Operations Manager

Screening notes

Experience

5 years running operations for a US home-goods brand doing about $4M a year, remote from Manila. Owned the relationship with two 3PLs and eleven suppliers (nine in China, two domestic). Ran weekly inventory planning, cut stockouts from 14 SKU-weeks a quarter to 3 by building a reorder-point sheet that accounts for actual lead-time variance rather than the supplier's promised lead time. Wrote the SOP library — 34 documents — and more importantly got people to use it by making each one fit on one screen. Before that, 3 years as a fulfilment coordinator.

Tools

Shopify, ShipBob and ShipHero, Airtable, Google Sheets (heavy — XLOOKUP, query, pivot), Slack, Notion, Asana, and Zapier for the glue. Lately Claude for turning call notes into draft SOPs, which I then edit — I do not ship a generated SOP unedited because it always misses the exception that makes the process real.

Scenario answer

Asked: A supplier misses a delivery date that three customer orders depend on, and you find out from a customer, not the supplier. Walk through exactly what you do in the next hour, and what you change so it can't happen the same way twice.

The hour splits into two halves and they are not equally urgent. First twenty minutes — the customers, because they are the only ones losing something right now. I pull the three orders and find out what each one actually needs. A customer who ordered for a birthday next Tuesday and a customer restocking a shelf are different problems with the same root cause. Then I email all three myself, before the supplier has confirmed anything, and I give them a date I am confident in rather than the date I hope for. If I only have a range, I say so. The thing that turns a late delivery into a refund request is silence, not lateness. Next twenty — the supplier. I want three facts: what happened, the new ship date, and whether anything else of ours is on the same line. That last question is the one people forget, and it is usually how you find out this is two problems rather than one. I ask for it in writing. Next twenty — the workaround. Can I fill any of the three from the other 3PL, split the shipment, or substitute a variant the customer would accept? Usually one of the three can be saved. I would rather save one than explain three. Then the part that matters more than the hour: why did the customer know before I did. The honest answer is almost always that we had no tripwire — we tracked promised ship dates and nobody looked at them until something shipped. So the change I make is a dated exception report, not a rule that says "communicate better". Concretely: every PO carries a promised ship date; a sheet flags any PO where the ship date is within 48 hours and the supplier has not confirmed dispatch; that flag lands in the ops channel every morning at 8am. It is fifteen minutes of setup and it converts a silent failure into a visible one. I would also add the supplier's confirmation to the weekly supplier check-in so it is asked before it is late rather than after.

Work sample

Asked: Pick any small business you know. Write the standard operating procedure for one recurring process it runs weekly — numbered steps, who does what, what 'done' looks like, and the one check that catches the most common failure.

SOP — WEEKLY INVENTORY REORDER REVIEW Small e-commerce brand, ~120 active SKUs, two suppliers, one 3PL. Owner: Operations. Runs every Monday, 9:00–9:45am. Backup owner: the founder. WHY THIS EXISTS Stockouts on the top 20 SKUs cost more than the carrying cost of holding six extra weeks of them. This review exists to make the reorder decision on a schedule instead of when someone notices an empty shelf. STEPS 1. (5 min) Export on-hand units by SKU from the 3PL portal. Paste into the REORDER sheet, tab "onhand". Do not retype them — the export carries a timestamp and typing does not. 2. (5 min) Export units sold, last 28 days, from Shopify. Paste into tab "velocity". 3. (2 min) The sheet computes weeks-of-cover = on-hand ÷ (28-day units ÷ 4) per SKU. Sort ascending. 4. (10 min) Work the list from the top. Any SKU under its reorder point is a decision today. The reorder point is not a fixed number of weeks — it is that supplier's ACTUAL average lead time for the SKU over the last six orders, plus two weeks of buffer. Those dates live in tab "leadtime" and are updated at step 9. 5. (10 min) Raise the POs. One PO per supplier per week, not one per SKU — suppliers batch anyway, and a single weekly PO is what makes the lead-time history comparable. 6. (5 min) Log each PO in tab "open_po": PO number, supplier, SKUs, units, promised ship date, promised landing date. 7. (5 min) Scan tab "open_po" for anything whose promised ship date falls inside 48 hours with no dispatch confirmation. Email those suppliers now. This is the step that stops a customer finding out before we do. 8. (3 min) Post a four-line summary in #ops: SKUs below cover, POs raised, anything at risk, anything needing the founder's money decision. 9. (ongoing, not Monday) When a PO physically lands, record the actual landing date in tab "leadtime". WHAT DONE LOOKS LIKE Every SKU under its reorder point either has a PO raised today or a written reason it does not (discontinuing, seasonal, supplier out). The #ops summary is posted. Tab "open_po" has no unconfirmed line inside 48 hours. THE ONE CHECK THAT CATCHES THE MOST FAILURES Step 9. Reorder points built on a supplier's promised lead time rather than their real one are the single largest cause of stockouts I have seen, because the promise is stable and reality is not. If step 9 stops happening, this SOP quietly degrades into guessing within about two months — and nothing looks broken while it does.

