Consultants love telling you what worked. Here’s what didn’t.
In the middle of scaling the team, I hired an operations manager to “take things off my plate.” Smart person, real experience, good references. Eighteen months and roughly $68,000 in fully-loaded cost later, we parted ways, and almost none of the operational weight had left my plate.
The failure wasn’t theirs. It was mine, and it was structural.
What actually happened
I hired an ops manager into a business with nothing written down about how it ran. No documented processes, no defined meeting rhythm, no scoreboard, no role clarity beyond “help with ops.”
So every decision still routed through me, now with an extra hop. My tribal knowledge didn’t transfer; it got interpreted, and every interpretation drifted. Within months I was managing the person managing the chaos, which is strictly worse than managing the chaos.
The kicker: they spent most of their time building ad-hoc processes (badly documented, tool-scattered, half-adopted) because I’d effectively outsourced designing the processes to a person whose job should have been running them. Those are different jobs.
The accounting
- ~$60K in salary and costs over 18 months
- ~$8K in tools bought for workflows that never stabilized
- Unmeasured but real: my time managing the role, the team’s whiplash from process churn, and the year we didn’t build the actual infrastructure because “we hired someone for ops”
The last line is the expensive one. The hire didn’t just fail. It deferred the fix.
The sequencing rule we extracted
Processes before staff. An operations hire runs and improves written processes; they cannot conjure them from an owner’s head. If the business isn’t documented, an ops manager inherits your chaos at a monthly salary.
The sequence that works, and the one we now set up with clients:
- Purpose first: define the seats and what “great” means in each (the one-page operating vision), including the ops seat you’ll eventually fill.
- People second: put the seat on the Ownership Map with a named outcome, and run the 3C Check (Clarity, Commitment, Capability) on the role before anyone is in it (write the role before you hire).
- Process third: document the core processes yourself; badly is fine. V1 SOPs beat perfect tribal knowledge (the one-page SOP template).
- Rhythm fourth: a weekly cadence where the new hire will live.
- Then hire, into documented processes, with a scorecard, owning execution from day one.
When we re-hired the role two years later, into a documented business, the ramp took three weeks instead of never, and my plate actually got lighter.
If you’re about to make this hire
Take the Origin Score first: twenty-seven questions, about five minutes, and it shows where your business is narrowest right now. If that is process, the honest move is a quarter of writing processes down before the job post goes up, whether that’s on your own inside the Inner Circle or with us through our services. It’s a fraction of $68K. I checked.
