About Cliff B. Carnes
Cliff Carnes Is a Fractional COO, Principal of BCC Group, Board Member & Advisor, and Operations Executive With Decades of Leadership Across Capital Markets, Finance, and Operations.
Cliff is an operator at heart. He builds the infrastructure, processes, and roles that growing companies need to scale, freeing founders to focus on revenue and growth. Today, he serves as a fractional COO to founders and leadership teams navigating critical expansion phases from his base in San Diego.
Building Operational Infrastructure That Scales
Cliff Carnes has a genuine appreciation for the work of building a company that runs. For him, operations is not overhead. It is the engine that turns a founder’s vision into a durable, growing business. He embraces the challenge of walking into a company mid-growth and installing the systems, procedures, and structure that were never built the first time around.
Across senior operating roles and fractional COO engagements, Cliff has learned to assess a business quickly and see where it will break under the weight of its own growth. He evaluates finance, HR, IT, and marketing together rather than in isolation, then streamlines each so the company can add capacity while cutting cost. His approach is practical and disciplined. It is not about complexity for its own sake. It is about giving founders and leadership teams the operational foundation to scale with confidence.
Advising Founders & Leadership Teams
Cliff Carnes serves as a steady source of operational judgment, guiding founders and executives through the phases where growth outpaces structure. With a career spanning capital markets leadership and C-suite operating roles, Cliff brings a grounded, experience-led perspective that helps leaders make decisions with clarity rather than guesswork.
Drawing on decades of running operations at a senior level, Cliff tailors his counsel to the real problems in front of a business. Each recommendation is built to improve efficiency, prepare infrastructure for the next stage, and protect margins while the company grows. His focus is always on measurable outcomes. He helps leadership teams move from reactive operations to repeatable systems, so the business can expand without losing control of cost, quality, or culture.
Cliff Carnes's Story
Cliff Carnes began his career in service, holding leadership roles in the United States Navy, including duty in the Iraq theatre and public affairs work for a commanding general. That early foundation in discipline, accountability, and operating under pressure shaped the operator he became.
He went on to build a career at the intersection of finance and operations. At Johnson Capital he served as Senior Vice President of Operations, then Chief Operating Officer overseeing roughly twenty domestic and foreign offices with full profit and loss responsibility, before becoming President and negotiating the firm’s sale to Walker & Dunlop. He then led capital markets as a senior executive across seven western offices, and later held C-suite and executive operating roles across real estate and specialty finance. Today he brings that full arc of experience to founders and leadership teams as a fractional COO, helping growing companies build the operations they need to scale.