The £90k ops hire you might not need yet
There’s a moment most service businesses hit somewhere between 5 and 30 people. Delivery is heavier than it should be, every operational question routes through the founder, and somebody says the sensible-sounding sentence: “we need to hire an ops person.”
It’s not a bad instinct. The growth-stage frameworks agree with it - most put the first operations or delivery hire right around the revenue band where the pain starts, roughly £30k to £100k a month. If you’re feeling it now, you’re on schedule.
The part worth slowing down for is what that hire actually costs, and whether it fixes the thing you’ve got.
The honest arithmetic
A Head of Operations in the UK runs somewhere around £65k to £75k in salary outside London - comfortably into six figures inside it. Add employer’s NI, pension, recruitment fees and ramp time and the realistic first-year cost lands between £85k and £110k. The search itself typically takes 4 to 6 months, during which the problem keeps compounding.
Then there’s the risk nobody prices in: at 15 people, a wrong senior hire isn’t embarrassing, it’s existential. And the odds of a wrong hire go up sharply when the business can’t describe the job - which is usually the case, because the job is currently “everything that falls through the gaps”.
There’s a second version of this decision that costs less and goes wrong more politely: promote your best delivery person into the role. Now your strongest practitioner spends their week fielding questions, rebuilding processes from memory, and holding the whole operation in their head. You haven’t fixed the system. You’ve given it a nicer job title.
What the hire is actually for
Here’s the thing the sensible sentence skips: everything routes through you because of a missing system, not a missing person - no map of how work actually flows, no owner per step, no agreed definition of done. Hire someone into that and they spend their first six months discovering it, the same way you would.
Which reorders the decision. The question isn’t “who do we hire?” It’s “what does our operation actually look like, and what’s eating it?” - and that question costs an afternoon and a wall of post-its, not £90k.
Once it’s mapped, you have three honest options:
Fix it yourselves. Genuinely viable for a lot of teams once they can see the problem. Rhythm, owners, definitions of done - none of it needs an outsider if someone owns the work. (This is why I give the method away.)
Bring in an operator part-time. Someone senior does the diagnosis and builds the systems with your team, for a fraction of the loaded cost of the hire, without the search, and - the part I’d underline - the deliverable is documentation and systems your team owns, not knowledge that walks out of the door at the next salary review.
Make the hire - onto a mapped operation. Sometimes the full-time role is right. It’s just far cheaper to make that hire six months later, into a documented operation, where the job description writes itself and the new person is useful in weeks. The map you made first is the best onboarding document they’ll ever get.
A standard worth keeping
Never hire someone to run a process nobody can describe. Map it first - whichever of the three doors you take afterwards, you’ll walk through it knowing what’s on the other side.
The mapping method I use with clients is written up in a short free guide: the Rhythms, Roles & Expectations System.
