Nat Portman Fractional COO | Operations & Growth Consultant

The business you built isn't the business you're running...

Working with digital rewards businesses — including cashback, reward, voucher and gift card platforms — to remove operational bottlenecks, automate manual processes and build operations that scale.

Former Head of Client Operations at Quidco.com Scaled operations across 4,200+ merchant partnerships and 30+ affiliate networks.
20+ Years
Experience
UK & Global
Collaboration
Project or
Long-Term Support
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Nat Portman at work with laptop

Engagements are limited — I work with a small number of businesses at any one time.

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Most businesses don't have a performance problem. They have a clarity problem — and somewhere between strategy and delivery, something is getting lost that nobody can quite name.

Before we talk about your business

Answer three questions most leadership teams avoid.

1

If an investor reviewed your business tomorrow — would they invest with confidence, or see operational risk hidden behind impressive revenue?

2

If your revenue doubled over the next 12 months — would your business scale, or simply require more people?

3

If your most experienced people left tomorrow — would your business continue to perform, or would critical knowledge leave with them?

The Way I See It

As companies scale, the processes, systems and structures that once created success can quietly become the barriers holding growth back.

I look across the whole operating model — the end-to-end customer journey and the people, processes, systems and cross-functional teams behind it — to find where complexity, misalignment or inefficiency is quietly holding performance and growth back.

Designed for

Established organisations already operating at genuine operational complexity — leadership teams responsible for scaling businesses where operational decisions have significant commercial impact. Not designed for early-stage businesses still searching for product-market fit.

  • Affiliate publishers, cashback platforms, reward and voucher businesses — my primary specialism
  • Established operational teams, not solo founders
  • Based in the UK or internationally — engagements are conducted remotely

Who I Work With

Affiliate publishers, cashback, reward and voucher platforms — the businesses I know from the inside.

Affiliate Publishers — Cashback, Reward & Voucher

My primary specialism. Large customer bases, merchant partnerships, affiliate tracking, validation workflows — the operational demands of publisher-led businesses, from the inside.

Teams Working in Silos

Finance, sales, ops, customer service — information that should flow freely instead gets stuck, duplicated, or lost between departments.

Complexity That's Crept In Quietly

More markets, more partners, more moving parts than there used to be — and the systems and processes haven't quite kept pace with how much has changed.

Profitable, But It Could Run Better

You're not in survival mode — the numbers are solid. But you know there's friction, waste, or missed opportunity a fresh, outside perspective would catch.

You Can See the Ceiling Coming

Growth is happening, or about to — but the way the business actually operates hasn't kept pace with the ambition, and something needs to change before it becomes a real constraint.

4,200+ Retailers Overseen
£500K+ Secured for Clients
20+ Years of Experience
600+ Independent Merchants
Portrait of Nat Portman

About Nat

Twenty years working inside businesses that were scaling faster than their own infrastructure.

I've spent two decades embedded in high-growth, founder-led companies — not observing from the outside, but doing the actual work of making complex businesses operate better. I know what it costs a business when the operations don't match the ambition. I know how to find it, name it, and fix it.

Read how I think →

No agency overhead. No team to manage.

You work directly with me — not an account manager, not a junior analyst. The person who does the diagnostic is the person who delivers the findings.

Genuinely independent.

No software to sell. No methodology to push. No commercial interest in any particular outcome. My only interest is in giving you an honest picture of your business.

An outsider's clarity. An insider's fluency.

Close enough to understand the complexity. Far enough removed to spot the opportunities that are easy to miss from the inside.

Built on real-world experience at scale.

Not theoretical frameworks. Two decades of working inside businesses with real teams, real customers, and real operational complexity.

Engagements are limited — I work with a small number of businesses at any one time.

The clearest view of your business is one conversation away.

Book an Investigation Call

Selected work

What changes when the real problem is named.

Recent work across affiliate and adjacent sectors. Sectors and shapes disguised; the numbers are real.

  1. Affiliate publisher · £8M revenue

    Reduced operational drag across marketing and finance by ~30%, freeing the founder from day-to-day approvals within one quarter.

  2. Additional experience across other sectors — available on request
  3. DTC brand · £4M revenue, 25 staff

    Removed a hidden £180k/yr cost of duplicated work between Ops and Customer Success — no change in headcount.

  4. B2B SaaS · £12M ARR

    Diagnosed why revenue doubled but profit didn't. Two structural fixes returned ~9 points of contribution margin over two quarters.

  5. Founder-led marketplace · pre-exit

    Restructured decision rights so the CEO could step back for a six-week diligence window without the business slowing down.