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How operators know whether People or Processes are the bottleneck
Learn to identify when you need to hire, or if you need to automate more
Regina Gerbeaux
March 16, 2025 • Reading Time: 16 minutes
Hi! Welcome to another issue of Force Multipliers, your weekly briefing from Regina Gerbeaux, where Silicon Valley's behind-the-scenes operators get battle-tested frameworks for their toughest challenges, from putting out chaotic fires to managing strong personalities.
Preface:
Developing Operational Excellence at 19
Dear Reader,
Today, I want to tell you the story of a guy named Frankie - one of the best operators I’ve ever met in my life.
But first - some background context about a 19 year old, inexperienced operator: me.
One of the earliest moments I dipped my toes into the operating world was during college. I started a music school.
The music school was my first real business. In the early 2010s and still today, unlike most of Silicon Valley, SMBs rarely took dilutive funding, and loans were exceptionally hard to come by - especially if you were still a teenager.
Operating under these conditions, you can understand that running in the red was almost never an option for me. Having an unprofitable month meant not being able to pay faculty, cover overhead, and maintain the school.
While tech companies feel what it means to run lean, bootstrapped and profitable businesses take this to a whole new level. In bootstrapped businesses, there is no venture money to save you. This means one bad decision is the difference between running a successful company and shutting the doors.
Running lean and profitably meant operational excellence was not optional. And one of the trickiest domains of operational excellence shows up in hiring and automating.
At the school, I remember being 22 and getting to the point where we had so many students and so many inquiries that we were drowning. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the equivalent of PMF. When I meet ambitious startup founders and operators today, they usually resonate with this feeling. It sounds something like:
I hoped one day our product/service would be flying off the shelves, and now that it is, I’m overwhelmed with the amount of work to do. Do we hire more? Do we automate? Do we do a combo of both?
At the time, I had two office assistants helping me, Megan and Frankie (not their real names). Having launched our Musical Aptitude Assessment to great success, we were facing a sudden influx of customer demand. We could barely keep up with the number of families who wanted their kids at our school.
Megan’s proposed solution for the influx was to hire more people.
Megan argued that she was drowning in office admin work, and that she needed an extra pair of hands to help. She reasoned that having more people would help process families faster and get matched quicker with teachers. Megan thought dividing and conquering the workload would get us out of the never-ending pile of work stacking up.
Frankie’s proposed solution was a little more nuanced.
Frankie believed there were many things we could automate in our workflow. So, he mapped out our entire onboarding flow, from the time a family was interested in our school, to when we did their intake, to when they became a permanent family in our studio. Frankie showed the flow to me, and we circled all the places we could automate, digitize, or eliminate from our onboarding. Then, he helped me identify where we were truly resourced thin, and where we could invest more financially for higher retention rates and lower workloads.
Guess who got to keep their job?
The automations and streamlines helped tremendously and kept our burn low and profitability high for another year. Eventually, it was clear we needed to think ahead to opening more locations.
And at that point, Frankie had established himself as the de facto operational leader of the business: he was so good, he went from being hired as an office executive assistant, to office manager, to 50/50 Managing Partner in the business. He still runs it to this day, and I can’t think of anyone better than him for the role.
I still think a lot about this story today when I talk to operators who are confused when it’s time to automate, versus time to write SOPs, versus hiring more headcount. There is a playbook for this. Let me share it with you today.
Dear Regina,
I’m at a crossroads with my ops team and need to figure out whether our biggest bottleneck is people or processes.
Right now, things feel messy but functional.
That is, our systems work - but only because my team is constantly plugging the gaps. Some days, it seems like automation could solve everything if we just streamlined our workflows better. Other days, I’m convinced we just don’t have enough hands on deck to keep things moving at the speed we need. Then, there’s the matter of play-booking stuff, which honestly feels impossible with such a small company size and a never-ending amount of work to get done.
I find myself asking: Do we really need more people, or do we just need to fix our systems? When do I start setting aside the time to make playbooks? How do I tell if we’re at a true capacity limit versus facing an inefficiency problem?
What are the clearest signs that it’s time to hire more ops muscle instead of just optimizing what we already have? And how do I avoid making the wrong call of either over-hiring or stretching our current team too thin?
