Get an operations mentor who has scaled a company before

An operations mentor has already scaled a company through the stage you are in now. You get a 1:1 call with someone who has built the systems, made the first hires, and untangled the same mess you are looking at, so you can copy what worked instead of inventing it from scratch.

The most useful calls do some version of five things:

• Reframe the problem. "Everything is chaos" becomes a named cause: a missing system, a role you are still doing yourself, a process nobody follows. You leave knowing which one it is and what to fix first this week.
• Find the one bottleneck. The fastest win is usually spotting the single thing holding the whole operation back, then fixing that first instead of everything at once.
• Redesign your role. Most operators are the bottleneck without realizing it. A mentor helps you decide what to stop doing yourself and hand off.
• Sequence the work. Instead of building five systems in parallel, you decide which one to build first and which to leave for later.
• Pick the first hire. Knowing exactly which role to hire next is often the highest-leverage decision on the call.

The value is direction and structure, not another tool. You leave with a sequence, not a longer to-do list.

You also leave with a record. After each call, the takeaways are written down for you, ready to keep or skip:

After the call, the takeaways

Session Takeaways

Mischa van WieringenOperations sanity check

Fix the one process that breaks every week before you install anything new, that is where the hours leak.

You still personally approve work a mid-level hire could own, hand off the top three this month.

KeepSkip

Install one system this quarter and get it working before starting a second, not three half-built at once.

KeepSkip

Automate the Monday report you rebuild by hand before you touch the rest of the stack.

KeepSkip

AI-extracted from your session transcript

12 saved insights from your sessions

Most people who book an operations call are not titled heads of ops at big companies. They are founders and operators whose business has traction and is now buckling under its own processes. Success caused the pain.

• Grew fast, processes broke. the customers arrived, the systems did not, and now everything runs on memory and heroics.
• No infrastructure. there is no proper tracking, CRM, or analytics, because the plumbing was never installed in the first place.
• Choking on delivery. you run an agency or service business and you are still doing or checking every piece of the work yourself.
• Fragmented tooling. a pile of tools that do not talk to each other, with manual copy-paste filling every gap between them.
• Drowning in manual work. reporting, follow-ups, and admin eat the week, and there is no automation taking anything off your plate.
• You are the bottleneck. nothing moves unless you touch it, and you cannot step back long enough to fix that.

Mentors start diagnosing before the call. A typical first exchange after you book:

The chat, before the call

Richard Johnson

Saw your booking. Before the call, send me three things: a rough org chart or who-does-what list, the process that breaks most often, and what you still personally sign off on.

Org chart is me and four people wearing every hat. The thing that breaks is the handoff from sales to delivery. And I sign off on basically everything.

Then “I sign off on everything” is finding one, before we even meet. Bring the sales-to-delivery steps and we will mark the two that actually need you and the rest that do not.

That tracks. Writing it out now, see you Thursday.

Message Richard...

The most common operations situation is infrastructure that was never built. You are not optimizing a stack. You never had one, and now the lack of it is slowing everything down.

A mentor helps you install the foundation in the right order, usually starting with whatever is causing the most pain today:

• Tracking and analytics. the basic measurement that tells you what is happening, set up so you can finally trust the numbers.
• A CRM and pipeline. one place where leads, deals, and customers live, instead of spreadsheets and inboxes.
• Marketing automation. the foundation that handles follow-up and lifecycle without you doing it by hand.
• Attribution and reporting. enough of a dashboard to know what is working, without chasing perfect data.

Which CRM, which automation platform, how to wire it all together: this is the single most common question people bring to an operations call. The market is loud, every tool claims to do everything, and the wrong choice is expensive to unwind.

A mentor who has run these tools at scale can give you a straight read on what fits your stage and your team, and how to connect what you already have:

• Pick the right CRM. Match the tool to your motion and your size, not to the longest feature list or the loudest ad.
• Set up HubSpot correctly. Get the most common platform configured right the first time, instead of fighting it later.
• Connect the stack. Wire your tools together so data flows automatically instead of being copied by hand between them.
• Close the gaps. Find where the stack is fragmented and decide what to consolidate, replace, or glue with automation.

Often the answer is fewer tools used properly, not more tools layered on top.

A lot of operators arrive at a call buried in manual work. The reporting is done by hand, every workflow needs you in the loop, and the week disappears into admin that a machine could run.

A mentor helps you find the repetitive work worth automating and the tool to do it with, so you get your time back:

• Automate the reporting. stop rebuilding the same report by hand every week and let the data assemble itself.
• Wire up the workflows. use Zapier, Make, or Clay to connect the steps you currently do manually between tools.
• Automate sales and ops admin. follow-ups, handoffs, and data entry that eat hours can mostly run themselves.
• Reduce founder dependency. design the work so it does not stop the moment you step away from it.

At some point the answer is not another system, it is another person. Knowing which role to hire first, and when, is one of the highest-leverage calls an operator makes, and one of the easiest to get wrong.

