Running the business — operations for small startups

Weekly review (founders, 30-60 min) — what happened this week, what's blocked, what's next week's one priority. The minimum-viable management ritual. Skip it once, the team drifts within a fortnight.

Monthly close (founder + finance lead, 2-4 hours) — books closed, MRR/ARR computed, runway updated, investor update sent within a week of month-end. The discipline that turns gut into numbers.

Quarterly planning (whole team, 1-2 days) — what we accomplished last quarter, what the three biggest bets are this quarter, who owns each. Goes wrong when teams plan twelve things; it works when they plan three.

Pre-Series A you don't need OKRs, weekly KPI reviews, all-hands every week, or a separate operations meeting. Add when the symptom appears, not in anticipation.

Process is debt. Add it when the absence of it hurts; pay it down when it stops earning its keep.

Process you almost always need:

• Onboarding for new hires (a 1-page Notion doc, not a 30-page handbook)
• Standard customer pricing (so sales doesn't make every deal a one-off)
• Hiring scorecard for any role you've hired twice
• Incident response (someone is on call, knows what to do when prod breaks)
• Monthly close routines (so books don't drift)

Process you usually don't need pre-Series A:

• Multi-stage approval workflows
• Quarterly performance reviews (replace with weekly 1:1s)
• Detailed expense policies (just trust people; review on close)
• Engineering RFC processes for every change
• A separate "ops team" function

When in doubt, write it as a checklist not a policy. Checklists adapt; policies calcify.

Communication: Slack or Discord (one channel structure, ruthlessly pruned).

Docs + tasks: Notion or Linear + Notion. Avoid running parallel systems.

Email + calendar: Google Workspace.

Code + CI: GitHub. Vercel or Fly.io for deploy. Linear for issues.

Customer: A CRM only when sales > 1 person; before then a Notion DB is fine.

Finance: Stripe (charging), Xero or QuickBooks (books). Mercury or Wise for banking. Don't add layers unless the existing one breaks.

HR / payroll: Deel or Gusto. Avoid bespoke spreadsheets after the first two hires.

What to NOT buy: an LMS, a help-desk product before you have any tickets, a dedicated ops platform, a project management add-on, a "team OS." All of these are vendor-suggested; almost none are problem-suggested.