Where’s the tipping point?
(Director of Strategy and Operations, Series A, ~50 people, ~$30m raised)
Dear Operator,
For anyone who has been doing this long enough, this is a classic bottleneck that every scaling company encounters.
When do you hire more people? When do you automate? When do you write down your processes?
The answer is, at any given point, you will probably need a mix of all of these tactics.
Hiring is usually the very last step, because it is expensive in both time and resourcing. Just like Brooks’ Law from The Mythical Man-Month, hiring more people doesn’t necessarily translate to getting more done.
Work does not scale linearly with the number of people added, mainly because of (1) lag time in communication, (2) ramp up time to get new employees up to speed, and (3) how difficult it can be to divide tasks among more people.
The Playbook on Scaling Efficiency
(Automate, SOP, or Playbook)
The first step on Scaling Efficiency is identifying what your actual problem is.
In any scaling problem, you either have a process inefficiency, misallocation of resources / bad hires, or a capacity issue. I’ll break down each one below, and share what to do to remedy the situation.
You have process inefficiencies 🚨
Process inefficiency happens when tasks and responsibilities are not as streamlined as they could be.
💡 How to know if you have a process inefficiency
If your team is constantly putting out fires and keeping things afloat through sheer brute force, the system is likely broken and you probably have a process inefficiency.
👉️ Tip: if you don’t have any processes - even a mental one - it’s probably inefficient. It means you’re constantly winging things every time you do them.
This problem becomes worse the more people you have on the team, because everyone will have their own way of doing the same task. So hiring will actually make your problem worse, not solve it.
Another sign of process inefficiency comes up when there are frequent small mistakes that delay the task’s completion. This usually means there isn’t any standardization.
💡 The solution
If you have no SOPs, I encourage you to start making them to create standardization. The worst feeling is when a single person is a bottleneck because they are the only person who knows how to do the job. If removing one key team member causes total breakdown, you have a process fragility problem, not a headcount problem.
A fear I hear very often sounds something like, “Regina, I have no time to make SOPs, there are too many things to do!” The reality is, writing SOPs is a Quadrant 2 activity: important, but never urgent. But if you do it, the results compound over time.
👉 I once worked with an excellent operator who threw together dozens of SOPs per week. He didn’t overthink it: he simply noted when he was doing something that would be repeatable, and he turned on Loom and recorded himself doing it. THAT WAS IT. He didn’t write anything - just recorded himself doing it and put it into a How-To’s database. Don’t overthink your SOPs. Just get them down and store them somewhere.
Do a process audit. Each department should do intentional process audits once or twice a year. To do one, take the most recurring areas of responsibility, and look at the SOPs written for them. Where are there things that can be outsourced via automation? Where are there unnecessary steps? Where can you simplify? Where do you need more details to streamline for speed?
You can follow the mapping process Frankie did in the example given at the Preface. Sometimes, a great whiteboarding session is all it takes. I’ve helped CEOs and their operational teams do this during offsites to great success.
Create action items for all of the optimizations you find. Set due dates. Get them done.
You have misallocated resourcing or the wrong people on your team 🚨
Misallocation of resources is one issue that operators frequently miss! This happens when you have people that are great fits for the company, but they are working on the wrong things.
💡 How to know if you have misallocated resourcing / bad hires
In the earliest stages, companies need all hands on deck and there is no such thing as staying in one’s own swim lane. Saying that something isn’t in your scope of responsibilities is one of the fastest ways to get fired on a small, resource-constrained team.
Eventually though, the company makes it to a much better place. They’ve now got customers, raised a bit more money, and they’re no longer a baby company.
And yet, employees are doing work that isn’t in their Zone of Genius.
Here are two example scenarios where you probably have the right people in the wrong place:
(1) You have someone who has been managing product and engineers and interfacing with customers because that was necessary when the company was living hand-to-mouth. But perhaps that person would actually output much more if he or she were to focus exclusively on product.
(2) You have someone who has been doing IC work for the longest time, but they would genuinely thrive if they were managing a team instead: their influence on the team can lead to much more output than if they were grinding 24/7 on their own.
💡 The antidote
Look at the recurring Areas of Responsibility where you have bottlenecks. Evaluate who is involved in executing on that AOR.
