A practical guide to finding the operational friction in a growing business and deciding what to fix first.
This is the framework I use when I need to understand how work actually moves through a business — where it gets stuck, where ownership is unclear, where teams are creating workarounds and where better systems can create real capacity.
When a business feels messy, there is usually no shortage of things that could be improved. The temptation is to start fixing whatever looks most obvious: introduce a new tool, rewrite the SOPs, hire more people or add another meeting.
Sometimes those things are necessary. But they are rarely the best starting point.
I prefer to understand how work actually moves through the business first. What are people waiting for? Where does information get lost? Which decisions keep travelling upwards? What are people doing manually because the process has never been reconsidered?
Once those patterns become visible, it becomes much easier to separate the symptoms from the problems worth solving.
Growth can make a business look successful while quietly exposing weaknesses underneath it. Before changing anything, look at how the business actually works.
A surprising amount of operational friction comes down to responsibility and authority not sitting in the same place.
Good processes should make work easier to repeat, understand and improve. They shouldn't exist simply because someone once decided the business needed more structure.
Customer support can be one of the best places to understand what is happening elsewhere in the business.
Projects tend to slow down when priorities, ownership, decisions or dependencies are unclear. More meetings and more tools don't automatically solve those problems.
AI can create real operational capacity, but only when you understand the work before trying to automate it.
When I find a business with a lot of operational friction, I would rather identify the few problems creating the most downstream work than launch a huge transformation programme.
That's ultimately the test I come back to.
Good operations isn't about creating more process, more meetings or more documentation. It is about creating enough structure that people can make good decisions, move work forward and solve problems without everything travelling through one person.
If the business is growing but becoming harder and harder to operate, something needs attention. The answer isn't always another hire or another tool. Sometimes it's a clearer owner, a better handoff, one reliable source of information or a process that no longer needs to exist.
The goal isn't to make the business look organised.
The goal is to make it easier for good people to do good work.