world of us out there, and we all feel the same way.” — Susan Fennema
“You started because you were great at that trade. And now you’re buried under the weight of success.” — Susan Fennema
“Some people even feel like the business is running them. They’ve become a servant to it, which is not what any of us started our businesses for.” — Susan Fennema
“Start with the two easiest questions: what am I not good at at all, and what do I hate doing? Start offloading those.” — Susan Fennema
“If you’re just throwing it out there and hoping it turns out the way you want in your mind’s eye, I guarantee it’s not going to.” — Susan Fennema
“Give your team the same grace that you give yourself. As business owners, we fail all the time. We don’t fire ourselves. We clean ourselves up and do it again.” — Susan Fennema
“I believe you’re doing your team member an injustice if you take their work back. You’re not allowing them to succeed.” — Susan Fennema
“If the information only lives in your head, no one can ever meet your expectation. Nobody can ever do the job you want them to do.” — Susan Fennema
“A business that relies 100% on you, nobody wants to buy that job. They are essentially buying a client list and some employees. That’s not a business.” — Susan Fennema
“It has come out of the shell and it is not going back in.” — Susan Fennema (on AI, drawing a parallel to the resistance she faced when advocating for the internet in 1993)
“If you’re not using AI, you are falling behind every minute.” — Susan Fennema
“The difference between documenting a process and streamlining a process. I don’t think AI has quite gotten to the point of being able to do that yet.” — Susan Fennema
“There is a way out. It does take delegation. It does take finding someone who can help you navigate this journey. It also takes realizing you’re not alone.” — Joseph Varghese

 

🙌 Connect with Susan Fennema

 

🎧 Listen, subscribe, and leave a review! Let’s get 1% better each day. It adds up.

Let’s #DareToPlayBigger, together.

If you want more structure, accountability, and real momentum in your own business journey, explore Success Circles and connect with your own one-on-one Momentum Braintrust Buddy.

Connect with your own one-on-one Momentum Buddy.