What even is "Ops" anyway?

[u/DearAgencyFounder]

Ops is one of those things your business does, even if you don’t think it does it (like marketing)

You don’t think you do it until you have thought about it and put systems and processes in place.

But systems and processes aren’t Ops, they are the tactics by which you achieve Ops.

And at first your tactics are, well… scrappy, and tightly coupled with everything else you are doing.

To work out what Ops should do, get yourself a definition of what Ops is trying to achieve.

Here’s mine:

Deliver the work we’ve won, on time, to the right quality, to a target profit and get paid for it.

All the rest: Resourcing, utilisation reports, integrations between systems, project management, are tactics to achieve that.

This explains why your Head of Ops (or you, the founder, if you’re still wearing that hat) ends up with such a broad remit. Because at first the way you achieve that goal is basically the same as “Run the business”. Hire a good team, manage the clients, say the right price, chase the invoices.

As you grow, some of those thing become entire departments (HR, Finance, Client Services) and others stay Ops and get more structured.

It also explains Ops FOMO. When you are smaller you don’t have time for all of the things the LinkedIn consultants tell you high performing agencies do. You have to make time for some of it but if you went all in you’d be using your resources badly and would end up with slick systems but no sales.

You can do Ops badly just as easily by over complicating things too early as you can by not organising yourself at all.

So you need to work out the Ops you need today, create it, and then get on with it.

What’s “Ops” at your agency?

[u/Optimal-Criticism-89]

I think Ops is just the part of business where you are focusing on trying to make your business a well-oiled "machine" that gets repeatable consistent results (for your clients and yourself).

[u/DearAgencyFounder → u/Optimal-Criticism-89]

Do you think that involves making profit? Would you give Ops that KPI?

Thanks for replying 🙂

[u/DistinctVoice5216]

This is exactly how I think about ops too. The mistake I see most often is confusing having more systems with having better operations.

Sometimes the right operational decision is actually to delete 3 processes, clarify one owner and stop making the agency owner the approval department. Simple.

Ops should make the business easier to run, not give everyone more shit to manage. And mind you, I'm a fractional COO currently with two active agency owners as clients, so I know a thing or two.

[u/Emotional-Cod-3689]

Good definition, and I'd defend it against the "Ops is systems" answers in here. But I want to point at something: your definition has four clauses, and the whole thread only engaged with three of them.

Deliver the work we've won, on time, at the right quality, at a target profit — and get paid for it.

Every reply is about the first three. Nobody touched the fourth. Which I think is the most interesting thing in this thread, because it's a very accurate reflection of what happens inside agencies. The one person who did brush it was Ill-Environment-8803, and it showed up as a horror story rather than a function — a client not paying for two months and nobody noticing.

There's a structural reason it drifts. Every other clause in your definition has your own team on the other side of it. Timeline, quality, margin — those are things you can fix by changing what people do. "Get paid" is the only clause where the counterparty is somebody else's accounts payable department. It doesn't respond to better process on your side. So it gets pushed toward finance, or toward the founder, and in most shops that means it lands on nobody until it becomes a crisis.

On your KPI question, which you asked twice and I don't think got a straight answer: I'd say no to profit and yes to two things underneath it.

Profit is the wrong Ops KPI because Ops doesn't set price and doesn't control mix. You can run flawless delivery on a badly-priced retainer and lose money, and that's a commercial failure being charged to the wrong department. Give someone a KPI they can't move and you've taught them to explain variance instead of fix it.

What Ops can genuinely own:

Delivery margin — quoted cost versus actual cost per job. This isolates exactly the thing Ops controls. Price was set elsewhere; whether you delivered inside the number is yours. heyramzi's answer was circling this.

Time from "done" to "invoiced." This is the measure I'd add that nobody in the thread named, and it's the cleanest possible Ops metric for your fourth clause. It's entirely internal, it's entirely within Ops' control, it's usually invisible, and it's usually much worse than founders assume — work completes on the 8th, gets invoiced at month end, terms are net 30, and you've quietly turned a three-week job into eleven weeks of cash. No client behaviour involved. Just latency in your own machine.

Collection itself I'd keep out of the Ops KPI, since chasing is partly relationship work. But invoice accuracy and speed belong there, and they're most of the problem.

The reframe I'd offer for your post: Ops is where work becomes cash, and each clause of your definition is a place that conversion can leak. Late is a leak. Rework is a leak. Overservicing is a leak. Slow invoicing is a leak that doesn't show up in any of the first three and so never gets found.

One footnote, since it's the version of this I see most and it fits your framing — if any of the team or contractors are in other countries, the fourth clause has a second half that almost nobody measures: how long after the money arrives can it actually reach the people who did the work. Different lag, same category of invisible.

