When I joined my first startup as the sole ops hire, I was the entire ops function. People programs, benefits, payroll, executive support, recruiting coordination, and facilities, which included managing daily catering with a three-week rotating menu. One person. Series A. We tripled headcount in under a year.

My kids were two and four years old.

I figured it out.

But I was working 70+ hour weeks. I was making decisions I'd never made before with no one to gut-check them. I was building systems from scratch while simultaneously keeping everything running. Every week felt like I was one dropped ball away from something breaking.

I didn't have a senior ops person guiding me. I just had urgency, drive, and enough stubbornness to keep going.

It worked. But it cost a lot.

I want to be clear: this isn't about founders doing something wrong. Most early-stage founders are running as fast as they can too. They make the first ops hire because things are breaking and they need someone capable to fix them. They find someone hungry and driven and trust them to figure it out.

And that person usually does. That's the thing about good ops people. They find a way.

But there's a gap in that model that nobody talks about. The hungry, driven first ops hire is also making high-stakes decisions: HRIS selection, benefits design, compliance, hiring infrastructure, without the pattern recognition that only comes from having done it before across multiple companies. They'll get there. But they'll get there slowly, and at a personal cost that's easy to miss from the outside.

That's the gap a fractional ops leader fills.

Not instead of your first ops hire. Alongside them.

The fractional person brings the pattern recognition. They've seen what breaks at 30 people, at 50, at 100. They know which systems to build now and which ones can wait. They know what a good HRIS implementation looks like and what a bad one costs you later. They can make a decision in 20 minutes that would have taken your first ops hire two weeks of research.

And they can mentor your ops person in real time. Not in a formal, scheduled way. More like "here's how I'd think about this," the kind of guidance that accelerates growth without burning someone out.

I've been that first ops hire. I know exactly what it feels like to be building the plane while flying it with no co-pilot.

Now I'm the co-pilot.

I work with seed and Series A founders who have a scrappy, capable ops person, or who are about to make that hire, and want to make sure they're set up to succeed. I bring the senior pattern recognition, the system design, the decision support. Their ops person brings the execution and the institutional knowledge.

Together it works better than either one alone.

If you're at the stage where things are starting to break, or you can see they're about to, that's usually the right moment. Not after the fire. Before it.

I work with early-stage founders as a fractional Head of Ops. If this resonates, let's talk.