Issue #31 & September 28, 2026

Happy Monday!

I’m in SF this week for the start of year 3 of Intuit Partner Council.

Selfishly, I asked my friend Chase to write this guest post because I wanted to learn more about operations inside accounting firms. Usually, when I’m wondering about something, it’s probably worth writing about too.

So without further ado, here’s Chase!

My favorite question surfaced yet again.

I run private monthly roundtables for accounting firm CEOs. Owners of ambitious firms thinking about the forefront of technology, industry trends, and where the puck is heading. This past month, one roundtable chose one of my favorite topics: “What’s the role of a COO in an accounting firm? Do I need one?”

Experience tells me they aren’t just asking about a “COO,” but some “operations leader” in general. When do you hire one, how do you do it, and at what level to hire?

By the end, everyone agreed that “operations” means something different in each firm, and to each firm owner.

I’d like to change that narrative. I think operations can be quite concrete. Here’s how I think about operations roles, the three levels they can show up as, and how to actually hire the right one.

Before you hire, you need an internal anchor for who you're hiring. In my experience, an operations role shows up in a firm at one of three levels. Many firm owners expect an operations hire to solve all of their operations problems, and that simply isn’t true. Most hiring mistakes are a mismatch between the level you want and the level you hired.

Administrator. Email, scheduling, task completion, recurring work like billing and invoicing. Follows process, execution-oriented. Great at execution, weaker with planning and systems design. Closest analog: a strong executive assistant.

Enabler. Work routing, capacity planning, projects, team coordination. Builds process rather than just following it. Great at enabling the team and being a generalist, sometimes weaker at influencing change and is at the highest risk of working “on an island”. Closest analog: an operations manager or director of operations.

Strategist. Strategic initiatives, building the operating system, technology, people management, and change management across the whole firm. Systems-thinking and consultative. Often thought of as “the Integrator.” Great at thinking ahead and as a thought partner, sometimes can lack in hands-on execution. Closest analog: a chief operating officer.

Not every human fits into these clear-cut boxes; it’s just a lens to think about the hire. To pair with the framework, here are real examples for how these roles can show up in firms:

An offshore executive assistant at a fast-growing bookkeeping firm. She owns the calendar, inbox, CRM upkeep, and practice-management system. She keeps recurring work moving so nothing drops, and is now growing toward operations management.

An executive assistant embedded in a firm owner's daily life. Inbox, schedule, notes, tasks, travel. He keeps the owner's world running so the owner can stay focused on higher-value work.

A director of cloud finance services at a ~20-person professional-services firm. She owns capacity planning, a revenue-and-role allocation model, sales forecasting, and hiring. That's coordination and process-building at firm scale, not just getting tasks done.

A director of client operations at an accounting firm. Its first non-client-facing operations hire. She builds the systems and efficiency the firm runs on, and chairs the leadership team's weekly meeting as its integrator. She has the telltale sign of an Enabler: she owns how the work flows, not just whether it got done.

Senior Operations Advisor or the COO for the firm owner. This role helps the firm move forward by: interpreting the firm's KPIs and health, making strategic, financial, and operational recommendations, and then leading the implementation: building research memos, process maps, org design, operating models, workshops, and coaching the firm.

The work is systems-thinking and consultative: they don't just tell an owner what to fix, they build the operating system, hands-on with their team, and get it adopted.

1) Know the "level" you need. Matching the level is critical; for example, hiring a Strategist means keeping them out of coordination tasks, so they can focus on the long-term alongside of you. Hiring an Administrator means you won’t get that long-term thinking you may deeply crave. Budget here is important.

2) Manage your expectations. If you have a lot of operational holes, any hire will fall to the lowest level of operations. The reason for this is operations is like building a house; you first need a foundation, then the walls, floors, ceiling, then all the finer fixtures. Without a foundation, your operator will fall through the cracks in the floor and be less strategic than you thought. Maybe you make that hire anyway, so they patch the holes. Just know that your 90-day onboarding plan may need to adjust, depending on what the operator finds.

3) Give autonomy, not just delegate tasks. Make them decision-makers, not just doers. Handing over a task list keeps them at the Administrator level no matter what you hired for. Earn their trust, set the guardrails, and then fully let go; the whole point of the role is to take decisions off your plate, not route them back to you.

4) Align the work with your firm's strategic priorities. Operators are enablement professionals; their success is tied to the team's performance. Point them at a metric that matters; for example, they may take your average month end close speed from 15 days down to 10. That’s a win the whole firm can celebrate. The failure mode here is giving them "side quests": ops work that sits adjacent to client delivery instead of integrated into it. Good ops is scaffolding; poor ops is an anchor. Collaborate with them to define where their time goes, what they work on, and what "done" looks like.

AI is eating a lot of knowledge work, and operations is no different. The best operators are getting with the program. Three qualities separate them:

Technical ability. They work at the forefront of the tools: connecting firm data to Claude or ChatGPT, building agents, and piping data with n8n, Make, or Zapier. Enabler-level hires tend to excel here.

Strong written communication. They build the firm's internal "brain”: a unified operating system, written down. Think about your business context: who the clients are, what services we provide, who does the work, the processes to get the work done, what success looks like for each service, where work is tracked, how the team communicates, and the firm’s strategic priorities. Imagine: you can have all of this clarified, documented, and streamlined as a unified operating system. This requires great written communication. Strategist hires design that system; Enablers run it.

Comfort with ambiguity. They proactively pull what's stuck in the owner's head and turn it into systems, without waiting to be told how. Strategist and Enabler hires have this; Administrators usually don't.

Simply put, you get what you pay for; Strategist hires are paid the most, Enablers in the middle, Administrators the least. Accountants resist this, because an ops role can look like pure overhead. I see firm owners attempt to mitigate this and fall into a trap: promoting an accountant into a “hybrid 20-hour ops role.” It never works: client work always wins, because it keeps the lights on, so the ops work never happens at the speed necessary to compound gains.

Instead, shift your mindset. Good ops is long-term, strategic leverage; it’s an investment that pays dividends, not a cost center. The dividends are time: time for business development, selling deeper into existing clients, marketing, and showing up at industry events. Run the math with two questions. How many clients would it take to cover an operator's salary? (Fewer than you think.) And if I freed up 5, 10, or 20 hours a week, could I go generate that? If the answer is yes, make the hire, take a bet on yourself, and go win.

I like to think of operations as the intersection between people, process, technology, and culture.

Think of it like a tight ball of yarn, bundled up together, difficult to disentangle. And worse, every thread touches other threads. I think this is a big reason operations is difficult to hire for: where do I start, and for what do I optimize? But great operators are up to this challenge: pulling each thread, seeing how it connects, and deconstructing each piece into its components. It's a process of deep problem solving, system building, and influencing the whole firm. The net effect (see what I did there?!) is having a scalable operation that keeps the firm owner out of the weeds and focused on growth.

Question of the week

What would change in your firm if the right person truly owned operations??

If you enjoyed this one, check out Chase’s newsletter. It’s one of the few I actually read + add him on Linkedin!

Have a lovely week,

- Tailor