The most useful changes are generally those which move responsibility away from the founder, reduce exceptions and standardise processes which currently depend on individual knowledge.
Operational maturity becomes particularly important when a founder-led business starts preparing for a sale as it gives buyers confidence that the business will be easier to integrate in their existing operations.
Improving it does not necessarily require a major restructuring, and a few targeted changes can materially reduce perceived key-person risk.
1. Move key customer relationships away from the founder
In many founder-led businesses, the founder still manages the largest clients, leads renewals and steps in whenever there is a problem. This creates a particular risk where those customers represent a meaningful percentage of revenue.
The quickest improvement is to move day-to-day ownership to another senior employee in charge of sales or customer success. That person should lead meetings, manage renewals and become the main commercial contact.
The founder should of course remain involved in growing new business, but buyers should be able to see that the relationship no longer depends entirely on them.
2. Give managers real decision-making authority
A management team adds relatively little if every important decision still requires founder approval. The same issue may appear in flat organisations where the founder still directly manages most of the team despite having senior employees underneath them.
Commercial, finance and operational managers should therefore have defined authority over both the people and decisions within their areas.
For example, a commercial director might manage the sales team and approve discounts up to 10%, while the finance director controls supplier expenditure within budget and approves payment-term exceptions.
Larger decisions can still remain with the founder or board. The objective is simply to stop routine management and operational decisions accumulating at the top of the business.
3. Introduce useful monthly management reporting
Management should set targets for the metrics it wants to improve, and give ownership of these metrics to managers. However, monitoring and reporting should be a standalone function, much of which can be automated.
The targets should also connect operational activity back to financial performance. For example, an advertising campaign should not only be assessed on ROAS, but also on the margin generated by the customers it acquires and its impact on current-year profitability.
The same applies across other functions. Sales teams should not be rewarded for revenue growth if it comes through heavy discounting or low-margin work, and operational targets should not encourage behaviour which weakens customer retention or profitability.
Coordinating the targets across different functions and assessing their overall impact on the business should ideally sit with the CFO or CEO.
4. Put controls around commercial exceptions
Weak operational maturity often appears through commercial exceptions which gradually become normal practice. Over time and as the business scales, it’s easy lose sight of whether those decisions are still commercially sensible.
A quick solution is to define clear approval thresholds and make someone responsible for enforcing them. For example, custom features requested by a customer could require approval from the commercial director or product lead once the development effort exceeds a certain number of hours, with CEO approval required above a higher threshold. This creates discipline around exceptions without slowing down normal operations.
5. Standardise recurring manual processes
Another useful area to review is recurring work which still depends on one person knowing how to do it. Common examples we see are commission calculations, customer onboarding, and management reporting.
The first step is usually to standardise the process rather than immediately trying to automate it. In the case of management reporting for example, the current preparer should outline where the data comes from, then explain how it’s transformed and eventually mapped to structured management accounts.
Once the process is consistent and broken down into steps, each individual step can be automated for complex processes, and straightforward workflows may even be entirely automated from that point.
The idea is to invest time now so that processes which currently rely on man-hours can be automated and become a secondary part of the business, rather than cause frictions which bring admin processes to the forefront of day-to-day activities.
To conclude…
Improving operational maturity can be done initially with a few simple steps, and does not require turning a small business into a large corporate organisation.
The most useful changes are generally those which move responsibility away from the founder, reduce exceptions and standardise processes which currently depend on individual knowledge.
These changes can often be implemented relatively quickly and, for founders preparing an exit, they can give buyers clearer evidence that the company can continue operating smoothly after a transaction.