WHERE IT'S BREAKING
Operations Review and 90-Day Plan
When a business grows fast, the systems that worked at 10 people quietly break at 30, and the owner becomes the switchboard. This piece shows how Kelly would run an operations review: trace real jobs from sale to cash, list every tool and login, sort findings into causes, and leave a ranked list of fixes with named owners and a 30/60/90-day roadmap.
What it looks like
- The owner approves every quote, purchase, schedule change and payroll exception.
- Scheduling is a whiteboard plus group texts. Crews show up without site notes.
- Seven tools and no system of record. Logins are shared over text.
The ask:“I don’t need more software. I need to stop being the bottleneck, and I need to know what to fix first.”
How I'd work through it
- Trace the money path first: follow real jobs from first inquiry to cash received.
- Separate symptoms from causes, and tag each finding as people, process, tool or ownership.
- Treat owner dependency as a design problem: keep, delegate with a limit, or replace with a rule.
- Check each tool against the job it needs to do before recommending anything new.
- Prioritize by impact, effort and risk together, and name an owner for every fix.
- Leave it runnable: a weekly operating rhythm keeps the work going after the engagement.
What gets built
- One-page executive summary
- Current-state workflow map from sale to cash
- Systems, tools and access review
- Findings register tagged by root cause, impact and risk
- Owner-dependency inventory
- Prioritization matrix and future-state structure
- 30/60/90-day roadmap with owners and definitions of done
Walkthrough
More from Where It's Breaking
WHERE IT'S BREAKING
Project-Management System Redesign
One home for projects, one template, statuses that mean something.
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