Availability

Full-time, 1pm–10pm PHT (1am–10am ET) or shifted later if more overlap is needed. Two weeks' notice.

Screening notes

Experience

4 years as operations lead at a 25-person US marketing agency, remote from Medellín on US Eastern hours. Owned delivery operations: project intake, resourcing across 14 contractors, client reporting, and the vendor stack. Rebuilt the intake process after we lost a $9K/month retainer over a missed deliverable nobody owned — the new intake made the owner explicit at the moment work was accepted, and we did not repeat it in the following 18 months. Also ran the agency's AI tooling rollout: I wrote the guidelines for what could and could not be drafted by a model, which mattered because client contracts had confidentiality terms.

Tools

Notion (our system of record), Asana, Harvest, Slack, Google Sheets, Zapier, Make, Claude and ChatGPT for drafting, Looker Studio for the client dashboards

Scenario answer

Asked: A supplier misses a delivery date that three customer orders depend on, and you find out from a customer, not the supplier. Walk through exactly what you do in the next hour, and what you change so it can't happen the same way twice.

Hour one, in order. 0–10 min: I get the facts before I get the story. Which three orders, what did each customer pay, what did we promise in writing, and is anything time-critical for a reason we already know about. I am building the call list, ranked by how much damage silence does. 10–25 min: I contact all three customers myself. Not a templated apology — a specific one. What happened, what it means for their date, and what I am doing about it. If I do not yet have a new date I say I will have one within four hours, and then I send it at hour four whether or not the supplier has replied. The commitment is to the update, not to the news being good. 25–40 min: Supplier. I want the new ship date and the reason, and whether the rest of our open POs with them are affected. In writing, so the answer is quotable later. 40–55 min: Mitigation. Split ship, partial ship, alternative supplier, or a goodwill credit if none of those work. I decide this myself up to a threshold the owner and I agreed in advance; above it I ask. Having the threshold pre-agreed is what lets this happen inside the hour at all. 55–60 min: Write it down while it is fresh — what happened, what I did, what it cost. Now the prevention, which is the actual question. The failure is not that the supplier was late. Suppliers are late. The failure is that our first signal came from outside. So I fix the signal, not the supplier. 1. Every PO gets a promised ship date as a required field. No date, no PO. Required fields are the cheapest process control there is. 2. A daily automated check lists any PO whose promised ship date passes with no dispatch confirmation and posts it to the ops channel. Silence becomes an event. 3. Customer-facing dates carry a buffer reflecting real supplier variance, not the best case. If a supplier's real lead time is 18–26 days, we promise on 26. And one thing I would not do: add a rule telling suppliers to notify us of delays. They already know they should. A process that depends on the party who failed telling you they failed is not a process.

Work sample

Asked: Pick any small business you know. Write the standard operating procedure for one recurring process it runs weekly — numbered steps, who does what, what 'done' looks like, and the one check that catches the most common failure.

