The Art of Operations
A lot of people think of operations as something you only worry about when a company gets too big or complicated for one person to handle. But that’s not true.
Operations is the backbone and the spirit of an organization. Every vision requires navigation.
Dropping paint on a canvas isn’t painting. It’s only when someone takes up a brush, considers the canvas, the colors, the strokes, and the vision that the picture comes into fruition.
Too many businesses are just dropping paint. They have a spark of color, an idea, or a talent, but no sense of how to work with the canvas itself.
Think about it this way:
The canvas is the macroeconomic environment. It is the backdrop that shapes every business, setting the conditions you cannot control such as interest rates, consumer confidence, or tariffs. You do not choose the canvas, but you paint with what the canvas allows.
The paint is your people, the source of your color, energy, and potential. Every shade matters and every mix changes the outcome. The right blend creates harmony while the wrong one muddies the picture.
The brush is your tools and technology. Without them, the paint sits stagnant. With them, the paint can take shape, precision, and texture. The right brush makes vision possible.
The strokes are your processes and execution. Random swipes lead to chaos, but intentional movements build form. Discipline in every stroke turns creativity into something sustainable.
The eye for composition, understanding shapes, colors, and objectivity, is leadership. It connects the parts into a cohesive whole. Without vision and objectivity, the painting loses meaning.
Operations is what allows the picture to come alive. Without it, you do not have a painting, you just have a mess of color on an empty surface.
And when you finally hang your piece for the world to see, it has to look like something people want to buy. It cannot and will not without the operational rigor that brought the painting to life. The same is true in business: without strong strategy and operations, scaling is impossible, ROI becomes inconsistent, efficiency erodes, and CAC rises faster than growth can offset.
The best businesses do not settle for something passable. They create work that feels museum-worthy, the kind of vision that discipline and execution bring to life.
The leaders who succeed are the ones who put as much discipline into operations as they do into vision, because an idea without execution is just paint drying.
I have spent much of my career focused on this very intersection of vision and execution. If this sparked a thought for you, I would be glad to compare notes.
