Key takeaways
- Hire operations when you are the bottleneck for scheduling, quality and follow-through, not when you are merely busy.
- Write the role as a list of outcomes you want to stop owning, then hire against that list.
- A coordinator who runs the systems is a different hire from a manager who runs the people. Decide which you need first.
- Give the hire a written cadence, a scorecard and ninety days before you judge the decision.
The first operations hire is the one owners get wrong most often, and the one that changes the business most when it lands. It usually comes after a season where jobs were booked twice, invoices went out late, a good employee quit over chaos and you realised that every process in the company lives in your head.
We help owners across British Columbia design this role and then hire for it. We are not a licensed recruitment agency. What we do is define the seat, build the scorecard, run the process alongside you and make sure the person has a system to step into on day one.
The signal that you are ready
Being busy is not the signal. Being the bottleneck is. If scheduling stops when you are on holiday, if quality drops when you are not watching, if customers wait for answers because you are the only one who knows, then the business needs an operations seat regardless of how you feel about the cost.
The other signal is revenue that has stalled because you cannot take on more work without breaking something. Operations is the hire that lets sales grow again, which is why it often pays for itself faster than owners expect.
A simple test is to look at last month's calendar and count the hours you spent on scheduling, chasing, ordering and fixing. If it is more than a day a week, you already have the role, you are just doing it at an owner's cost.
Coordinator or manager, pick one
A coordinator runs the systems. Scheduling, dispatch, ordering, invoicing, follow-up, the shared calendar and the job board. They are process people and they are happiest when the board is clean. A manager runs the people. Hiring, performance, training, standards, difficult conversations. They are people people and they need authority to be any use.
Most companies between $1M and $3M need the coordinator first, because the systems are the mess. Companies with more than a dozen staff and a working process usually need the manager. Hiring a manager into chaos is a waste of a good manager, and hiring a coordinator to lead people is unfair to them.
Write the role as outcomes
Each outcome becomes a line on the scorecard. The scorecard is what you hire against, what you review at thirty, sixty and ninety days, and what stops the role from quietly turning into your personal assistant.
- Every job scheduled and confirmed with the customer the day before.
- Invoices out within a set number of days of completion.
- Materials ordered against the schedule with no emergency pickups.
- The weekly operations meeting prepared and run without you.
- Customer complaints logged, answered and closed, with you only told about the ones that matter.
- The written procedures kept current as the team changes how it works.
Paying for it and finding the person
Pay for the role out of the time you get back. If the hire frees you for one more sales day a week, work out what a sales day is worth to you and the arithmetic usually settles the question. Pay a fair market rate for your region and do not try to save money on the person who will hold the company together.
Look first inside the business, then at people in adjacent trades or industries who have run a desk under pressure. Experience in your exact industry matters less than evidence of keeping promises under load. Ask every candidate to describe a week where everything went wrong and listen for what they did on Friday.
Employment contracts, probation terms and termination clauses go to an employment lawyer. We work alongside licensed professionals on every hire and never draft those terms ourselves.
The first ninety days
Give the person a cadence on day one. A daily ten-minute standup, a weekly operations meeting they prepare, and a monthly review with you against the scorecard. Hand over one outcome at a time and resist the urge to take it back the first time it is done differently.
The most common failure is the owner who hires operations and then keeps running operations. If you cannot let go, the hire will leave and you will tell yourself the market has no good people. Our team can design the handover and sit in the first weeks of meetings so the transfer actually happens.