Should You Hire an Operations Manager or Fix Your Systems?

Should you hire an operations manager or fix your systems?

Write the honest job description first, then split it into two columns: things that move information from one place to another, and things that require somebody to decide. If the first column is bigger, you have a systems problem wearing a hiring costume. If the second is bigger, hire, and hire sooner than feels comfortable.

The standard advice is to hire when you can afford it. That skips the question that actually decides it, which is what this person would spend their first year doing.

What does the coordination column look like?

Re-entering the same record into a second system. Chasing status updates that a trigger could send. Rebuilding a report by pulling from two places that do not reconcile. Relaying information between departments whose tools do not talk.

All of it is real work. None of it needs a manager. It needs the seam between two systems closed, and paying a salary to hold that seam open is expensive in a way that compounds.

What does the judgment column look like?

Pricing exceptions. Vendor negotiations. Deciding which job gets the crew when both are urgent. Handling the customer who is technically wrong but strategically important. Setting the rule that resolves a recurring conflict so it stops reaching you.

Judgment does not automate. If your week is full of it, you are the constraint, and a hire is the answer.

Why do good operations hires leave?

Because a job that is mostly coordination is not a career. Strong operators take it, spend eighteen months as a human integration layer, and leave for a role where their judgment gets used. Then the search starts again, and the underlying seam is still open.

That turnover is often read as a hiring problem. It is usually a job-design problem.

How do you tell which column is bigger?

Your own calendar answers this faster than any outside opinion. For one week, mark each block as either passing something along or deciding something. Count at the end.

Owners are frequently surprised by the split, and by which specific tasks turned out to consume the most time. That week of tally is also the only baseline that will later tell you whether the hire or the fix actually worked.

What if both columns are large?

Then sequence them. Close the two or three worst seams first, because doing so changes the job description you are hiring against. A role scoped after the coordination work is removed attracts a different and better candidate than the same role scoped before.

Hiring first is not wrong, it is just more expensive: you pay a salary to absorb friction while you decide whether to remove it.

What does a fractional arrangement solve here?

It covers the case where the work is genuinely judgment but not yet full time, and where nobody currently owns the intersection of operations and systems. Finance owns spend, IT owns uptime, and the question of whether a tool changed how work actually happens tends to belong to no one. That gap is what a fractional operator holds until the volume justifies a permanent seat.