5 ways your operations are holding you back

Scaling? Here’s where your operations start holding you back...

You’re hiring fast. Your team’s growing. Suddenly, everything takes longer than it should. 

Decisions stall, questions pile up, and you’re spending your day double-checking things you thought were already handled.

That’s not a leadership problem. It’s an operational one.

Founders often feel like they’re “missing something” as the team scales—like they aren't moving as quickly as they'd like, but can’t figure out why. 

That drag? It’s your ad hoc ops foundation buckling under your growth. It's time to build systems that hold up under your pace of growth.

Here’s how to know when it's time to systematize your PeopleOps:

1️⃣ You’re asked the same onboarding questions over and over.

 No one’s sure where the information lives—or if it’s still accurate.

 📌 Fix your routine and organization will take care of itself. Email and Slack shouldn't be your system of record, they should be triggers for steps in a resilient process. 

2️⃣ You’re redoing work because people didn’t know what to do—or how.

Your team’s guessing their way through process gaps that should’ve been paved.

 📌 A simple checklist with links to basic SOPs and templates turns chaos into momentum.

3️⃣ Employees wait days for answers—so they ask you. Again. And again.

When there’s no trusted system or point of contact, everything flows back to the founder.

📌 Turn your responses into documentation. If you've answered a question more than once, it's time to put the answer into a knowledge base. 

4️⃣ You’re dropping balls because there’s no system to catch them.

Expense reports, PTO approvals, access permissions, payroll tweaks—they’re scattered across email, Slack, and spreadsheets. Important tasks get lost in the shuffle and take multiple cycles to get done.

 📌 Centralize operational requests in one system. If it’s not in the workflow, it’s not getting done.

5️⃣ Every issue feels urgent and every fix is a one-off.

Without consistent systems, your team must find a new path every time.

📌 Create templates and triggers for recurring issues. If it’s not your first fire drill, it shouldn’t feel like one.

Ops drag isn’t obvious at first, but it compounds quickly. Fortunately, small systems create big leverage. And a few smart fixes now can save you from spending your days scrambling as you grow.

Let's talk about how a few small changes can make a big difference in your organization.