Startup operations consulting for Seed to Series B companies

What an operating model actually is

It is not a diagram. It is the answer to a short list of questions that a growing company stops being able to answer informally: how work arrives and gets prioritised, who owns which decisions, how teams are organised against the work rather than against history, what the company measures, and what rhythm it runs to. Startups do not usually lack these answers. They hold them implicitly, in a small number of heads, and that stops scaling somewhere around twenty-five people.

The consulting work is making them explicit, testing them against how the company really behaves, and installing whatever is missing.

Accountability and decision rights

The single highest-leverage change in most companies at this stage is writing down who decides. Not a RACI matrix for its own sake — a short, blunt list of the decisions that actually come up, and who owns each. Most founding teams are surprised by how much of what they are personally deciding could be decided two levels down, and how much of the delay in the company is people waiting politely for permission nobody needed to give.

Cadence and planning

A cadence is the predictable rhythm at which priorities are confirmed, work in flight is visible, and something that is not working can be said out loud without it becoming an escalation. Start smaller than feels right. One weekly forum with a clear purpose beats four with overlapping attendance, and a meeting people quietly stop attending is worse than none because it teaches the team that structure is theatre.

Planning is the same discipline over a quarter: a short list of outcomes, named owners, and an honest read on capacity before the commitments are made rather than in the retrospective afterwards.

Hiring infrastructure

Growing headcount is not the same as growing capacity. What turns one into the other is defining the seam a role is meant to close before opening it: what decisions it owns, what it is measured on, and who it unblocks. Add the sequence — which roles have to exist before which others can succeed — and an onboarding path that gets someone useful in weeks rather than a quarter, and hiring stops being the thing that makes the organisation more complicated.

Business operations and the P&L

The unglamorous layer that becomes load-bearing at exactly this stage: the numbers the company runs on and who owns them, the link between the plan and the spend, board and investor reporting assembled from things you already measure, and the contracts and vendor commitments that quietly accumulate. Where the commercial side of that is the pressing part, it is covered in more depth under commercial operations.

Execution systems, and the capability to run them

All of the above is worth nothing if it lives with us. Every engagement is built to be handed over: the leaders who will run the cadence are in the room while it is designed, they run it while we are still there to say when it is drifting, and the coaching that goes with it is part of the work rather than an add-on. That is the difference between a company that changed and a company that had a project.

Whether this is the right fit

How the work is sequenced

Diagnose, design and validate, then coach and hand over. The shape is the same whether the engagement is six weeks or two quarters; only the depth changes.

Common questions