Agency operations director: what a COO is responsible for, how an agency's operating system works, and who MOVE is looking for
Agency operations director: COO vs CEO and head of production, operating system, dashboards, weekly rhythm, hiring leads, 6 mistakes.
In short
An operations director is what turns an agency into a system instead of a group of talented people orbiting a founder. The COO doesn’t sell and doesn’t make content; they hold the rhythm, processes, dashboards, and cross-department communication together so that sales turn into production, production turns into delivered projects, and projects turn into profit and clients who stick around. Below: how a COO differs from a CEO and a head of production, what an agency’s operating system looks like laid out as a table, how to think in unit economics without a calculator, which processes to document first, how the weekly rhythm and dashboards work, how to manage a team spread across several cities, who to hire first, what MOVE expects from this role, and how a candidate proves they’re the right fit in a case interview. The visual side of this structure is led by the designer at an agency.
COO, CEO, and head of production: who owns what
At agencies, these three roles often blur together because one person, the founder, handles all of them at the start. As the team grows, that overlap becomes a problem: strategic decisions get made between fires, and the fires get put out by the person who should be thinking a year ahead.
| Role | Main question | Responsible for | Doesn’t do |
|---|---|---|---|
| CEO | Where are we going and why | Strategy, positioning, key clients and partners, hiring top people, big bets | Doesn’t run daily team meetings, doesn’t reconcile every invoice |
| Operations director (COO) | How do we get there without breaking along the way | Processes, meeting rhythm, dashboards, communication between departments, financial control, change initiatives | Doesn’t set strategy alone, doesn’t build the product themselves |
| Head of production | Is the product being made well and on time | Content production, quality standards, creative team workload, production process | Not responsible for sales, finance, or HR |
Here’s a simple test for whether an agency needs a COO: if the founder is personally figuring out every week why a client wasn’t invoiced, why a designer is overloaded, and why a salesperson promised something production can’t deliver, the operations function already exists, it’s just being handled by the most expensive person in the company.
An agency’s operating system: from lead to profit
An agency runs like a five-stage assembly line. The operations director makes sure information, money, and people don’t get lost between stages.
| Stage | What happens | Typical failure | What the COO holds |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pipeline (sales) | Lead → qualification → proposal → contract | Salespeople sell what production can’t deliver on time or profitably | A single price list and scope agreed with production; a funnel with conversion by stage |
| Production | Brief → plan → creation → approval | Overload on some teams and idle time on others; endless revisions | Workload planning, quality standards, revision limits in the contract |
| Delivery (handoff and support) | Publication, campaign launch, client report | The client sees the result but not the process, and leaves after the first failure | Reporting rhythm, client touchpoints, retention as a metric |
| Finance | Invoices, payments, cost, profit per client | Accounts receivable grows, profitable and unprofitable clients look the same | Monthly sign-off on P&L and cash flow, unit economics per client |
| People | Hiring, onboarding, development, team retention | Lead burnout, turnover, knowledge walks out the door with people | Hiring planning based on workload, regular 1:1s through team leads, a knowledge base |
Every arrow between stages represents an agreement someone has to document and enforce. MOVE’s operations director listing puts it as “communications between salespeople, team leads, accounting, HR, and the founder.” Profit usually gets lost right at these seams.
An agency’s unit economics without a calculator
An operations director has to think in unit economics even without looking at a table. A unit at an agency means a client or a project, and for each one you need to be able to answer four questions:
- How much team time does it consume? In practice, including revisions, calls, and approvals, the contract is only a reference point here.
- How much does that time cost? Including the time of the team lead, the manager, and your own.
- What’s left after paying for that time? And does one urgent shoot or reshoot wipe out that “leftover”?
- How long does the client stay? A client who brings moderate profit for three years is often worth more than one who pays more and leaves after two months.
Three conclusions follow from this. First: unprofitable clients are almost always unprofitable because of time overrun, and a low price is rarely the real cause, so the fix is the approval process and revision limits, raising prices alone won’t save it. Second: it’s worth selling what production can do repeatedly; unique projects look prestigious but eat up resources. Third: client retention belongs among operational metrics, not just marketing ones: a client leaves when they stop seeing the process, and that’s on the COO.
A clear example of a long-term relationship is the Toi Samyi Baranchyk case: 8 years of cooperation, over which the brand grew from one restaurant to a chain in 6 cities. That kind of run is impossible without a system that survives turnover on both sides of the relationship.
Which processes to document first
A new person in the COO role wants to document everything. That’s a mistake: the agency will drown in regulations that nobody reads. The order that works: start with the most expensive failures and move toward the cheapest.
- Handoff of a client from sales to production. What exactly was promised, in what scope, with what timeline and budget. One document, without which the project doesn’t start.
- Client approval of materials. Who approves, how many days before publication, how many rounds of revisions are included in the contract, what happens if the client goes silent.
- Invoicing and payment control. Who does what, and when, on day three of a late payment. Accounts receivable is what kills an agency most quietly.
- Weekly client reporting. Format, owner, day of the week. This covers both retention and early diagnosis of dissatisfaction.
- Onboarding a new hire. The first two weeks by plan, a mentor, access, a first review.
- Escalation. What the manager does when a client is unhappy, when a team lead steps in, when the COO or founder gets involved.
Everything else gets documented once these six run without anyone needing a reminder. The sign that a process is documented correctly: it still gets followed when you’re not in the office.
Dashboards and weekly rhythm
A dashboard exists to support a management decision; a picture for the founder is secondary. If a metric doesn’t have an owner and an action tied to deviation, it’s decoration. At MOVE, the operations director is responsible for keeping three areas current: finance, KPIs, sales. In practice it looks like this:
- Finance. Revenue and profit per client for the month, cash flow a few weeks out, accounts receivable by aging. P&L and cash flow get signed off monthly together with accounting, “somewhere in a file” doesn’t count.
