Why You Need a Strategist Before You Hire an Operator or COO
Hiring a COO for a small business — or an operations manager, or an online business manager (essentially a really good VA) — is the most reasonable-sounding but fundamentally wrong move I see business owners with ADHD make. It looks logical. It looks like the next best step. It looks like the thing a “serious” business owner does. And a significant percentage of the time, it's an expensive way to postpone dealing with the real problem.
And before you come for me, let me be clear. I'm not anti-operations. I recommend operational hires all the time. But the order matters more than most business owners realize, and getting it backwards costs them double.
Why chaos looks like an operations problem
When a business feels chaotic, the chaos is what you can see. The Inbox is out of control. Clients are onboarded different every time. Nobody, including you, is entirely sure what happens after someone signs on the dotted line.
Chaos looks like a symptom of an an operations problem, so you go shopping for an operations solution. The logic is clean. The logic is also where the trouble starts, because chaos is a symptom that can mean two totally different things.
What an operations hire is for
A good operator excels at making an existing system run well. They'll find the friction, document what's undocumented, build the workflow, and close the open loops. This is a genuine skill and most business owners with ADHD suck at it, including me.
What an operator is not hired to do — and here's the part that gets totally missed — is question whether the system should exist.
They're not going to ask why you have four offers instead of two. They're not going to ask why your delivery model requires you to be reachable on days when your capacity is non-existent. That's not incompetence; it's scope. You hired someone to run the machine. Asking whether it's the right machine is a different job, and if nobody's doing it, you are handing them a broken structure and they will make it hum, but it will still be a broken structure.
The worst part is that it will usually feel like a process improvement for a few months.
Let’s try an analogy to drive the point home
Let’s say you are a writer who has finished the manuscript for your first book. You hire a world-class copy editor but your manuscript has no plot. What you’ll get back is the best-looking writing of your life. Every sentence is tighter. Every comma is correct. All the right grammar. And the book still doesn't work, because the problem was never at the sentence level, and the editor was never in a position to tell you so. It’s not their job.
Now you've spent the money, you've spent the time, and the thing you still have to fix is the thing you had to fix in the first place — except now there's a beautifully edited draft you're emotionally attached to, and who knows how much money down the drain. Oh, and add the sunk cost on top of that.
Answer this question first
Before you hire operational help, ask yourself this question and make sure you answer it honestly: Is the chaos coming from bad execution of a solid structure, or from a structure that's not designed around how your brain actually works?
Signs it's truly operational: you know what the business does and who it's for, the offers make sense, the revenue works, and things break because there's too much volume for you or you and your team to hold. That's an ops problem. Go ahead and hire. You'll be delighted.=
Signs it isn't operational: the offers overlap, and you can't explain the difference between them. Your revenue depends on being available in ways you can't sustain. You've stopped enjoying half of what you deliver, and it’s getting harder with each new client. Every time you try to document a process, you realize you can’t because you do it differently every time based on how you feel that day and how much you like the client.
Those aren't operations failures. That's a structure that morphed instead of being designed and built, and no operator can fix it for you. This is where my concept Options vs. Opportunities really helps your next move crystal clear. It would be well worth your time to check out How to Stop Confusing Options for Opportunities: a Practical Guide to Decision Making for ADHD Entrepreneurs.
An option is something you could do. An opportunity is something that moves you toward where you've decided to go. The difference between them is a decision — and if you haven't made the decision, everything looks like an opportunity, because there's inclusion criteria and no way to disqualify everything else.
An operations hire is a fantastic option when that’s the kind of help you need. Online business managers, operations managers, fractional COOs and full-time ops hires are available at every price point. They will absolutely produce visible improvement. Whether it's an opportunity depends entirely on whether you've decided what the business is supposed to be. Before you make that decision, you're not investing in operations. You're buying relief, and relief is the thing ADHD brains will pay almost any price for when we're overwhelmed. The problem is that relief doesn’t last when strategy is missing.
The cost of doing the right things in the wrong order
Get the sequence backwards, and you pay twice. Once for the ops hire and the systems they build. Then again for the restructure that should have come first — only now it's harder, because there's a documented operational system built around the wrong structure, and a person whose role was defined by that structure, and unwinding it means telling someone competent that the thing they built for you is being dismantled. That conversation is brutal, and I've watched people delay the whole restructure for a year or more instead of having it. Plenty of us are conflict avoiders who feel so crappy about making the wrong decisions that we tolerate years of misery instead of calling it out.
When we get the sequence right, the ops hire is dramatically better. They walk into a business with a decided shape. They know what to protect. They know what "done" looks like. You spend less on them because you aren’t paying them for temporary relief that needs to be rebuilt later.
Plenty of people hire an ADHD coach or even an ADHD business coach and wonder why their business still feels so hard for them to run. Sometimes it’s not a matter of doing the right things in the wrong order. What’s more likely is that we are expecting the business coach to address business strategy, and that is not their job. If this scenario describes you, and you are trying to figure our your next step, check out this companion blog post: How an ADHD Coach Prepares You to Work with a Strategist.
Strategy isn't the fancy thing that only big businesses need
Strategic work gets treated like the fancy optional thing you do once you've handled the real problems. It's backwards. Strategy is what determines whether the money you spend on operational help buys you something that lasts or not. First decide what the business is. Then hire someone to run it. Strategy before operations.
