Operations Analyst

What the work actually is

You go through a company operation by operation. How customers arrive, how the work gets delivered, what lands on the owner's desk and why. For each one you work out what it costs the company in a year, whether it can be replaced with an AI system, and what replacing it is worth. Then you write it down in a document the owner can act on without us, because the offer says he can, and we mean it.

The hard part is not the arithmetic. It is getting to what actually happens rather than what the process document says happens. People describe the version of their job they are proud of. You have to get past that without making anyone defensive.

The document also contains the section on what we would not automate. That section is usually the most useful one in the whole assessment and it is the reason clients believe the rest of it.

What you would be doing

• Interview the owner, then interview the people doing the work, and reconcile the two accounts.
• Price each operation in annual dollars with the arithmetic shown, so the owner can check it.
• Write the section on what not to automate, including the AI projects the owner is already considering that we would advise against.
• Present the assessment and defend every number in it, in the room.
• Hand the scoped work to the implementation engineer with enough detail that they do not have to re-interview anyone.

What we are looking for

• You have worked inside a company under 100 people, not only alongside one as an advisor.
• You can sit with an owner who is defensive about his business and still get a straight answer.
• You are comfortable in a spreadsheet and can read a P&L without help.
• You write clearly and you are willing to put your name on it.
• You will tell a prospect to buy a $40 tool instead of hiring us, and you will do it on the call rather than after.

What we are not looking for

• Deck builders. The output is a written document, not slides.
• Anyone who needs the answer to be yes. Roughly a third of what we assess should be left alone.
• People whose only experience of process is a company with 5,000 employees. The problems do not transfer.
• Someone who wants to work entirely from behind a screen.

Who should not apply

Do not apply if you want to be a strategist. You will spend a week reading a company's quote history and a day arguing about whether one number is 40,000 or 62,000.

Do not apply if you need a large team around you. There are four of us.

Do not apply if you are outside the United States. We would like to say otherwise, but we can only hire and contract there at the moment, so an application from anywhere else is one we have to turn down on paperwork rather than on merit. We would rather you knew that before you wrote it than after.

How to apply

Email us with your CV attached and tell us about one operation you have personally removed from a business. What it cost before, what it cost after, and how you know.

If you have never removed one, pick a company you have worked in and tell us which operation you would take out first and why you would pick it over the others. That answer is more useful to us than the CV.