Most founders I have worked with hit the same wall. The product is moving, customers or partners are coming in, and every small decision still lands on the founder's phone. Who follows up with this partner? Where is the signed contract? Did anyone confirm the venue? The founder becomes the bottleneck for work that should never have needed them.
The usual response is to hire an assistant. That helps for a few weeks. The inbox gets cleaner and the calendar makes sense. Then the same questions come back, because the problem sits in how the work moves between people. What fixes it is someone who owns that movement: an operations person.
What an operations person does
An operations person makes sure the work that repeats runs the same way every time, without the founder in the middle. In practice that comes down to four jobs.
- Map how work moves. From the first message a partner sends to the invoice getting paid, they know every step and who owns it.
- Build the system around it. A pipeline, a tracker, a checklist, a shared inbox. Simple tools, set up so nothing depends on anyone's memory.
- Run it every week. Follow-ups go out, deadlines get checked, and small problems get caught while they are still small.
- Report back. The founder gets a short update and keeps the decisions only a founder can make.
At Latitude59 I did this for the partnerships team of Estonia's flagship tech conference, working remotely from Nairobi. I ran the partner pipeline in Salesforce, wrote proposals for sponsors and built the team's documentation in Notion. The win was simple: a partner could email any of us and get the same answer, fast.
Signs you need one
You probably need an operations person if three or more of these are true for you today:
- You are the only person who knows where your biggest deals or partners stand.
- Follow-ups happen when you remember them.
- You have lost a lead, a sponsor or a customer because nobody replied in time.
- Your team asks you the same questions every week.
- The report to your investors, funders or partners takes you a full day to put together.
- You spend evenings on admin and mornings catching up.
What to hand over first
Hand over one area at a time. Start with the work that repeats and hurts the most when it slips. For most early companies and programmes it is one of these:
- The pipeline. Partners, sponsors, clients or applicants. One list, clear stages, a named owner for each row and a next step with a date.
- The weekly rhythm. The standing meetings, the check-ins and the follow-ups that keep people moving.
- The report. Whatever you send out every week or month. Turn it into a template the operations person fills straight from the system.
Agree what done looks like for that one area, let them own it for a month, then add the next.
Hire for judgement
Anyone can learn the tools in a week. What you are paying for is judgement: knowing when to follow the process and when to pick up the phone. When I ran the community for ALX's virtual assistant cohort 14, the tracker told me who had missed a session. The work was calling that person, finding out what happened and getting them back on track. More than 160 learners from that cohort made it to graduation.
When you interview, ask candidates to walk you through a process they fixed. Listen for the steps: what was broken, what they changed and how they knew it worked. People who have done this work talk in specifics.
If you cannot hire full time yet
A fractional operations person works a few days a week or on a fixed scope. They map the flow, set up the system, train the team and then keep it running for a monthly fee. For a startup or a programme with a small team, that is often the right first step before a full-time hire.
Questions founders ask me
Is this the same as a chief operating officer?
A COO sets strategy across the whole company. An operations person, especially your first one, is hands on: they build and run the systems the team works in every day. Many COOs started in this role.
What tools will they need?
Fewer than you think. Most of the systems I set up start with a shared inbox, a spreadsheet or a simple CRM, WhatsApp and a weekly report. Custom software comes later, once you know exactly what the process is.
How much of my time will this free up?
It depends on how much of your week goes to follow-ups, status questions and reports today. Track it for one week before you hire. Most founders are surprised by the number, and it gives the operations person a clear first target.
If your company or programme is running on your memory right now, let's talk. The first 20 minutes are on me.
