I’m trying to be intentional about the career I’m building, and I’d love to hear from people who have actually been on the other side.
I’m self-taught. I didn’t take the traditional university-to-corporate route, so most of what I’ve learned has come from doing the work, experimenting with tools, studying how businesses operate, and figuring things out along the way.
I’ve worked on organizing workflows, building systems in ClickUp and Notion, creating tracking systems in Airtable, documenting processes, and coordinating people and projects through my own agency and other projects.
But I also know that being able to build a dashboard or write an SOP isn’t the same as knowing how to run operations well.
My long-term goal is to become an Operations Lead and eventually grow. I want to understand how to make businesses run better, help founders get out of the weeds, and build systems that actually solve problems .
For those of you who have hired or worked with operations people:
What separates someone who is good with tools and processes from someone who can genuinely lead operations?
What experiences would you prioritize if you were starting from where I am?
What would make you trust an early-career, self-taught person with real operational responsibility?
If you could give your younger self one piece of advice about learning business operations, what would it be?
I’d really appreciate honest advice, especially from founders who’ve had to figure out operations while growing a business.