You know the growth levers by now.
Get your activation rates up. Fix your revenue cohort retention. Stop guessing on pricing. Improve your go-to-market strategy.
These are the usual suspects when founders think about unlocking growth — and for good reason. They’re critical, they’re measurable, and when you fix them, you see results.
But there’s a fifth growth lever that flies completely under the radar, especially for bootstrapped founders: operations.
And before you roll your eyes and think “operations sounds boring,” hear me out.
Because I’ve watched companies 4x their revenue by fixing this one thing. I’ve seen CEOs go from constantly having their hair on fire to actually thinking strategically about their business. And I’ve watched teams go from spinning their wheels to executing with clarity and purpose.
Operations isn’t sexy. It doesn’t have a clever acronym or a viral framework. But it might be the most powerful growth lever you’re not pulling.
The growth levers you already know (and the one you’re ignoring)
When I work with SaaS companies under $10M in ARR, there are typically four main reasons growth gets stuck:
- Value decline — Customers hire your product for one job, but over time, new jobs emerge that your product doesn’t solve. Eventually they churn because the value declined relative to their evolving needs.
- Activation issues — Everyone obsesses over acquisition, but if people don’t get activated once they sign up or start a trial, none of that marketing effort matters.
- Customer acquisition problems — Misaligned messaging, wrong channels, targeting the wrong customer. You already know this one intimately.
- Pricing — Most bootstrapped founders set pricing once and never touch it for 5-10 years. Meanwhile, they could probably double or triple it and keep their raving fans.
These four are table stakes. But there’s a fifth that most founders completely overlook: operations.
When I say operations, I’m not talking about “ops” in the traditional enterprise sense with its own department and fancy tools. I’m talking about something much more fundamental:
Operations is how you deliver value and how you internally structure yourself to deliver that value.
That’s it. It includes:
- Who’s on your team and in what roles
- How you decide what work gets done
- The processes you use to execute that work
- How often you meet and what you talk about in those meetings
- What you measure and report against
- How you communicate and make decisions
You might not think you’re doing operations, but you absolutely are. The question is: are you doing it intentionally, or is it just… happening to you?
Why bootstrapped founders are blind to operations
Here’s the thing about being bootstrapped: you can literally do whatever you want.
No board breathing down your neck. No investors demanding specific metrics. No forced structure or frameworks you have to follow.
This freedom is simultaneously your greatest strength and your Achilles’ heel when it comes to operations.
VC-funded companies are often pushed to think about operations. The board wants to see how resources are being allocated. They want to understand the org structure. They’re asking questions about how decisions get made and who’s accountable for what.
But bootstrapped founders? They can coast. And many do — until operations becomes the bottleneck that’s secretly strangling their growth.
I’ve seen this pattern play out dozens of times:
- 30-40 direct reports, all going to one CEO
- No middle management layer
- Constant context-switching between one-on-ones or async check-ins
- The CEO running marketing, product, engineering, and sales simultaneously
- Zero time to think strategically because they’re always reacting
That CEO is drowning. And the worst part? Fixing operations late in the journey is exponentially harder than being intentional about it early.
To restructure a flat organization of 30 contractors into something with actual layers and accountability? That’s massive change management with no one to help you execute it because, well, you structured it so you’re the only one who can.
When operations becomes your growth unlock
Let me tell you about a company I worked with a couple of years ago.
They had relatively junior marketing team, an engineering team, and a couple of co-founders who oversaw marketing, product, and engineering respectively.
On paper, they were doing a lot of things right. They were following EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System). They had weekly marketing meetings. They were trying to be strategic.
But growth was stagnant. And after digging in, it became clear that their biggest problem wasn’t their go-to-market strategy or their pricing or even their product.
It was operations.
Here’s what was happening: The CEO was running the weekly marketing meetings, and because the team was junior (think coordinators and assistants, not directors or VPs), they couldn’t contribute at the strategic level EOS requires.
The CEO would throw out ideas in meetings. The junior team would say “yes” and go execute. Then the CEO would be surprised later by what they’d committed to, and the team would realize they’d already done work that maybe wasn’t the right priority.
Nobody was thriving. The CEO was frustrated. The team was spinning their wheels.
The problem wasn’t the people. It wasn’t even EOS itself. The problem was that their operational structure didn’t match their team’s actual capabilities.
So we made changes:
- Restructured how the marketing team was organized
- Changed the meeting cadence and what we discussed in those meetings
- Put the CEO on the sidelines for certain conversations so the team could shine
- Created a new system for prioritizing projects so only the best ideas made it through
We also tackled go-to-market strategy, messaging, and positioning. And yes, there was some product work too — it’s never just one thing.
But that operational restructuring? That was a huge piece of what unlocked growth.
