When founders tell they want to get out of ops, what they usually mean is: they want to stop making decisions every hour, stop being pulled into client escalations, and stop being the only person who knows what "good" looks like.

Fair.

But the problem is that operations isn't “the work you do”. It's the system that decides what work gets done, by whom, and to what standard.

If you leave before that system exists, you're not “delegating” operations you're just hoping someone else will guess correctly.

The advice to "remove yourself from ops" assumes there's something to remove yourself from. But in most agencies, ops isn't a thing yet. It's just you, making calls in real time, holding the quality bar, interpreting scope, deciding what's urgent and what's not, etc.

And most of it comes down to the ability of making the right judgment.

So the question becomes… how do we build a business where people make the right judgment without you constantly being pulled into it?

What rules are currently living in your head that should be living in the business?

What decisions are you making reflexively that your team doesn't even know are decisions?

If you can't answer that, you're not ready to step back. What you're ready for is to extract.

Tomorrow I'm sitting in a room with a group of agency founders walking through exactly this what it actually means to make yourself replaceable on purpose, and why that's a different problem than most people think they're solving.

Not sure what comes out of it yet... But it's the right question.

BTW, the event is free to attend, and you can do it here.