The expensive mistake of hiring a Head of Ops too early

"I'll hire a Head of Ops first, then bring you guys in."

An agency owner said this to me recently. And on the surface, it makes complete sense.

"I think the right order is to hire a Head of Ops first, then bring you in so we can build everything together."

My answer was: absolutely, you can do that.

The problem isn't that it's not going to work. The problem is what happens while you're waiting for it to work.

Hiring a good operator is not a two-week sprint

You might spend 1-3 months finding the right Head of Ops. Then they need another few months to properly understand:

• Your service
• Your clients
• Your people
• Your delivery model
• Where the bodies are buried
• How the founder thinks
• What is actually broken versus what merely looks broken

So now you've spent 3 months if you're lucky, 5 months on average, waiting for the person who is supposed to fix the system to first understand the system.

And throughout those months? Nothing about the founder dependency has changed.

You're still getting pulled into decisions. Still fixing delivery problems. Still answering questions your team should be able to answer. Still carrying half the operating model around in your head.

The second problem, which I think matters more

They naturally start building the company according to their previous experience.

I don't mean that negatively. Experience is valuable precisely because people bring patterns from previous companies. But they also bring preferences.

"This is how we ran meetings."

"This is how we structured delivery."

"This is how I've always organised account management."

"This is the project management tool we should use."

Sometimes that works brilliantly. Sometimes you end up paying a six-figure salary for somebody to spend six months rediscovering problems you already knew existed, while introducing their own systems, preferences and biases.

I prefer the opposite sequence

Build the operating foundations first. Then hire the person who will own them.

There's a meaningful difference between hiring someone to figure out the operating model and hiring someone to run and improve an operating model that already exists.

The second person has a dramatically easier job. Their first few months aren't spent asking "how should this company work?" They're spent learning "how does this company work, where is it still weak, and how do I make it better?"

That's a much better use of an expensive senior operator.

It also changes who you need to hire. You can say: "Here is the operating model. Here are the outcomes you own. Here are the gaps we need you to improve."

Much easier hire. Much lower risk.

This is where we come in

We don't need three months inside an agency before we recognise the patterns. We've already seen variations of these problems across 60+ agencies. Different services, different team structures, different founders.

We use the data, benchmarks, frameworks and pattern recognition we've accumulated to help you diagnose what is actually creating the dependency, and build the foundations over the next 3-4 months.

Then your Head of Ops has something worth taking over. And you haven't paid them for their first quarter just to figure out what the hell is going on.

The broader lesson

When founders tell me "I need to hire someone before I can fix this," I usually want to understand what they expect that person to walk into.

Because sometimes the next hire really is the answer. But sometimes you're asking the hire to compensate for the absence of an operating system.