What does an operations manager do?
An operations manager runs the machine behind the work. Resourcing: who is on what, who is free, who is overloaded. Process: how a job moves from brief to invoice, what gets reviewed when and in what tool. Vendors, software, facilities, equipment, insurance, contracts, onboarding, timesheets, utilization. They watch the numbers that tell an agency whether it is healthy, margin, capacity and throughput, and they fix the bottlenecks before the client notices them. In a production studio the role extends to gear, stages, crew databases and the logistics of getting a shoot out the door.
The role sits beside the producers and project managers rather than above them. A producer runs a project; the operations manager runs the conditions every project shares. In a small agency it is often a partner or a head of production wearing a second hat; in a larger one it is a dedicated role, sometimes a chief operating officer.
Why it matters
Why an operations manager matters
Creative agencies fail on operations more often than on creative. The work is good; the invoices are late, the team is double-booked, the files are in four places and the margin has gone somewhere nobody can find. An operations manager makes the studio repeatable. Projects start the same way, approvals happen in the same place, the team's time is visible and the profit on each job is known before the next one is quoted. That stability is what lets the creative people take risks, because the rest of the building is not on fire.
In practice
How an operations manager works in practice
- 01
The manager starts by making the work visible: a single view of every project, its stage, its budget and its people. From that they build the process, usually a handful of stages with clear owners and a tool that holds the truth, then the resourcing rhythm, a weekly look at capacity against the pipeline so that hiring, freelancing and declining are decided with evidence.
- 02
Week to week they clear blockages: the vendor who has not been paid, the review that is stuck, the edit suite that is double-booked. Month to month they report on utilization, margin and delivery, and they adjust the process where it is slowing people down. The best operations managers remove steps more often than they add them.
At RIOT
Operations managers at RIOT
A 17-film documentary series for SoulCycle is an operations problem as much as a creative one: instructors, locations, crews and edits to schedule, track and deliver without the last film looking tired. Krova, our own production software, is our answer to this side of the business. Running a studio with its own tool means the person who answers your brief also knows what the studio can take on.
Watch out
What people get wrong about operations managers
Hiring one to add process. The best ones add as little as the studio can run on, because every stage and every form is a tax on the people doing the work. The other mistake is treating operations as back office. The operations manager decides, in effect, how many projects the agency can take, which freelancers get called and whether the margin is real, and those are leadership decisions.
