Most agency ops leaders spend their whole day in conversation. The resourcing clash on Thursday, the project that's out of scope and now unprofitable, the new starter whose laptop still hasn't arrived, the month's revenue forecast that needs a reality check.
What they rarely get is a conversation about the operation itself - with someone who understands it as well as they do.
The ops role sits in an odd place in an agency.
The MD is looking outward, at growth, clients and the next pitch. The creative and account teams are rightly absorbed in the work. Ops sits in the middle, holding it all together.
You're the one who decides which project gets the senior designer this week. You have the awkward conversation about a freelancer's invoice. You notice the pipeline and the resource plan don't match, and start fixing it before anyone else has spotted the problem.
A lot of the job is absorbing friction so other people don't have to feel it. Done well, nobody sees it. It only becomes visible when something goes wrong, and by then the conversation is about the one thing that went wrong rather than the hundred that didn't.
And most of it is done alone. In most agencies I've worked in, there's nobody else at that level doing what ops does. You might have a team, but you're their sounding board. You're rarely anyone's peer.
The obvious person to think with is the MD. And most good MDs do understand that operations matter - they often hired you because they knew they couldn't hold it all themselves.
But they're looking at the business through a different lens: revenue, growth, clients, new business. Bring them an operational question that needs a considered answer, and you'll often get a quick one, or it gets parked until after the pitch.
Sometimes you find yourself choosing your moment. Raising the difficult thing (the utilisation problem, the account lead who keeps overpromising, the process everyone agreed to and nobody follows) can turn into a much bigger conversation than you meant to start, on a day they had other things on their mind.
That isn't a failing on their part - they simply can't give it the attention it deserves. And that relationship already carries enough weight without also being the place you work through your doubts.
Then there's time. The day-to-day of an ops role fills every hour available. Requests come in, fires start, decisions need making now.
The thinking that would actually move the operation forward gets pushed to Friday afternoon. How should resourcing work at 40 people rather than 25? Is the way you scope costing you profit? What tools should you be considering for next month?
Those questions slide to the end of the month...and then to 'when things calm down', which in an agency is a date that never arrives.
Most ops leaders I talk to know exactly what they'd work on if they had the space. But making that space is the issue.
A regular session with someone outside the business changes that in a fairly unglamorous way. It's in the diary. You know it's coming, so you turn up having thought about something.
Someone who has held senior ops roles across several agencies has watched the same problems play out from different angles.
They've seen the resourcing model that worked beautifully at one size and fell apart at the next. They know which fixes tend to stick, and which get quietly abandoned after six weeks.
They can tell you when something you're wrestling with is completely normal for an agency your size - which is often a relief. And when it's genuinely unusual - which is often more useful.
That perspective is hard to build from inside one business, however good you are. You only see your own agency, and you see it from the middle.
Then there's accountability, which sounds more serious than it is.
Ops leaders aren't short of discipline; they're usually the most organised people in the building. The trouble is that the day-to-day offers an endless supply of perfectly good reasons to put the strategic work off. Each one is defensible. Together, they mean the important thing never happens.
Knowing someone will ask, in a fortnight, what happened to the thing you said you'd look at makes that drift much harder. It's easy to let yourself off. It's harder to explain to someone else why you did.
None of this is quite what coaching, consulting or mentoring offer. Coaching tends to focus on you as a person. A consultant comes in to fix a specific problem and leaves. A mentor is often a generous, informal arrangement with someone who took a different path.
What most ops leaders are missing is simpler: a peer who has done the job, has no stake in the internal politics, and whose only role is to help them think.
In practice, that's a regular conversation every few weeks with someone who has sat in your seat. You bring whatever's on your mind - the decision you're weighing up, the problem that keeps coming back, the plan you haven't found time to write. They listen properly, ask the questions nobody inside the business is placed to ask, and tell you honestly when they've seen it before and how it went.
Between sessions, the things you said you'd do stay on the table. Nothing gets written up for the board.
It's thinking time, with someone on your side. The job doesn't otherwise give you that.
💜 If that sounds like something you'd use, find out more about how I work with COOs and ops leaders.
Most agency ops leaders spend their whole day in conversation. The resourcing clash on Thursday, the project that's out of scope and now unprofitable, the new starter whose laptop still hasn't arrived, the month's revenue forecast that needs a reality check.
Agencies are good at diagnosis. You walk into a client's business and within a few conversations, you can see it.
For many of us, today marks the unofficial start of the summer holidays. The day when school finishes, the kids are home, and somehow your days aren't quite yours in the same way they are during term time.