SOP — WEEKLY CLIENT DELIVERY REVIEW Marketing agency, ~14 active retainers, contractor delivery model. Owner: Operations lead. Every Friday 10:00–11:00am ET. Backup: account director. WHY THIS EXISTS In an agency the thing that kills a retainer is not bad work, it is a deliverable nobody owned. This review makes ownership explicit once a week, in writing, before the client notices a gap. STEPS 1. (10 min) Open the delivery board. For each active retainer, confirm this week's committed deliverables are marked done, in progress, or slipped. A blank status is treated as slipped, not as unknown. 2. (10 min) For every slipped item: name the owner, the new date, and whether the client has been told. If the client has not been told and the item is client-visible, it goes on today's send list and I send it. 3. (10 min) Contractor capacity for next week — hours committed against hours available, per person, from Harvest. Over 90% is a risk. Over 100% is a deliverable that will slip and we just do not know which one yet. 4. (10 min) Next week's commitments. Every item gets a named owner before the meeting ends. Not a team, a person. 5. (10 min) Retainer health scan: any client with two slipped items in a month, or no client contact in 10 days, is flagged to the account director with a reason. 6. (10 min) Post the summary in #delivery: what shipped, what slipped and who owns it now, capacity risks, clients flagged. WHAT DONE LOOKS LIKE Every next-week deliverable has one named owner. Every slipped client-visible item has been communicated or is on today's send list. The summary is posted before noon. THE ONE CHECK THAT CATCHES THE MOST FAILURES Step 4 — a named person, not a team. Every delivery failure I have investigated traced back to an item assigned to "design" or "the pod" rather than to someone with a name. Teams do not miss deadlines; the gap between two people's assumptions does.

Availability

Full-time, 9am–6pm ET from Medellín. Three weeks' notice.

Screening notes

Experience

4 years as an operations coordinator for a Cape Town logistics company, then 2 years supporting a UK e-commerce client remotely. I coordinate between departments, keep the order tracker updated, follow up with suppliers on outstanding deliveries, and produce the weekly operations report for management. I am highly organised and very good at following up on things until they are resolved.

Tools

Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Teams, Trello, Google Sheets, WhatsApp for supplier communication

Scenario answer

Asked: A supplier misses a delivery date that three customer orders depend on, and you find out from a customer, not the supplier. Walk through exactly what you do in the next hour, and what you change so it can't happen the same way twice.

In the first hour I would immediately contact the supplier to find out what has happened and when the delivery will now arrive. I would ask them to confirm the new date in writing so that we have a record of it. Once I have that information I would contact the three affected customers and let them know about the delay and the new expected date. I would apologise for the inconvenience and reassure them that we are monitoring it closely. I would then update the order tracker so that everyone internally can see the status, and inform the sales team and management so they are aware in case the customers contact them directly. To prevent it happening again, I would make sure we follow up with suppliers more regularly rather than waiting for them to contact us. I would set reminders to check on outstanding orders a few days before they are due, and I would keep the tracker updated so that nothing is missed. Better communication with our suppliers is really the key to avoiding this situation.

Work sample

Asked: Pick any small business you know. Write the standard operating procedure for one recurring process it runs weekly — numbered steps, who does what, what 'done' looks like, and the one check that catches the most common failure.

SOP — WEEKLY STOCK AND ORDER REVIEW Owner: Operations coordinator. Runs every Monday morning. PURPOSE To review stock levels and outstanding orders so that we can reorder in good time and keep customers informed. PROCEDURE 1. Open the stock spreadsheet and update the current stock levels from the warehouse report. 2. Check which items are running low and highlight them in the spreadsheet. 3. Review the outstanding purchase orders and check which ones are due this week. 4. Contact any suppliers whose deliveries are due to confirm they are on track. 5. Place new purchase orders for the items that are running low, after getting approval from the manager where needed. 6. Update the order tracker with any new information. 7. Send the weekly operations report to management summarising stock levels, outstanding orders and any issues. WHAT DONE LOOKS LIKE The stock spreadsheet is up to date, all due deliveries have been confirmed with the supplier, new orders have been placed where needed, and the weekly report has been sent. CHECK The most important check is confirming the deliveries with the suppliers, because if a delivery is late and we do not know about it we cannot tell the customer in time.

Availability

Full-time, 9am–6pm SAST. Available immediately.