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Diary of a Leader: Why Business Operations Isn’t “Common Sense” in Growing Companies
- Lindsay Sheldrake
- Feb 11
- 6 min read
Updated: Mar 31
Welcome to Diary of a Leader: Real Stories, Leadership Lessons, and Personal Growth
Last week in Diary of a Leader, I wrote about what happens when insight has nowhere to land.
How good conversations dissolve when no one owns the space between vision and execution.
This week goes one layer deeper.
Because before ownership can exist, something else has to happen first.
Understanding.
Understanding what operations actually is.
And why it is not nearly as simple as it sounds.
Ah, Founders.
They build remarkable things.
They solve real problems.
They serve real people.
They create value that did not exist before.
From the outside, their businesses often look strong.
Busy.
Respected.
Growing.
And yet, inside, many carry a quiet frustration.
Not with their work.
Not with their team.
But with how hard everything feels to run.
Welcome back to Diary of a Leader, where we explore what is really happening beneath leadership, growth, and the systems meant to support both.
This week is about why business operations is rarely “common sense,” even though many founders expect it to be.
Why Operations Sounds Simple on Paper
If you look up the definition of business operations, it sounds technical.
Inputs.
Outputs.
Processes.
Efficiency.
Profitability.
It reads like something that should be manageable with enough intelligence and effort.
But most founders do not think about operations in formal terms.
What they usually hear is this:
Operations means things functioning.
It means being active.
It means work getting done.
And we have been learning how to function since childhood.
So it makes sense that many founders assume:
“How hard can this really be?”
When “It Should Be Simple” Meets Reality
Recently, I had coffee with a founder.
Great business.
Strong reputation.
Meaningful impact.
From the outside, everything looked solid.
From the inside, he was frustrated.
Decisions kept circling.
Work depended too much on him.
Small issues became big ones.
Momentum felt fragile.
So I asked a few questions.
Not about effort.
Not about commitment.
Not about intelligence.
About ownership.
About structure.
About how work actually moved.
It did not take long to see the pattern.
Operations had evolved by default.
Not by intention.
Why No One Was Ever Taught Business Operations
Part of the reason this happens is simple.
Almost no one learns operations on purpose.
There is no clear educational path for it.
Very few people go to school to study how businesses actually run.
The closest things are supply chain or project management.
And even those have only become mainstream in recent years.
Most founders never learned:
How decisions should live.
How work should flow.
How capacity should be protected.
How systems should adapt as complexity grows.
They learned by doing.
By building.
By reacting.
By fixing what broke.
By carrying what no one else could.
Which works, until it does not.
So when operations feels hard, it is not a competence issue.
It is a training gap.
How People Actually Get Good at Operations
Strong operators are rarely created in classrooms.
They are shaped through experience.
By watching patterns repeat.
By learning where friction forms.
By seeing how people, projects, and priorities collide.
By being trusted with real responsibility.
Operations is a craft.
It develops over time.
Which is why simply assigning someone to “run ops” rarely works.
The title comes first.
The capability follows later, if it is supported.
The Most Common Fix in Growing Businesses
When something is not working, most founders respond the same way.
They bring in someone new.
Add a role.
Change a title.
Put someone in charge.
That is what happened in this case.
A new person was now accountable for operations.
Problem solved.
Or so it seemed.
So I asked one more question.
“How do you know they are set up to do this well?”
His answer was honest.
“They are on payroll now. They had better be.”
And that was the real issue.
When the Peter Principle Shows Up in Operations
It reminded me of the Peter Principle.
The idea that people are promoted for being great at their current role, not because they are prepared for the next one.
The new operations lead was smart.
Respected.
Highly capable in the core work.
A top technician.
A strong contributor.
What they were not trained for was holding the entire operating system.
They had been promoted into complexity.
Take your best technician and make them responsible for everything.
Except this is that, on a much larger scale.
Why Operations Is Not “Common Sense”
Running Operations is not just about being organized.
It is not about working harder.
It is not about caring more.
It is about:
How decisions travel.
Where ownership lives.
How priorities get translated.
How capacity is protected.
How work moves without constant supervision.
None of that is intuitive.
It is learned.
It is practiced.
It is developed.
When businesses skip that development, founders compensate.
They stay close.
They carry context.
They fill gaps.
For a while, that works.
Until complexity makes it unsustainable.
The Hidden Cost of Assigning Without Defining
When someone is given responsibility without clear authority and structure, risk builds quietly.
The founder still holds the real system.
The new leader holds partial ownership.
The team stays dependent on proximity.
On paper, operations exists.
In practice, it does not yet.
Which is why frustration persists.
Not because people are failing.
But because no one has been set up to succeed.
What Changes When Operations Is Understood
When founders truly understand what operations requires, something shifts.
They stop looking for quick fixes.
They start building real capacity.
They stop assuming it is obvious.
They start investing in clarity.
They recognize that running a business well is a discipline.
And they begin strengthening leadership where it matters most.
In the middle.
Reflection Prompts for Leaders and Ops Leaders
Where has operations been inherited rather than built?
Who carries the real operating system today?
Do your ops leaders own decisions or coordinate tasks?
Where does work still depend on proximity?
What assumptions are you making about “common sense”?
Wrapping Up: Functioning Is Not the Same as Operating Well
Most founders do not struggle with operations because they lack ability.
They struggle because they were never taught that it is a profession in its own right.
A way of thinking.
A way of structuring work.
A way of protecting momentum.
Operations always exists.
The only question is whether it is intentional or inherited.
Understanding that difference is often the moment things begin to change.
You can learn more about how we support founders and leadership teams through operational clarity at SOLVED Collective.
You Do Not Need to Fix This All at Once
If this post helped you see your business differently, that is enough for now.
Awareness comes first.
Clarity follows.
Change comes later.
When you are ready, you can reach out here SOLVED Collective.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why isn't business operations common sense in a growing company? Because operations in a growing business is not just about things functioning. It is about designing how work moves, how decisions get made, how information travels, and how accountability is defined across an increasingly complex organization. None of those things are intuitive. They require deliberate design. The assumption that a smart, hardworking founder should be able to figure it out naturally is one of the most common and costly beliefs in growing businesses.
Why do founders struggle with operations even when their business is successful? Because the skills that build a successful business are not the same skills that design the systems to sustain it. Founders are typically excellent at creating value, solving problems, and serving clients. Operational design requires a different kind of thinking. It requires stepping back from the work and looking at how the work moves. That shift from doing to designing is not natural for most founders and is rarely taught.
When does operations stop being manageable without intentional design? Usually around the time the business grows past the point where the founder can hold everything together through proximity and presence. When the team gets large enough that informal coordination stops working, when decisions start stalling, and when the same problems keep recurring, those are signals that the business has outgrown what common sense and good intentions can hold together. That is the moment when operational design stops being optional.
Stay tuned for more real-world reflections on leadership, operational clarity, and purposeful growth in the next installment of Diary of a Leader.
