What Operations Work Is Worth Outside

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Vendor management. Process improvement. Supply chain coordination. Inside a company these are responsibilities. Outside one, they're the specific reason a growing business keeps tripping over the same problem every quarter without ever naming it.

Ian O. closed a $4,200 a month retirement gap with this expertise, part-time, without leaving his job. Not financial advice. Example only. Your results will vary.

Ian O. is an Operations Director with twenty-three years of corporate experience. He had spent those years solving the problems growing companies accumulate and never fully address: process breakdowns, vendor inefficiencies, cross-functional coordination failures that cost real time and money without ever showing up cleanly on a balance sheet.

He wasn't looking for a dramatic second career. He had run the retirement calculation carefully and knew his number: $4,200 a month, part-time, to close the gap between a comfortable retirement and a pressured one.

Operations expertise runs into a specific problem that finance and HR don't hit as hard: it's diffuse. There's no single deliverable. Management researchers have long distinguished between explicit knowledge, the kind that can be written down and handed over, and tacit knowledge, the kind that lives in judgment and pattern recognition built over years. Michael Polanyi's original framing was that we know more than we can tell.

Operations expertise is close to pure tacit knowledge, which is exactly why it can become valuable once its specific problem is named, and exactly why so few people manage to name it.

For Ian, the obstacle was never the work itself. It was the sentence.

"I run operations" sounds like one job. From a client's side, it's at least four different problems, and they don't pay the same. Here's how to tell which one is yours.

1. The repeat failure. Things break in the same place and nobody owns the system underneath. How you know it's you: you can name the exact process that fails, and you've fixed it more than twice without anyone assigning you to.

2. The unaudited cost. Vendor costs crept up quietly over three years and nobody renegotiated. How you know it's you: you've looked at a contract or invoice line and known immediately it was wrong, without needing to check.

3. The outgrown process. The company scaled faster than its systems and is now running a hundred-person operation on thirty-person habits. How you know it's you: you've been the person quietly building the workaround that keeps it functioning.

4. The orphaned handoff. Two departments each assume the other is handling it, so it doesn't happen. How you know it's you: you're the one people call when something falls between two teams, even though it isn't your job.

Different people, same four words: "I run operations." The one you recognized fastest is the one to build your sentence around.

Ian wrote three versions before one worked. His first was still corporate: "operational process improvement and vendor management oversight." His second got closer: "things keep breaking in the same place and nobody is fixing the system." His third was the one that got a reply:

"Your growth is creating operational problems that your current team doesn't have the bandwidth to solve."

Your version, using whichever of the four you recognized above:

"Your [specific growth or change event] is creating [specific operational failure] that your current team doesn't have the [bandwidth / systems / ownership] to solve."

Write it three times. The first will sound like your resume, because it's the language you've used for twenty years. That's the normal starting point, not a failure.

That third sentence went into three messages, to three former colleagues now at companies under 300 people. Former colleagues and former clients only, people from organizations already left, never current-company contacts.

The first reply came on the second contact, twelve days after the first message. The conversation ran forty minutes. The first project was a process audit for a logistics company that had scaled faster than its systems, worth $3,100. The second project followed before the first one finished. Within fourteen months the gap was closed, and Ian was still in his role. Not financial advice. Example only. Your results will vary.

"I kept waiting for it to feel complicated," he said afterward. "It never did. The hard part was writing the sentence. After that, the rest of it just followed."

Pick which of the four you recognized fastest, then write your version of the sentence using the template above. Write it three times. Read the first one out loud and notice how much it still sounds like a job description. The third one is where most people stop sounding like a resume and start sounding like a diagnosis.

A process audit for a logistics company that had outgrown its systems. That was Ian's entry point for this work. The second project started before the first one finished, which mattered more to the math than the size of the opening number. Not financial advice. Example only. Your results will vary.

Not an operations book, but it makes the argument that stuck with me most this week: the difference between expertise that owns you and expertise that runs on documented processes. Most consultants end up available 24/7, doing custom work for everyone, with no systems underneath any of it. The irony is that operations people, of all functions, are the ones most likely to build a side practice with no operations at all. Worth reading before your second client, not after your fifth.

The hard part is never the work. It's the sentence describing the work.

Ian had twenty-three years of operations expertise before he wrote that third version. The expertise didn't change between version one and version three. Only the language did, and the language is what made the expertise buyable.

P.S. If you write your three versions this weekend, hit reply with the third one. I read every reply, and I'll tell you honestly whether it still sounds like a job description.

A few things I've built, if any of them are useful this week.

No pressure on any of it. Take what's useful, skip the rest.

This newsletter is for informational and educational purposes only and is not financial advice. Any figures, projections, or outcomes mentioned are examples based on individual circumstances, not guarantees, your results will vary. Consult a qualified financial advisor before making retirement or income decisions.

Affiliate disclosure: Encore Income Insider may include affiliate links, including Amazon Associates, in book or resource recommendations such as This Week's Reading. If you purchase through one of these links, I may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you.