About ClearwaterIQ
Clarity for better business
Operating discipline and engineering depth, delivered by people who have run a P&L and built the systems, not just advised on either.
Our Thesis
Leadership without visibility stalls. Visibility without leadership never gets acted on.
ClearwaterIQ was built for one underserved segment of the market: founder/owner-led small and midsize businesses where growth has outpaced management infrastructure. The owner who built something real is still the default decision-maker on questions the company can no longer afford to route through one person, and the data needed for confident calls is scattered across ERPs, spreadsheets, and institutional memory.
Most firms make you choose between strategy and dashboards, then outsource the technology underneath both. We built ClearwaterIQ to deliver all three inside one relationship: the leadership, the intelligence, and the engineering that makes everything durable and automatic.
Leadership
Two people, two roles, one accountable relationship
ClearwaterIQ is built around a simple division of labor: one person owns the leadership relationship your business feels every week, and one person owns the engineering that makes what that relationship decides actually stick. Neither role works without the other. A meeting rhythm with no data behind it is theater, and a dashboard nobody acts on is decoration.
Bert is your day-to-day operating partner, because that's the structure of the engagement, not a hierarchy inside the firm. Tyson runs the engineering practice in full. Most fractional Integrators have to outsource this to a vendor who has never met your team. You get both, from people who already work as one.
Bert R. Bolick, MBA
Founder & Fractional COO / EOS® Integrator
Bert has spent nearly three decades operating small and mid-sized businesses: as a CFO closing the books, a COO walking the floor, and a President/CEO negotiating the deal that would decide whether a company survived its next chapter. That operating depth, not facilitation credentials alone, is what ClearwaterIQ is built around.
He leads the firm's operating leadership and analytics practice: embedded executive leadership, financial performance, operational excellence, and the Executive Intelligence™ dashboards that put real numbers in front of real decisions.
Tyson Nichols
Cloud, DevOps & Automation Lead
Tyson is a Senior DevOps Engineer whose craft was built the same way ClearwaterIQ was: in production, where things have to work every day. He has spent his career running AWS infrastructure and writing the Python and Ansible automation that quietly does the work people used to do by hand, reliably, on schedule, without being asked twice.
At ClearwaterIQ, Tyson owns the cloud and automation practice outright: architecting secure, cost-aware AWS environments, wiring together the systems a business already owns so an invoice, an order, or a shipment can trigger the next step on its own, and building the monitoring that catches problems before customers do.
"Bert finds the insight in your numbers; Tyson builds the machinery that acts on it."
The Standard We Operate By
Our WATER values
The second half of the ClearwaterIQ name. Where the CLEAR™ framework defines how we work, these values define who we are while we do it.
Win Together
Success is shared. Our clients' growth is our growth, and we don't win unless they do.
Accountability
Own the outcome. Full responsibility for every commitment, with no excuses and no passing the buck.
Trust
Earned every day through consistency, transparency, and follow-through, built into every interaction.
Execute Relentlessly
Strategy matters. Execution wins. Ideas only matter when translated into measurable action.
Responsive Leadership
Communicate. Engage. Deliver. Proactive, accessible, and dependable through every stage of an engagement.
Where We Work
Rooted in North Carolina
ClearwaterIQ is rooted in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and serves founder/owner-led small and midsize businesses across the Southeast: manufacturing, distribution, construction, professional services, family enterprises, and private-equity portfolio companies, in person or remote, wherever the business is.
How we engage: fractional, interim, or long-term partnership, a durable partner for owners who intend to stay lean indefinitely, or a bridge to an internal hire for those building toward one.
Let's Talk
Let's talk about your business
A 30-minute discovery conversation. No pitch. No pressure. Just clarity on whether we're the right fit.
bert@clearwateriq.com · (336) 442-9734 · Winston-Salem, North Carolina