A mentor who has built and scaled a team helps you make the call with eyes open:

• Pick the first role. decide whether you need an operator, a doer, or a senior hire, based on where the bottleneck is.
• Build a hiring process. set up a way to filter candidates so you stop hiring on gut feel and regretting it.
• Structure the team. get clear on who owns what before you add people, so you are not just spreading the chaos.
• Delegate properly. hand off the work and the decision, not just the task, so the hire takes load off you.

A large share of operations calls come from agency and service founders. The work sells, but every project still runs through you, and that ceiling is fixed. You cannot grow past the hours in your own day.

A mentor who has scaled a service business helps you systematize delivery so the company can run without you on every account:

• Productize the delivery. Turn bespoke work into a repeatable process a team can run, instead of reinventing every engagement.
• Fix the team model. Decide who delivers what, where to add capacity, and how to keep quality as you scale headcount.
• Rework pricing. Move toward pricing that pays for a team and a margin, not just your personal hours.
• Get off the critical path. Redesign your role so the work ships when you are not the one shipping it.

The goal is a business that delivers well without the founder in the middle of every job.

Many operators arrive unsure whether anything they are doing is working, because there is no measurement to tell them. That uncertainty leads to either freezing or thrashing, and both are expensive.

A mentor helps you set up enough tracking to make decisions, without waiting for a perfect system:

• Measure outcomes, not activity. track the numbers that tie to revenue and retention, not the ones that just look busy.
• Fix the attribution gap. get tracking good enough to know which efforts deserve more, even if it is not perfect.
• Pick the number that matters. choose one metric to move this quarter instead of a dashboard you never act on.
• Make the case internally. turn your numbers into the argument you need to get a co-founder, boss, or board to fund the next step.

You do not need a giant question. Bring the operations call you would put off, the decision you keep circling. The most useful moments to book:

• Growth caused chaos. the customers arrived, the processes broke, and you cannot tell what to fix first.
• Your stack is fragmented. the tools do not talk to each other and you are weighing a CRM, a platform, or a rebuild.
• You are facing a first hire. you are about to add a person and want a second opinion on the role before you commit.
• Before you build the next system. you are about to invest weeks in setting something up and want to do it once, correctly.
• You have become the bottleneck. nothing moves without you, and you need a plan to get out of the middle of everything.

A focused 30 minutes with the right mentor beats spending another quarter building the wrong system.

Operations sits underneath go-to-market, sales, and growth, and so does the network. You are not limited to one process specialist. You can find someone who has done the specific thing you are stuck on:

• Systems and process. Building the operating systems a growing company needs and getting the team to use them.
• Building a team. First hires, team structure, delegation, and the management systems that come with scale.
• Tools and tech stack. Choosing, configuring, and connecting your CRM, analytics, and the rest of the stack.
• Marketing automation. Setting up the automation that runs lifecycle, follow-up, and pipeline without manual work.
• Go-to-market and sales ops. Building the pipeline, outbound, and sales infrastructure that operations has to support.
• Pricing and unit economics. Packaging, pricing, and the numbers that decide whether the business works at scale.
• Customer success and retention. Onboarding, churn, and the operational side of keeping the customers you win.
• Leadership and scaling. Running a company that grew past founder-led, and leading the people inside it.

Pick the mentor whose operating background matches the problem you brought.

You can also run it in reverse: post what you are stuck on as a help request, and mentors raise their hands to take it.

A help request, three hands up

Help Requests Create Help Request

Mentorship Request

Operations, Systems· posted 3 hours ago

We grew past our systems and now everything runs through me. Where do I start?

Micah McGuire

Head of Growth @ GrowthMentor

What’s your main pain/challenge?

The customers arrived and the processes did not. Reporting, handoffs, and approvals all run through me, and I cannot step back long enough to fix it. I do not want ten new tools, I want the one thing to untangle first.

3 Applicants

Matched based on your needs and mentor expertise

Mischa van Wieringen

Ops, Strategy & People | Ex-COO, Founder of The Ops Collective

Mentor View profile Start chatting

Untangling a founder-run operation is what I did as a COO and now do at The Ops Collective. Send me your org chart and the three things only you approve, and we will find the one process to pull you out of first, not ten.

1 hour ago

Maciej Galkiewicz

Founder & CEO @ Ragnarson

Mentor View profile Start chatting

Sean Weisbrot

Founder & Fundraising Agent @ Independent

Mentor View profile Start chatting

Rarely what they end up solving. The ask on the booking form is usually a symptom, and a mentor who has done this work recognizes the pattern underneath it. Three that come up again and again:

Every mentor on GrowthMentor is vetted before they are accepted. Fewer than 5% of applicants get in. They are operators and advisors who have scaled real companies, not influencers selling a course.

Because the network is broad, you are not stuck with a single specialist when your problem spans systems, tooling, and hiring at once. You can find the right person for this question, then a different person for the next one.