Hire an Operations Manager or Fix Your Systems First?
Get enough of the business written down that a capable newcomer can follow it, and then hire. A manager who walks into written workflows can start running and improving them early. Without them, the first months go to learning the business from you, and the time you hired them to save goes into teaching.
Most owners picture the same hire. An operations manager who walks in already knowing how to run a business like yours, spots what is broken, and builds the systems you never had time to build.
That person is hard to find for a company your size. The people with that experience often aren't looking at businesses this size. The person you can actually land is capable and promising, and new. New to your business, your customers, your way of doing things.
Why can't you hire someone who already knows how?
When you post that job, you are picturing expertise. What shows up on day one is someone who needs to be taught. They need to learn how you quote, how you schedule, what you promise customers, which exceptions you grant and which ones you don't. Most of that lives in your head, and in the heads of one or two people who have been around a while.
So the job quietly becomes yours: train them, onboard them, answer their questions, and do it while you keep running everything else. You were hiring to get time back. For the first stretch, the hire costs you time instead.
What goes wrong when you hire before the systems exist?
There are two common ways this starts badly.
The first is a thin onboarding. A few conversations, a login or two, and a "you'll pick it up." The new person fills the gaps with guesses, and some of those guesses land in front of your customers.
Picture week three. The new operations manager quotes a repeat customer the standard terms, because nobody told them that customer has a standing discount and net-30. The customer calls you, not them. That's the thin onboarding version.
The second is the fire. You are busy, so you hand over the mess and say figure it out. A good person can flounder in that, and they start poorly through no fault of their own. They can't see what good looks like because nobody wrote it down.
Either way, you are now watching someone you just hired struggle, and you are wondering whether you picked wrong. Sometimes you did. Often you can't tell, because there was never a clear standard to measure them against.
If the hire is already made, how to onboard a new manager in the first 30 days covers how to give them that standard while they start.
What does the wrong operations hire cost?
An operations manager sits in the middle of your business. When the hire is wrong, you pay in more than salary. You pay in the months you spend working around them, the customers who got a worse experience, the team members who watched it happen, and the time it takes to start the search over. Then you onboard the next person from scratch, with the same gaps still in place.
That is an incredibly expensive risk to take on a role you hoped would save you effort.
The wider version of this problem, where each new person plugs into the owner instead of into a structure, is the subject of you can't hire your way out of owner dependency.
Which beliefs keep owners hiring before the systems are ready?
Owners who hire first usually believe one of these:
- "A senior hire will bring the systems with them." Someone from a larger company arrives with habits shaped by that company's tools, staff and customers. Fitting those habits to your business is still a build, and it still runs through you while they learn.
- "I'm too busy to document, so the hire has to come first." The busier you are, the less time you have to teach a newcomer, so the gap you hired to close tends to widen in the first months.
What should you document before you hire an operations manager?
Documenting first changes who you can hire, because the pool of people who can run a system is much bigger than the pool of people who can invent one. Get the work out of your head and onto paper before you hire:
- How a job moves from first call to final invoice.
- Who owns each step.
- What good looks like.
Then a solid operator can step in, read how the business runs, and start from a real baseline. If they turn out not to be the right fit, you find out sooner and it costs less, because the business doesn't depend on what they happen to know.
It also helps to define the seat by results rather than duties, which is the idea behind role scorecards instead of job descriptions.
Why haven't the systems been written already?
You probably know the systems should be written down. The reason they aren't is that you are the one who would have to write them, and you are already the one holding the business together. There is rarely a spare week.
That is the part worth solving first. If you can find a way to get your systems documented without adding the whole project to your own plate, the manager question gets a lot easier. You may still hire one. You will be hiring into something that works, and you will be able to tell whether the person is doing well.
What does hiring into working systems look like?
The new manager spends the first weeks reading how work moves and asking about exceptions, instead of asking how everything works. By the end of the first month they run the weekly rhythm off the written steps, and the questions still coming to you are judgment calls the documents leave with you on purpose. You can measure them against a standard you wrote before they arrived, so a weak fit shows early and a strong one shows quickly. After that, they improve the systems instead of inventing them.
How can you tell which problem you actually have?
A quick check you can do tonight: write down the last few things that slipped through the cracks in your business. For each one, ask whether the person lacked ability, or whether the work had no clear path and no clear owner. When owners do this, the second answer tends to show up more often than they expected. That tells you where the real work is.
Frequently asked questions
Should I hire an operations manager before I have any systems?
Only if you can give them protected time to build while you stay close enough to answer questions every day, and you accept that the first months will cost you time. Most owners in that spot do better writing down the three or four workflows that carry revenue, then hiring someone to run and improve them.
Can the operations manager write the systems after they start?
They can write them with you. The knowledge still sits in your head and with your longest-serving people, so you get interviewed either way. The difference is that a newcomer is writing while learning the business and keeping things running, which is slower and leaves more gaps than writing before their first day.
Not sure whether to hire now or write first?
If you own a business with a team and want help getting your systems written down so the next person can run them, that is what we do. You can start here: Get started
Ezra Dewolfe
Systems to Scale Group
