How to find an operator for your startup

To find an operator for your startup, name the recurring work that needs an owner, describe the decisions that person can make and look for evidence of solving similar problems. Decide whether you need an employee, a project specialist or a founding partner before you start asking for introductions.

“I need someone to run things” is understandable when everything lands on your desk. It is also difficult for another person to act on. One founder may need someone to make customer onboarding reliable. Another may need help coordinating suppliers. Both could describe the need as operations, but they are looking for different experience and proposing different jobs.

What work keeps coming back to you?

Start with a recent week. Write down the decisions, reminders and repairs that interrupted your main work. Separate occasional annoyances from problems that repeatedly delay a customer, a payment or a team member. This is a practical exercise for defining the role, not a diagnostic score. The aim is to identify work that matters enough to hand over properly.

For a hypothetical software startup, the list might include gathering setup information from new customers, arranging training and checking whether the first promised result happened. If each customer needs a different improvised process, the problem may be designing a workable onboarding process. If a useful process already exists but nobody owns it, the problem may be consistent execution.

Write the desired change in a sentence: “We need one person to own onboarding from signed agreement to first successful use.” Add the people involved, the current obstacles and the decisions that require founder approval. A candidate can respond to that. A request to “bring order to chaos” leaves too much of the actual assignment hidden.

Do you need an operator, a specialist or a partner?

Use the relationship that fits the work. A defined cleanup project might suit a specialist. Ongoing responsibility across a changing process might suit an employee. A founding partnership involves a broader conversation about company direction and shared responsibility. Calling every person who helps a partner makes it harder to discuss what either side is committing to.

These are starting points for discussion, not rules about employment arrangements. Describe the proposed work, availability and compensation honestly. If those basics are unresolved, say so before asking someone to invest substantial time. Where contracts or employment obligations arise, get advice appropriate to the actual arrangement rather than relying on a job title.

What should the role brief include?

Create a short brief that a candidate and an introducer can both understand. State what the company does, which process needs an owner, what is failing today and what a useful first result would look like. Explain the team and tools already available. Include the constraints that would affect the person's ability to deliver, such as limited founder availability or an unresolved product dependency.

First Round's interviews with operations leaders emphasize that the role needs to fit the company and the founder. Its recruiting guidance also stresses defining the work before evaluating candidates. Those are useful starting principles. The brief below is an original working template you can adapt, rather than a universal description of an operations job.

• Problem: new customers wait because setup information arrives in several places.
• Ownership: coordinate the handoff from sales through the first customer milestone.
• Authority: propose and run the agreed process; escalate changes to customer promises.
• Support: a named founder contact and access to approved working information.
• First result: a documented process used on the next suitable onboarding.

Keep the brief specific enough to evaluate and flexible enough to improve. A good candidate may explain why your proposed first result misses the real bottleneck. That conversation is more informative than agreement with every assumption. You are hiring judgment as well as willingness to complete a list.

Where can you look for relevant people?

Begin with people who have seen comparable work happen: founders at a similar stage, former colleagues, trusted service providers and people running adjacent teams. Ask for experience with your problem rather than a prestigious title. Someone who coordinated a small, changing delivery process may be more relevant than someone whose previous team supplied extensive support around a narrow role.

A useful request might be: “We need someone who has owned onboarding at a small company, including messy handoffs between sales and delivery. Do you know anyone who might want that responsibility?” Share the brief so the other person can judge relevance. Our guide to asking for a warm introduction explains how to make the request easy to assess without turning it into pressure.

Use professional communities and public job descriptions as additional discovery routes, then check the actual work behind a profile. Do not assume membership, a shared contact or a recommendation settles fit. If a person prefers consulting, a narrower assignment or a different level of commitment, learn that early and adjust the conversation accordingly.

How do you evaluate what they have actually done?

Ask the candidate to walk through one relevant problem. What was happening before they became involved? Which decisions were theirs? What did they change, what proved difficult and what remained unresolved? Invite examples they can legitimately share. Confidential customer information is unnecessary; an anonymized explanation can still show how someone thinks about a process.

Follow the sequence rather than collecting impressive claims. If they say they improved a handoff, ask how they identified the failure and involved the people doing the work. If they added a tool, ask what changed beyond the tool being installed. Compare the explanation with the responsibility in your brief, keeping notes about evidence and open questions.

With permission, ask a relevant reference about the candidate's actual scope and how they handled a difficult handoff. Use the same core questions across candidates so you can compare evidence fairly. A personal connection can help the conversation, but it should not replace a clear account of the work the person would need to own.

What can you learn from a small working exercise?

Offer a bounded, relevant exercise with an agreed time limit and expectations about payment, use and confidentiality. For the onboarding example, that could be discussing a fictional customer journey and identifying the next three questions to investigate. It should help both sides understand the work, not quietly become free delivery of a production project.

Look at the questions they ask, how they explain trade-offs and whether the proposed next step fits your resources. Also examine your own behavior: can you provide the information and authority you promised? An excellent operator cannot make a handoff reliable if every routine decision remains blocked in the founder's inbox.

If this is a potential founding relationship, the cofounder trial period checklist covers a deeper shared exercise. If the missing ownership is actually technical product direction, use the technical cofounder search guide to define that different role. Choose the relationship after understanding the work.

How do you make the next decision?

Finish each conversation with one clear outcome: continue, change the proposed scope or stop. If you continue, agree on the information and decision needed next. Our guide to following up after an introduction includes ways to keep that next step clear without repeated chasing.

AME learns who you are, what you are building and what you need next, then makes purposeful introductions one at a time. Operators are among the people AME is designed to introduce. You can apply for AME 1000. Bring the work you need someone to own, not just a title you hope will solve it.