Key Takeaways
- Operations is any work that makes the rest of the work easier and more consistent.
- Documenting processes before you scale is not bureaucracy. It is preservation of institutional knowledge.
- The COO hire that most early companies need is a founder who thinks operationally.
When founders talk about operations, they usually mean either "the stuff that is not product or sales" or "what we need to hire a COO to handle someday." Both of these are underestimates of what operations actually is and how much it matters in the early stages of a company.
Saim Abbasi's background at Scotiabank Capital Markets and across three acquired companies gave him an unusual appreciation for operational discipline. The companies that got acquired cleanly were operationally clean. The ones that went through painful processes were operationally chaotic, and the chaos showed up in the due diligence in ways that cost the founders real money.
What Operations Is, Specifically
Operations is the set of repeatable processes that allow a company to deliver consistent quality without depending on any one person's heroic effort. When a customer onboards, what happens? When an invoice needs to be sent, who does it and when? When a team member needs access to a tool, how do they get it and who approves it?
In a very early company, all of these processes live in founders' heads. That is fine when the team is two people. It becomes a problem when the team is ten people and three of those questions get answered differently depending on which founder is asked. The inconsistency is friction that compounds as the company grows.
Documentation as an Asset
Saim's approach at SA Capital was to document processes the moment they became repeatable, not the moment they became complex. A simple Notion page describing exactly how a new customer account gets set up takes 20 minutes to write and saves hours of confusion across every subsequent onboarding. That is an absurdly good return on the time investment.
The documentation is also an asset in a due diligence process. An acquirer looking at a company that has clean process documentation is looking at a company that can scale without the founders being involved in every decision. That is a materially better acquisition target than a company where the founders are the process.
Who Owns Operations Before There Is an Ops Team
In most founding teams, one person is naturally more operationally oriented than the other. That person should own operations early, not as an afterthought but as a defined responsibility. Not because operations is less important than product or sales, but because it is different enough in its nature that it needs someone specifically thinking about it every week.
"The best operational system is the one that answers the question the founder is not available to answer at 9pm on a Tuesday."