Operations is the foundation of any business! Too many startups piecemeal their operations with bits and pieces with no real strategy. This is going to result in more work, hardship, and expense down the road. Work with a a consultant or company that can help you set up streamlined operations.

Founders/CEOs should really be working with an operations director whether full time or part time so they can get out of the administrative/operational tasks and focus on the core business for growth.

I’d ask what you’re doing for systems right now. Some people just start with QuickBooks and don’t do much else because they just have to track the financial side. I’d start looking at where you want to be in five years when it comes to systems and start getting a minimum viable product in place as soon as you can.

First do things manually. Then figure out how to become more efficient (process development) to automate, outsource, repeat, and improve upon.

I feel like I wait too long.

I just work hard to get things going, then $ goes in and out of our account and I pay someone to clean up the mess later on. Systems? Google sheets, docs, notepads, calendars, calendar booking links, LinkedIn Nav, Hubspot, Xero.

I just hire proper management then I just get out of the way. We went $0 to >$5MM and now >> and I haven’t tracked anything. Absolute zoo. Someone comes soon to clean my mess.

For me I prefer to start making money and entrenchment, get amazing people in, then I add systems. But this is b2b. We do have some systems, cadences, but not much.

When you can’t remember if Dave is in charge of marketing or the office plants, it’s time to tighten things up.

When Product Market Fit is validated. Not before.

I started at seed stage and there were some things that I still wished were more structured earlier.

If you are remote or growing quickly it’s even more important to get ahead of it.

Also, keep in mind that as you hire people, especially VPs, many will break the systems, so also don’t over invest. Some will put in their own systems and some will just be unorganized or anti-process. If you can afford to bring people on more slowly it will help.

IMO it’s even more important to have good systems in this more cost conscious environment. Poor organization is where your costs will quickly get out of control. Some VPs might try to hire people to do things that were previously automated either because they are lazy or because they think it’s prestigious to manage more people. You need to make sure your culture rewards efficiency instead of this type of selfish behavior. If you have pretty good systems overall before they join it will help. If a VP makes something substantially worse in a way that hits your metrics then you should consider moving on from them quickly.

Also note that this need doesn’t override having amazing product market for and tight messaging among sales and marketing. It should come a little bit after you’re also pretty happy with those other things and have a nice runway (ie you are growing at a solid rate).

One way to do this is just to carve out a few hours per week to work on this. Or, you can delegate to somebody to make sure all of the important processes are documented, or even make organization and documentation an element in the managers’ performance reviews. Some managers will hate this but if they don’t understand the importance and do their part then they probably won’t scale much past 30-40 people anyway IMO.