Is that teammate the right person to own this AOR? Is this in their Zone of Genius - that is, they are exceptionally good at it, and they genuinely enjoy it? Do you know if it lines up with their long-term career goals?
In cases where someone is underperforming, this could be the telltale sign of a misallocated resource. Evaluate if they could be a 5 out of 5 in an AOR the company really needs, and move them to that area ASAP.
For anyone who is underperforming and there is no place in the company for their Zone of Genius skillset, please let them go (see more below.)
If you have a teammate that is struggling in their AOR and they don’t express interest getting moved to any other part of the team, you must give them a fair warning. Either they have to quickly improve to become a 5 out of 5 on execution to remove themself as the bottleneck, or they must agree to part ways with the company.
If they choose the latter, please make sure you write them a glowing recommendation letter and help them find their next role outside the company to do the right thing and also preserve your company’s reputation. (For more reading on Firing Well, see here and also read my write-up on Six Mistakes to Avoid when firing someone.)
You have actual capacity issues 🚨
Capacity issues come up when all of your processes are clearly defined, automations have been created for all repeatable areas of responsibility, and you’ve got the right people in the right places on your team. And still, there are issues. This might be where you have an actual capacity issue.
👉️ Please note: everything below operates under the assumption you’ve automated, SOP’ed, and put people into AORs where they are high performers.
💡 How to know if you have capacity issues
You still have consistent backlogs. This is a signal you don’t have enough hands to get everything you need done.
There are still consistent bottlenecks in repeatable workflows. There are just some things you can’t automate - for example, if you work in an industry that is very high-touch, maybe one of your differentiators is your customer speaking to an actual human, rather than getting thrown through an onboarding flow with a bunch of bots.
Superhuman is probably the best example of having a very manual onboarding flow - they figured out that hiring more people, giving them clean SOPs, and automating where possible helped because the human touch converted people into loyal, low-churning customers.
💡 The antidote
Do a “contract to hire” first. Looking at the AOR where you need resourcing, determine what kind of hard and soft skills your ideal candidate would have to own this responsibility. Put your contracted hires on a trial/probationary basis first to see if they’re able to step up and reveal their Zone of Genius during the given time. Choose a reasonable amount of time, based on how long it would take to see real results.
Map out a great org chart. I think there is no one better than Ali Nawab and AgentNoon for doing this, so I’d consult there first. But this is the best way for you to make sure all roles you hire for are mission-critical ones with clear definitions of AORs and success metrics to avoid bloat.
Be sure to clear out any low-performing team players. Everyone should go through The Keeper Test to keep the talent density bar high.
For more reading, I recommend checking out Reed Hastings’ No Rules Rules. You should be willing to fight super hard to keep every person on the team because of both their hard skillset, and also their contributions to company culture. It isn’t worth it to retain smart assholes.
👉 ONE THING TO AVOID: Do not hire if you aren’t clear what the hired person will own. This means you’ve skipped the critical steps of process auditing and writing SOPs. You know it’s time to hire when it’s abundantly clear what this person would do, and automation / simplification will not solve the bottlenecks present.
Ultimately, the best operators don’t default to throwing people at problems. They make sure their processes are clean, they automate as much stuff as possible, and only once they reach further constraints do they hire.
So next time you find yourself wondering: Should I hire? Should I automate? Should I write playbooks? Remember this Playbook on Scaling Efficiency, and follow it to achieve sustainable growth.
Until next time,
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About Regina Gerbeaux
 | Regina Gerbeaux was the first Chief of Staff to an executive coach who worked with Silicon Valley’s most successful entrepreneurs, including Brian Armstrong (Coinbase), Naval Ravikant (AngelList), Sam Altman (OpenAI / Y Combinator), and Alexandr Wang (Scale). |
Shortly after her role as Chief of Staff, then COO, she opened her own coaching practice, Coaching Founder, and has worked with outrageously talented operators on teams like Delphi AI, dYdX, Astronomer, Fanatics Live, and many more companies backed by funds like Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz.
Her open-sourced write-ups on Operational Excellence and how to run a scaling company can be found here and her templates can be found here.
She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her partner Lucas and dog Leia, and can be found frequenting 6:00AM Orangetheory classes or hiking trails nearby.
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