The Job You Know Too Well to Describe

You’ve been staring at this job description for longer than you want to admit. The title is easy enough — Director of Operations, General Manager, whatever fits your business. It’s the bullet points underneath that keep stopping you.

Lead day-to-day operations of the business. Sure. But what does that actually mean here? What are they leading? What decisions get made without you, and how? You rewrite the line again. You save the draft and walk away. You’ll come back to it tomorrow.

The labor market isn’t helping. Recent survey data shows that nearly half of small business owners hiring right now report few or no qualified applicants — a trend that’s held for years. The candidates feel too junior, too expensive, or perhaps both. The strong ones take other offers before you can move. Hiring takes longer than it used to.

That’s all real. But it doesn’t explain why the bullet points won’t come.

Here’s what might be going on: you’ve been running this business on instinct for years. When to say yes. When to say no. How to define and measure quality. How to resolve day-to-day problems. The business runs on those decisions. And because you’re the one making them, you’ve never had to articulate them.

Then you decide to make your first operational hire — a director of operations, a general manager, a practice manager, a studio lead, an operations manager, a head chef who also runs the kitchen — and something becomes clear. The person you’re bringing in isn’t just taking over tasks. They’re taking over decisions. You’re asking someone else to operate the way you would when you’re not in the room.

And they can’t do that unless you can tell them what that actually means.

Without that clarity written down, an otherwise strong candidate might step into a role that hasn’t been properly defined and fill the vacuum the only way they can — by importing their own operating instincts. The business doesn’t break. It just slowly stops being the business you built.

Remember the childhood game of telephone? It works the same way. A message gets whispered from person to person until it barely resembles what it started as. Without your vision ever being written down, it gets passed along through interpretation, assumption, and instinct — none of it malicious, all of it imperfect. By the time it reaches the other end, the operating vision of your business no longer belongs to you. It belongs to whoever filled in the blanks.

That’s the actual cost of skipping this work. Not a failed hire. A successful one, running on the wrong blueprint.

There is a better question to ask before you post the job. Not who should I hire? but what does my business look like when this role is working well?

Picture it twelve months from now. Things are running better. What’s different? What do you trust someone else to be the last word on? What are you finally able to see, or build, or step back from, because someone else is carrying the operational responsibility?

Those answers are the job description. The bullet points come after.

The labor market is projected to be tight for a while, and scarcity creates a real pull toward moving quickly. But scarcity also makes the deliberate strategic work even more important. A hire made into an undefined role is a shot in the dark. A hire made into a defined one is a decision the founder can stand behind, defend internally, and build on — because the role is sound even if the first person in it isn’t.

Founders who define the role before they search for the person don’t lose their candidates. Conversely, they may find the search gets shorter — and surfaces candidates who are a better long-term fit for their business. And as a bonus, the ones who do this work are likely to walk away with something unexpected: a clearer picture of their own business than they had going in.