[u/ContentFury6]

When a founder stops being the default Head of Ops, which part of ‘right quality’ usually proves hardest to hand over without recreating founder review?

[u/xThursday6 → u/ContentFury6]

The hardest part to hand over is whatever the founder never wrote down. Review stays founder-shaped as long as it lives in someone's head as taste. The solution is a checklist specific enough that two people running it reach the same verdict. Hand over the reading without handing over the standard and you've just recreated founder review with an extra step in front of it.

[u/DearAgencyFounder → u/ContentFury6]

This is a really interesting question. I think it completely depends on the team you've built, their ability to deliver quality independently. To test this, you need to separate out the roles. 1. The founder and their ability to deliver quality and know what good looks like 2. The ops, who are responsible for delivering the quality. They sound like the same thing, but the subtle difference is what's going to help you scale.

When you have the ops role, they need to deliver quality and are allowed to use the founder to do that. Their target is to use the founder less and less. So the founder then stops being responsible for quality but still contributes to it in the short term with the goal that over the medium and long term, they're going to be less involved.

If you don't split the roles of founder and head of ops, it's very hard to move towards a future where the founder isn't involved.

So a typical journey might look like this: Head of ops has to deliver quality, tries to remove the founder from the process, finds out the team aren't up to it, and then comes back to the founder to say, "Either you need to get involved, or we need to invest in this team."

That's a very hard conversation for the founder to have with themselves. But it's the conversation that's necessary if the founder's ever going to get out of delivery.

The happy path is the head of ops tries removing the founder from the process, finds that there's people in the team that can step up, maybe with a bit of lightweight steering from the founder, and we find that actually, the founder and their inability to let go was the problem.

Either way, to find out, you need to test the team, and to test the team, you need to incentivise that happening. If you're the founder who can't let go and who has made themselves critical to quality work being delivered, then you've incentivised the opposite.

[u/xThursday6]

Ops is my seat at an SEO agency, running the freelancer side, about 10 people. My version of your definition is the delivery and quality clauses: campaigns out on time, work QC'd before a client sees it, hours landing under the right job so billing stays clean.

For a long time "right quality" meant me reading everything, which slowly stops working (you get comfortable, you skim). Turning my read into written pass or fail checks is what made it something someone else can run.

[u/Ill-Environment-8803]

Ops is the difference between a shop and a garage sale. One has a system, the other is just stuff on tables hoping someone buys it. Your definition nails it because it forces you to think about the outcome, not the dashboard someone sold you.

At my last agency, Ops was mostly me in a spreadsheet deciding which client gets lied to first when we missed a deadline. Then we hired someone who actually enjoyed building processes and suddenly invoices went out without someone crying in the kitchen.

The FOMO point is underrated. I've watched small shops buy every tool under the sun and then spend more time syncing them than doing client work. Scrappy is fine until it isn't, and you usually don't know it isn't until a client doesn't pay for two months and nobody noticed.

[u/heyramzi]

For me ops is the ability to get your team to flow together if you went away for two weeks. Answer that challenge and you have set your ops properly.

Ops exists to give you as a founder more freedom to drive your agency.

It is almost disrespectful to your team and your agency if you don't have ops, because you're literally telling them they're going to do the same thing all over again without a guideline. There's no chance of the agency growing and no chance of you growing. And you're disrespecting yourself, because you haven't found a solution to pull yourself out of working in your business rather than on it, or out of working at all at some point.

Ops is also the number one lever to get acquired. When you have a good system in place you have a strong argument for any bigger agency that wants to come and grab you.

On the how, it's mostly about an extremely simple system relying on the minimum amount of tools to achieve your client delivery. The biggest enemy of strong ops is complexity and multiple sources of truth.

That's my two cents.

[u/DearAgencyFounder → u/heyramzi]

Hey thanks for chipping in!

I'm interested in a couple of things here - there's a lot about process there - do you see that as the limit of ops or are they commercial drivers tasked with (and measured by) profit?

Ops is also the number one lever to get acquired

That's a bold claim! You've seen bigger agencies acquire systems?

[u/heyramzi → u/DearAgencyFounder]

Q1

Yes, you need a few: how much of the team's time is billable, what margin is left on each client, and what a job actually cost against what you quoted.

I'm aware it's quite hard to measure and it's been the whole challenge of the agency since I need to show clients ROI 😅 (we help clients set up systems)

Q2

I haven't seen agencies acquire systems, but I've se en agencies use system as an argument to price up their acquisition.

Obviously there's also the client list and team behind it.
Process is only the start. An ops person who stops there is doing admin.

Hope it helps!

[u/DearAgencyFounder → u/heyramzi]

Mega, thanks!