Why hire an operations manager for your startup?

Saving money is one of the biggest priorities for new companies when cash is tight, but often, saving cash is a false economy when it comes to hiring.

We hired an operations manager about six months ago, and it’s probably made the biggest difference to my life as a CEO since we started the company.

The early days of starting a company are full on. Everything is on fire-fighting. It’s a rush, but you’re in survival mode, which equates to doing everything yourselves as founders.

In the early days of Float, everything was focused on product and engineering. I often saw my job as CEO (of a 2 person company) to shield my co-founder from everything I could to let him keep coding. That meant doing all the customer support, product planning, raising money and everything else.

Our next hires were also more developers, so while it meant we went faster, it just meant more product planning, more raising, and more customer support.

As a team of 5, we were all engineers except me (Ironically, I was the only one with a Computer Science degree). This is pretty much unsustainable, and Anoop, one of our engineers, took on the customer support side. This was great. He also started to take on more of the product management, which was also great. In the early days, it’s awesome when people step up and take on roles that they can just see need to be done.

Then Anoop had too much to do, so we hired Graeme, who took on the customer support.

However, when we were a team of 8, I remember one of our team, asking who could order more rechargeable batteries? Everyone else was too busy, so of course, I was the one who took it on.

Around the same time, I’d noticed a few other companies in CodeBase (where we work) had either a COO, office manager, or operations manager. I enquired a bit further, and they all said it had been a “game changer” for them.

So we hired an operations manager.

Guess what? It’s been a game changer for me.

I think Inga was the 10th person in our team. We had developed our org chart in a more balanced way, hiring 3 in sales and marketing, a full-time designer, customer support, and 4 engineers.

The key thing was that the operations manager is really the first person to join your team with the focus of taking things off your plate.

There is a great post from Mathilde from Front on this where she says:

If you find the right person, you’re actually filling five positions at once: human resources, office manager, finance/accounting, executive assistant, and customer support.

It’s allowed me to stop thinking day to day, and start to focus on the finding the time to do some thinking. Something like sorting out times to meet people probably was taking me 3–4 hours per week. Managing things in the office, again 3–4 hours per week. The list goes on: auto-enrolment pensions, new staff on-boarding, budget management, and helping prep for the monthly board meetings.

If you’re the CEO of a startup and you’re planning to grow beyond 10 people, stop thinking you’re saving money and go and hire the smartest, most adaptable person you can to work with you on this.

Colin Hewitt is fascinated by startups, the future banking, and finance. He’s the CEO and co-founder of Float. Based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Further reading:

I found this book very inspiring and helpful in terms of rearranging my priorities and how I spend my time. Deep Work by Cal Newport. Also, see this post below from Front on a few other hires that make sense to make sooner rather than later.