After the cheque cleared

The situation

Two co-founders, a R40m Series A six months prior, headcount on a path from 22 to 60 across the year, and a new institutional shareholder expecting quarterly board reporting. The investor’s diligence had named several “things to professionalise post-close.” The first six months had been spent hiring, quoting, and stitching customer issues — none of them on the operating layer itself.

The symptoms were familiar: leadership meetings that solved Monday’s fire and left the strategy untouched; a board pack the team produced in panic the week before each meeting; new managers waiting on the founders for decisions the new managers were technically already empowered to make.

Hiring fast doesn’t fail; running the people you hired without an operating model is what fails.

The work

The diagnostic ran two weeks. Twelve leadership and senior-management interviews, a numbers pass against the management accounts, and a board-pack walkthrough with the investor’s chosen non-executive director.

The seven-month engagement focused on three layers:

• Operating model — function-by-function map of how the firm now worked at 38 staff, with the gaps the founders had been filling personally named explicitly. RACI for the leadership team plus a 90-day plan to close the three highest-friction handoffs.
• Cadence — weekly 60-minute leadership stand-down (not a status meeting, a decision meeting), monthly half-day operating review, quarterly board review. Each with a one-page agenda and an owner that wasn’t a founder.
• Reporting — a single board pack the team could maintain in 90 minutes, not three days. The first three packs were co-written; from pack four onwards the team owned them.

The outcome

By the end of the engagement, the leadership team made the recurring decisions that had been routing through the founders. The board pack was produced in under two hours each cycle. The investor’s NED told the founders that the firm “now feels like one we can scale capital into” — which, while pleasant, was not the metric we cared about. What we cared about was the count of founder hours per week spent on operating decisions: that went from ~25 to under 8 across the engagement.

What we learned

Most post-funding ops engagements get sold as “build a finance function” or “hire a COO.” Sometimes that’s true; more often the prior job is making explicit how the firm already decides things. A new hire onto an undefined operating model rarely succeeds.