What I do as Head of Operations at Kontor
Head of Operations is a tricky job title. What is it, really? Some people think it’s just managing the office, making sure things happen. But it’s so much more than that.
Head of ops is strategy. It’s finance. It’s marketing. It’s expansion, sales, all these things. It’s putting systems in place that make the company better and mean that everybody else can actually do their jobs. My job gets more and more interesting as the company is growing — which it is, and quickly!
I joined Kontor almost two years ago now. I was the 8th employee; now there are 16 of us and we’re looking for more people to join us. We find amazing offices for the tech, creative and media sectors — loads of different types of businesses, from start-ups to huge international companies.
For me, with my consultancy background, it’s so great to work with those kinds of businesses. It gives me an insight into what their strategy is. I can learn from looking at how a massive company like WeWork plans its expansion, or how companies like Monzo, iZettle or Propercorn deal with growing so fast.
We’re expanding ourselves because we’ve focused a large chunk of our business on finding flexible workspaces, which so many more of our clients are choosing. Co-working spaces, managed offices and so on — this is now a huge part of the market. This is both a business and generational shift that we think is only going to keep growing, so we’re trying to expand with it!
Growth can be tricky to manage as a business. When I first started at Kontor, my job was to focus mainly at business planning, working out where we should be spending money in order to get the best return. Now, my role is much broader, really focused on growing a start-up into a scale-up.
As soon as you reach a certain headcount as a company, you need to automate processes, using tools that you didn’t have before. Otherwise, you lose a lot of detail when people forget to communicate with each other. It’s taken some time, but everything is now much more transparent than before.
Previously, to get work done we relied on a core group of people. Our priorities were based on who was in the room at the time. We’re moving away from this dependency on the core group, as we have taken on more staff. Now, if someone is out of the office, we can use the system to see who they’ve talked to, what they’ve been doing.
Recently I’ve been very active in testing our marketing strategy. I’ve really focused on tracking marketing activity back to leads, looking at our funnels to work out where we are generating most leads. We’ve done some big marketing campaigns recently, advertising on the London Underground for example. That’s been super fun to work on. We are, bit by bit, starting to become established as a brand now.
If you compare my role to anyone else’s here at Kontor, I’m the least siloed. I have to understand what everyone else does otherwise I can’t improve it. That’s why it’s good for me to do property deals myself, so I know how it gets done. I see where the pain points are and how the process can be improved.
To some people, some parts of my job won’t be very sexy. Everything I do is based on a firm bed of spreadsheets, analysing everything we do. But I love spreadsheets. When it’s a day to work on a load of spreadsheets, I know where I am. I guess some people might not love spreadsheets as much!
The best things about my role aren’t always the visible things. But they are tangible in their own way. For example, I used to see Kontor’s founders write down leads on a bit of paper and call them out for people to take on. Now, I see an automated system pull out a list of leads and allocate them to different people automatically. That’s really satisfying. It’s also really brilliant to measure how many leads come through and are converted.
All this means that I know the system is working. To me, that’s total satisfaction. We’ve got a lot ahead as we’re now expanding the business to New York. Now I have so much more experience growing a company here, I cannot wait to use this to grow Kontor overseas.
