One of the most interesting things about working with a growing business is watching the founder slowly become its unofficial operating system.
They know which customer needs special attention, which supplier is likely to cause a problem, why a particular process exists, who can solve a specific issue and which decisions absolutely need their involvement. In the early stages, that knowledge is an advantage. The founder is close to everything, decisions happen quickly, and very little gets lost between people.
The problem is that the same way of working doesn't necessarily survive growth.
As the team gets bigger, customer volume increases and more people become responsible for different parts of the business, the information that used to live comfortably inside one person's head starts becoming a bottleneck. People wait for approvals. Questions get asked repeatedly. Someone creates their own version of a process because nobody is quite sure what the official one is. A decision that should take ten minutes ends up sitting in someone's inbox for two days because the person who normally makes it is busy.
I've seen this happen in different forms across the businesses I've worked with. It rarely looks like a dramatic operational failure. More often, it looks like a business that is doing well commercially but has become unnecessarily difficult to run.
And that's usually the point where the role of an operator becomes much more important.
When the way you've always worked stops working
There is a stage in most growing businesses where the things that made the company successful in the first place start creating operational problems.
Being close to customers is a strength, until one person is personally handling every difficult customer issue. Moving quickly is a strength, until decisions aren't documented and the team starts making assumptions about what should happen next. Having a small, flexible team is a strength, until nobody is quite sure who owns a particular piece of work because everyone has been doing a bit of everything.
None of these things are necessarily mistakes. They are often completely sensible ways to operate when a business is smaller.
The problem comes when the business changes but the operating model doesn't.
I think this is one of the areas where an experienced operator can add real value. You have to be able to look at the business as it actually operates, rather than how the process document says it operates, and identify where the friction is coming from.
Sometimes the answer is a new process. Sometimes it's a new person or clearer ownership. Sometimes it's a better way of measuring performance. Sometimes it's simply deciding that something doesn't need three approvals anymore.
The difficult part is knowing which problem you're actually trying to solve.
Systems should make people better at their jobs
I've always been wary of operations for the sake of operations.
It's relatively easy to make a business look organised. You can create folders, write SOPs, introduce project management software and build dashboards until everything has a place. That doesn't necessarily mean the business is operating better.
A useful system should make it easier for someone to do their job well.
That might mean giving a customer support agent enough information and authority to resolve an issue without escalating it. It might mean giving a project manager a clear view of priorities and ownership. It might mean establishing a reporting rhythm so a manager can spot a problem before it becomes a crisis.
The system has to work for the people using it.
This became particularly obvious to me while working with Feline Skinscience. As the business grew, the operational load grew with it. Customer support volume increased, the number of situations requiring decisions increased, and the original support structure wasn't designed for the level of demand it was now handling.
The answer wasn't simply to tell the existing team to work harder.
We scaled the customer support team from one person to eight, but hiring was only one part of the work. We also needed clearer workflows, escalation processes, SOPs and performance visibility. Without those things, adding people would simply have created a larger team dealing with the same underlying problems.
The point of building the system was to give the team more capacity to actually do their jobs.
That's an important distinction.
The founder shouldn't have to be the answer to every question
One of the clearest signs that a business has outgrown its current operating model is how often the founder becomes the escalation point.
Some decisions genuinely should sit with the founder. There are strategic decisions, financial decisions and questions about the direction of the company that require that level of involvement.
But there is a difference between being involved in the important decisions and being required for all decisions.
If someone needs to ask the founder how to handle a routine customer situation, approve something that falls squarely within their responsibility or explain a process that should already be understood, there is probably an operational problem underneath it.
The solution isn't necessarily to remove the founder from the process completely. It's to create enough clarity that people know what they own, what they can decide and when they genuinely need help.
That requires more than documentation. It requires trust, context and accountability.
People need to understand not only what the process is, but why it exists and what outcome they're responsible for.
That becomes increasingly important as teams become distributed. At Melewi, I worked with a global team across multiple countries while managing digital projects for major international clients, including Visa and McDonald's across APMEA. When people aren't working in the same room, you can't rely on proximity to fill in the gaps.
The operating rhythm has to do more of that work.
Clear ownership, communication, project structures and expectations become much more important when the team isn't sitting beside you.
The real shift is from knowing to building
I think the biggest change when a business outgrows its founder is that the founder's knowledge has to become organisational knowledge.
Not every piece of knowledge needs to become a 20-page SOP. Some things are better handled through training, regular communication or simply giving someone ownership and letting them learn.
But the business shouldn't depend on one person's memory to function.
That shift can be uncomfortable because founders are often very good at being the person who solves things. It's one of the reasons they built the business successfully in the first place. Handing some of that responsibility to other people can feel like losing control.
In reality, done properly, it should create more control.
When responsibilities are clear, performance is visible and the team knows how decisions are made, the founder has a much better view of what is actually happening in the business. They don't need to be involved in every individual decision to know that the operation is healthy.
That's when the founder can start spending more time on the things only they can do.
Strategy. Relationships. Product. Growth. The next stage of the business.
And the operator can focus on making sure the organisation is capable of supporting all of that.
The messy middle is where I like to work
This is probably why I enjoy operations work as much as I do.
The interesting part isn't creating a perfect process on paper. It's figuring out what a business actually needs at a particular stage of its growth and then building something that people will genuinely use.
Sometimes that means cleaning up a process that has become unnecessarily complicated. Sometimes it means hiring and developing a team. Sometimes it means introducing better performance reporting. Sometimes it means sitting between different parts of the business and working out why something keeps falling through the cracks.
It's rarely one big fix.
It's usually a series of relatively practical decisions that, over time, make the business easier to operate.
That's what I mean when I talk about working in the messy middle between growth and the systems needed to sustain it.
The goal isn't to build an organisation where the founder never gets involved.
It's to build one where they don't have to be involved in everything.
Because eventually, a growing business has to stop relying on the founder being the smartest person in every room and start relying on the organisation itself being capable of doing good work.
That's the shift I think good operations leadership should help create.