The company 2x’d. Then more recently, they 2x’d again. They’ve now quadrupled from where they were when we started working together.
And along the way, they hired a CMO who now oversees the marketing team. The CEO and CMO liaise on strategy. The junior team has clear structure and knows what they’re doing.
That key hire — that operational change — unlocked growth.
You’re already doing operations (you’re just not aware of it)
Here’s where this gets a bit philosophical, but stay with me.
It’s kind of like politics. You may not do politics, but politics is doing you.
You may not think about operations, but you are absolutely operating. You’re executing processes right now. You have a way you make decisions. You have some structure (even if it’s just “it’s all me”).
The question isn’t whether you have operations. The question is: How aware are you of your operations, and are they actually serving you?
I think about someone like Arvid Kahl, who runs The Bootstrapped Founder and Podscan. Arvid is incredibly intentional about how he operates. He knows what he’s optimizing for. He knows what trade-offs he’s making. He’s both aware and intentional.
(He’d probably joke it’s because he’s German, but I digress.)
That awareness and intention is what separates operational excellence from operational chaos.
When you’re not aware of how you’re operating, you can’t improve it. You can’t see what’s working and what’s not. You’re just… going through the motions, wondering why everything feels so damn hard.
The four-pillar operations audit framework
If you’re reading this thinking “okay, maybe operations is a problem for me,” here’s where to start.
I want you to audit four key areas of your operations:
Pillar 1: The right people in the right seats
First, ask yourself: Do I actually have the right people in the right seats?
This is an EOS concept, but it’s critically important. You might have someone in the marketing seat, for example, but when you’re honest with yourself, you really wish you had a CMO or someone more senior.
Or maybe you’ve got all individual contributors but you’re missing that middle management layer that would free you up to think strategically.
The key here is awareness. Are you clear on who’s in what seat? Are those the right seats for your stage of growth? And are the people in those seats actually the right fit?
Pillar 2: Resource allocation
Second question: Are the resources you have — both cash and people — getting spent in the most effective way possible?
Maybe you have budget to hire someone but you’re not pulling the trigger. Or maybe you’re spending money on tools and contractors when you’d be better served by one strategic hire.
This is about examining where your money and time are going and asking if those resources are truly being allocated to create the most value.
Pillar 3: Process clarity and efficiency
Third: Are your processes clear, effective, and as efficient as they need to be?
This one’s tricky because if you’re not aware, it’s hard to see. So the first step is simply getting aware.
What are your processes? How do you currently execute things? When you think about designing a feature, creating a campaign, or making a decision, what’s the actual process?
Then ask: Does this work? Could it be better? Are there more effective or efficient ways to get the same outcome for less time, money, or resources?
This is probably the hardest pillar of the four. If you’re not an ops guru, consider bringing in focused consultants for specific areas. Need help with enterprise sales processes? Hire an enterprise sales consultant. Struggling with marketing project management? Work with a marketing consultant who can help you structure that function.
You don’t need to figure it all out yourself.
Pillar 4: Decision-making and communication
Fourth and finally: How do you make decisions, and how do you communicate with your team (or with yourself)?
This is the softer, more psychological side of operations, but it matters enormously.
I recently asked a CEO I work with: “How do you like to disagree?”
His answer was illuminating. He’s hyper data-driven. He wants proof. He wants the report in hand, the stats, the analysis. He doesn’t thrive in willy-nilly, messy decision-making environments — he needs to at least know what the data says, even if he ultimately goes against it.
That’s a conscious choice. He’s aware of it. He’s communicated it to everyone on the team.
Not all teams are like that. Some teams need you to wrap hard news in bubble wrap and tissue paper before you share it. Others (like this CEO’s team) just want the straight facts, no posturing, radical candor style.
The key is knowing how you want to make decisions, what’s actually important to you, and how you want to communicate and show up within your team (or with yourself if it’s just you).
If you’re looking for support here, this is exactly what executive coaches are for.
The operations unlock you didn’t know you needed
Operations probably isn’t the sexiest topic I’ve ever written about.
It doesn’t have the immediate dopamine hit of “double your prices!” or the clear before-and-after of fixing your revenue cohort retention chart.
But here’s what I know after working with dozens of companies:
Operations can be the difference between a CEO who’s constantly drowning and a CEO who actually has time to think strategically about where their business is going.
It can be the difference between a team that’s spinning their wheels and a team that executes with clarity.
And it can absolutely be the difference between stagnant growth and 2x, 3x, even 4x growth.
You’re already operating. You’re already making operational decisions every single day.
The only question is: are you doing it intentionally, or is it just happening to you?
If you’re stuck on growth and you’ve already tackled acquisition, activation, pricing, and product, it’s time to look at the fifth lever.
It might just be the unlock you didn’t know you needed.