The Operations Hat: Herding Cats, Taming Chaos, and Pretending This Was the Plan

Every small business has an Operations Person.

If you're lucky, it’s someone calm, organized, and unnervingly good at putting out metaphorical (and occasionally literal) fires.

If you’re like me, it's you—wearing this hat in addition to accounting, tech, hiring, customer complaints, and “why is the Wi-Fi down again?”

Welcome to the Operations Hat—the unsung backbone of your business. Not as flashy as sales, not as number-obsessed as accounting, and definitely not as romanticized as startup founders on LinkedIn pretending burnout is a lifestyle. But without ops? Everything falls apart.

Let’s break down what this hat actually involves—and how to wear it without losing your mind.

What Is Operations, Really?

Operations is… everything else. It's the systems that keep the business moving forward while you're sprinting in ten directions at once.

At its core, operations is:

• Making things more efficient – processes, workflows, automations—basically, reducing the number of steps between “idea” and “done.”
• Fixing what breaks – whether it’s a supply chain issue, an overloaded server, or someone putting “password123” as their admin login—again.
• Keeping people aligned – SOPs, checklists, Slack channel etiquette (read: “Stop @everyone-ing the team at 11PM.”)
• Planning for what’s next – scaling without chaos. Forecasting without tarot cards.

And if you’re doing it right, no one even notices you're doing it.

Fun Fact: You’re Already Doing Ops

If you’ve ever:

• Created a shared Google Sheet to track vendor orders
• Written a step-by-step how-to so you don’t have to re-teach someone again
• Yelled at a printer
• Implemented a Kanban board
• Said the words “we need to automate this” at least three times this week

Congratulations! You’ve entered the operations zone.

The problem? It’s hard to see the work of ops until it’s missing. When ops is bad, you feel it. When it’s good, it’s invisible. Which is ironic, because invisible hats are harder to juggle.

Systems That Save Sanity

Here are a few of my actual go-to moves from the operational trenches:

📌 Document Everything (No, Seriously)

If it takes you more than 5 minutes to do, and you’ll ever need to do it again, write it down.

Use Notion, Google Docs, a napkin—whatever. Just don’t rely on “memory.” Memory is not a system.

🧠 Build a Decision-Making Engine

Ops isn’t just about systems—it’s about making fewer, better decisions.

Make templates for the decisions you have to make often. Vendor scoring sheets. Inventory reorder thresholds. Employee onboarding checklists. If you're solving the same problem more than twice, systematize it.

🔥 The Rule of Bottlenecks

Operations rule of thumb: Your business moves only as fast as your slowest system.

That might be your inventory management. Or your 19-step client onboarding. Or the fact that no one knows how to refund a customer without asking you.

Find the chokepoint. Fix it. Celebrate by not doing that thing manually anymore.

The Secret Weapon? Clarity

You don’t need to be perfect. You need to be clear.

Good ops = clarity. Everyone knows what to do, when to do it, and how not to break things while doing it. And when things do break? There’s a plan. That’s the ops magic.

So, Why Care About Operations?

Because chaos is expensive.

You don’t want your staff wasting 30 minutes looking for a file. You don’t want your customer onboarding to depend on Linda remembering to CC the right person. And you definitely don’t want “the person who knows how to do that” to go on vacation.

Good operations is how you scale without stress. Or at least, with less stress.

What’s Next?

Now that we’ve uncovered the dirty (and delightful) truth about running ops in a small business, here’s what’s coming up next on the blog:

Your Business is a Mess: How to Run a Monthly Ops Cleanup

Also on deck: system templates, how to audit your current processes, and the best tech stack to keep your operation running smoothly even if you're still running it from a basement office with a suspicious smell.

Want more useful chaos-taming tips?

HatStacked is a blog for small business owners who juggle more hats than a department store mannequin. This one’s for the ops folks—the glue, the duct tape, the quiet engine behind the chaos.

— Josh