- Sales. Number of leads by source, conversion between funnel stages, average time to contract, reasons for lost deals.
- Production and clients. Team workload, share of tasks delivered on time, number of revisions, client retention month over month.
The weekly rhythm that keeps this data alive:
| Day | Meeting | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | Planning with team leads | Priorities for the week, workload, risks by client |
| Tuesday | Sync with sales | Funnel status, which proposals need to be aligned with production |
| Wednesday | Financial control | Invoices issued, overdue payments handled, cash flow updated |
| Thursday | Review of at-risk clients | Action plan for each, who’s responsible |
| Friday | Week summary with the founder | Action points closed or postponed with a reason, decisions that need the CEO |
The key COO function in this rhythm: tracking action points. A meeting after which nobody does anything is worse than no meeting at all, because it creates the illusion of management.
A team across several cities
The MOVE team is spread across Poltava, Kyiv, and remote specialists, and clients operate in Poltava, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Lviv, and Kremenchuk. For an operations director, this means most management happens without being in the same room.
What this changes:
- A written culture. Decisions that aren’t put in writing don’t exist. Agreements from a call go into tasks the same day.
- Shared standards instead of personal oversight. You can’t walk into an office and look over someone’s shoulder. So checklists, templates, and approval points matter more than they would on an in-office team.
- Rhythm matters more than spontaneity. A distributed team holds together through predictable meetings at fixed times.
- Local context. A team lead in Kyiv sees things that aren’t visible from Poltava, and vice versa. The COO folds these observations into the system instead of flattening them out.
Interestingly, we apply the same principles with clients growing from one city to several: a central standard, local relevance, unified reporting for each location. This logic is broken down in detail in the article on marketing a chain of venues, and an agency’s operations director should read it as a mirror of their own job.
Hiring the first leads
An operations director doesn’t manage every specialist directly. They manage through team leads, and the quality of these people determines how much time the COO actually has left for the system instead of firefighting.
What to look for when hiring or growing your first leads:
- Already acts like a lead. Onboards newcomers, presents results to the client, proposes process changes without being asked.
- Holds up in a conversation with a client under pressure. A team lead at an agency handles negotiations and presents strategies; someone who avoids hard conversations will just pass them to you.
- Thinks in terms of workload, not tasks. Can tell you how many clients the team can handle next month and where the bottleneck is.
- Understands strategy, not just execution. Knows why a client needs exactly this set of channels. A basic grasp of how marketing strategy is built is what separates a future lead from a senior performer.
We broke down the team lead role in detail in a separate article on the team lead at a marketing agency. For a COO, that’s effectively a description of the person they’re looking for.
What MOVE expects from an operations director
In the CEO / operations director listing, MOVE describes the role across five areas of responsibility:
- Information loop: keeping dashboards current: finance, KPIs, sales.
- Operating rhythm: keeping the meeting rhythm going and tracking completion of action points.
- Communications between salespeople, team leads, accounting, HR, and the founder.
- Finance: signing off on P&L and cash flow monthly.
- Change and development: driving initiatives with a specific target for profitability growth by the end of the quarter.
The candidate requirements are just as specific: experience as a team lead or operations person, specifically at a social media or traffic agency; a proven track record of scaling systems; a case where the candidate took over business processes from the previous COO and showed a result within 3-6 months; an example of data-driven decision-making. The format is office or hybrid in Dnipro, Kyiv, Kharkiv, Poltava, or Lviv, with a flexible schedule.
Note the word “proven.” MOVE is looking for someone who has already done this and can show it. Knowing how it should work isn’t enough for this role.
How to prove you’re the right fit: the logic of a case interview
An agency operations director interview tests how you think through a real situation; a conversation about values isn’t the main point here. Typical scenario: you’re given a description of an agency with certain symptoms and asked what you’d do in the first 90 days.
The answer structure that convinces:
- Diagnosis before action. The first two weeks go to conversations with the founder, team leads, salespeople, accounting; a dashboard audit; a review of the three most recent clients who left. A candidate who jumps to changes before diagnosis is a red flag.
- Three priorities, not thirty. For example: sales-to-production handoff, payment control, weekly client reporting. With an explanation of why these specifically.
- Result metrics. What will change in 90 days and how it will show up on the dashboard.
- What you won’t do. A leader’s maturity shows in what they knowingly leave for later.
Separately, prepare your own case using the pattern “inherited, state, changed, result, timeframe.” That’s exactly what MOVE asks for in its requirements. Plus an example of one decision you made against your gut, because that’s what the data said. A case interview is won by the most honest breakdown with numbers that hold up to scrutiny; the slickest presentation won’t help here.
6 mistakes operations directors make
- Starting with regulations. A hundred pages of processes nobody reads. Start with the six processes that stop the most expensive failures.
- A dashboard for its own sake. Charts without an owner and an action for deviation. Three metrics people actually live by beat thirty that just get glanced at.
- Managing over team leads’ heads. Blurs accountability and turns the COO into a senior project manager.
- Silent accounts receivable. Not noticing overdue payments because “the client is good.” Money that doesn’t arrive on time breaks cash flow quietly and surely.
- Changing everything at once. A team can handle one or two process changes a month. Push past that, and sabotage or burnout sets in.
- Losing touch with production. A COO who doesn’t understand how much time a shoot or an approval actually takes ends up planning the impossible and getting blindsided by missed deadlines.
If, while reading this article, you found yourself checking every section against your own experience and have something to show using the pattern “inherited, changed, result,” take a look at MOVE’s open roles. The operations director position doesn’t open often, and we’re glad to meet candidates ahead of time.