This is the most terrifying hire you will ever make. Why? Because you are hiring someone to tell you what to do.
The 3 Signs You Need an Ops Manager Yesterday
Most founders wait too long. They wait until they are having a mental breakdown in a Starbucks parking lot. Don't be that founder. Look for teh signs.
1. The "Whac-A-Mole" Calendar
Look at your calendar. Is it blocked out for "Strategy"? Or is it a chaotic mess of "Client Call," "Fix Bug," "Quick Sync," and "Urgent!!"? If you are spending 80% of your time fighting fires, you are not a firefighter. You are an arsonist who forgot to build a fire station.
2. Projects are Slipping
When you were small, you kept everything in your head. Now, balls are dropping. Deadlines are missed. Clients are sending those passive-aggressive emails: "Just following up on this..."
3. You Hate the Details
Be honest. Do you enjoy updating the Asana board? Do you love checking if the invoices were sent? No. You hate it. You procrastinate on it. And because you are the boss, nobody yells at you for it. But the business suffers.
What Does an Ops Manager Actually Do?
I hear this a lot: "But what will they DO all day if I'm doing the sales and the work?"
They will do the things that make the business run. They are the oil in the engine. They are the person who ensures that when you sell a project, it actually gets delivered without you having to hover over everyone's shoulder.
The Ops Manager Bucket List
- Project Management: Ensuring the team hits deadlines.
- Resource Allocation: "Can we take on this new client, or will Dave explode?"
- Process Documentation: Writing the SOPs you refuse to write.
- Hiring/Onboarding: Sifting through resumes so you only interview the top 3.
- Firefighting: Handling the small crises so you only hear about the big ones.
Who to Hire (Please Don't Hire Your Cousin)
This is where founders mess up. They hire someone "nice." Or they hire a "Yes Man." Or they hire their cousin Vinny because he "needs a job and is good with computers."
Do not hire Vinny.
You need a Integrator. If you follow the EOS model (which you probably should, read Traction), you are the Visionary. You have ideas. You are chaotic. You chase shiny objects.
You need someone who is the opposite. You need someone who loves spreadsheets. Someone who gets a perverse thrill from organizing folders. Someone who is not afraid to say, "No, we cannot launch a podcast next week, we are drowning in client work."
Traits to look for:
- Organized to a Fault: Their closet is color-coded.
- Disagreable (in a good way): They will push back on your bad ideas.
- System-Minded: They see "create a checklist," not "work harder."
The Hardest Part: Letting Go of the LEGOs
First Round Capital had a great article about "Giving away your Legos." As a founder, the business is your LEGO set. You built the castle. You know where every brick is.
Hiring an Ops Manager means handing over a huge pile of huge bricks and saying, "Here, you build this part."
It hurts. You will want to micromanage. You will think, "I could do this faster."
Stop it.
Yes, you can do it faster. But you cannot scale if you do everything. You have to let them do it. They might do it differently. They might even make a mistake (gasp!). But they will learn. And eventually, they will do it better than you because it is their only job, whereas for you, it was your 17th priority.
Conclusion: Replace Yourself
The ultimate goal of hiring your first Operations Manager is to make yourself useless in the day-to-day measures of the business. You want to be useless at "Delivery." You want to be useless at "Admin."
Why?
So you can be useful at Growth. So you can be useful at Strategy. So you can finally take a vacation where you don't have to bring your laptop to the beach (sand in the keyboard is terrible for ROI).
Hire the Ops Manager. Give them the keys. And for the love of capitalism, stop responding to every Slack message.
