Michael Krowne. Operator.
Twenty years inside founder-led companies. Currently running four of his own.
My first company was a web shop I ran out of my bedroom in the late 90s, building sites for small businesses and a few Napa Valley wineries. I was sixteen. I've spent every year since then operating inside companies, almost always at the same moment in their life: the point where they'd built something real but the structure to support it hadn't caught up.
For most of that run I was the number two. The operator a founder brings in to actually make the thing work. That's how I ended up at Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner's Charity Network, running Prizeo and then Charitybuzz. Prizeo was a celebrity sweepstakes platform bleeding seven figures a year when I got there. Inside twelve months it turned its first profit since Cuban and Wagner had bought it. They moved me over to Charitybuzz, the auction side, to do it again.
Then the CEO of Charity Auctions Today came looking. He'd gotten a piece of advice from Dan Martell: find the leading company in your industry and go recruit their second-in-command. That was me. I went over to run the turnaround and added seven figures in new revenue in year one, mostly by finding income the business was walking past every single day.
Before all of that, the New York LGBT Community Center hired me to look at Cycle for the Cause, a big AIDS-fundraising bike ride from Boston to New York that had stalled out. I rebuilt how it asked people for money and grew it five times over. It's still going.
Today I run four companies of my own, all serving the addiction treatment industry: a growth marketing agency, a SaaS platform that automates ad buying for treatment centers, a private community for the people who run those centers, and my personal practice, where the coaching and writing live. The agency, Faebl Studios, has helped more than ten thousand people get into treatment and driven over $300 million in revenue for the facilities we work with, growing 50%-plus a year for four years running.
The Krowne Company is where I take everything I've learned doing this and bring it to one or two founder-led businesses a year that need it.
Not a consultant. An operator.
I'm not a consultant, and the difference actually matters. Consultants deliver a recommendation and leave. Operators own the outcome. When you bring me in, I'm in the exec meetings, I'm in your Slack, I'm in the weekly standup. I'm in the building.
The model is the way good fractional work has always worked: a small roster, deep relationships, real accountability. One or two clients at a time. Twelve months is a normal arc, but I scope in 90-day blocks, because that's the honest unit of real change. Anyone promising a transformation in 30 is selling something.
I'm also a sober entrepreneur. That's the foundation under everything I've built, and it doesn't show up in the work the way you might think. It shows up in how I show up: consistent, direct, allergic to BS, steady when things are on fire. If you want that part of the story, it lives at michaelkrowne.com.
A quick note on conflicts: I run a marketing agency that serves the addiction treatment industry. This practice operates above the agency layer, takes engagements outside that space, and doesn't sell agency services. If a conflict ever shows up, I name it immediately and we sort it out together.