The first ops hire: when to make it, what to make them do
May 13, 2026 · 4 min read · Sultan Shalakhti, Founder, Slingshot
The first operations hire is the most over-explained and under-thought hire in any small business. Most founders make it too early or too late, and most make it for the wrong reasons. Here is a clearer way to think about it.
Too early is when the founder is still learning what the operations of the business actually are. You cannot hire someone to run a process you have not run yourself, because you do not yet know what the process should be. The first six months of any operational function — sales ops, customer ops, finance ops — should be the founder's, in painful detail. Then you know what to delegate.
Too late is when the founder has been doing it for two years and built a tangled, idiosyncratic system that only they can navigate. Now the hire is not replacing a process — they are untangling one. The founder spends six months explaining "why we do it this way", which is a tax on both of them, and the new hire spends a year before they can make any independent decisions.
The right time is six to nine months after the founder has been running the function. Long enough to have built a mental model. Short enough that the system is still simple enough to explain in a week. The hire then has a clear template to start from, and the freedom to evolve it without rebuilding from scratch.
The right role is not "run operations". It is "remove specific friction the founder is feeling". Be concrete: the friction is "I spend three hours a week reconciling invoices", or "every customer onboarding takes 90 minutes of my time". A great ops hire owns one or two of those friction points end-to-end and frees the founder's hours. A bad ops hire is given a vague mandate to "improve operations" and ends up writing a Notion page about it.
The trap most small businesses fall into is hiring the ops person to compensate for the tool stack — moving rows from a CRM into invoicing, reconciling spreadsheets, gluing together six SaaS tools that should have been one. That is not operations; that is friction. Fix the tool stack first, then hire ops to do the strategic work the unified tool stack now makes possible. The order matters.