Growing companies usually know when they need another salesperson, engineer, or customer support rep. The workload goes up, the team hits capacity, and the need for another specialist becomes obvious.
The more interesting hiring problems are harder to spot.
Sometimes the person a company needs most isn't adding another unit of output themselves. They're giving five or ten other people more time to do their best work. They organize messy processes, keep projects moving, take recurring tasks off senior employees' plates, and make sure important work actually has an owner.
These high-leverage hires can include an operations manager, executive assistant, project manager, business operations professional, or Chief of Staff. The right role depends on what's slowing the company down.
And that distinction matters. As companies build remote teams and add people across sales, finance, operations, marketing, and technology, simply increasing headcount won't always solve the underlying bottleneck. Sometimes the smartest next hire is the person who makes the existing team significantly more effective.
So, what's the most underrated hire at a growing company? The answer starts with figuring out where your team's time, decisions, and execution get stuck.
The Most Underrated Hire Is Usually the Person Removing the Bottleneck
The most underrated hire at a growing company usually isn't defined by a specific job title. It's defined by the bottleneck they can remove.
As a company grows, work starts piling up between functions. Founders get pulled into routine decisions. Senior employees spend time coordinating projects, updating spreadsheets, chasing approvals, documenting processes, or handling tasks that don't really require their level of experience.
That's where high-leverage hires add real value.
An operations manager, executive assistant, project manager, business operations specialist, or Chief of Staff can create value across several parts of the company at once. Instead of adding capacity to one function, they help existing teams use their time better.
Think of it as the difference between a capacity hire and a leverage hire.
A capacity hire adds more output to a specific area. Another salesperson can handle more accounts. Another developer can ship more product work. Another customer support rep can take more tickets.
A leverage hire improves how the rest of the organization operates. They might reduce meetings, clarify workflows, improve handoffs, organize reporting, keep cross-functional projects moving, or take recurring administrative work off leadership.
That multiplier effect is what makes these roles so easy to underestimate. Their contribution doesn't always show up as a single revenue number, but it can improve productivity across an entire team.
For a growing company, the better question is often less about which department needs another person and more about where the organization is losing the most time, focus, or momentum.
Why Growing Companies Tend to Hire This Person Too Late
Growing companies usually hire for the most visible pain first.
Sales needs more pipeline, so they hire another rep. Engineering has a backlog, so they add a developer. Customer support volume climbs, so they bring in another support specialist.
Operational friction is easier to tolerate because it builds gradually.
A founder spending six hours a week on approvals may not see it as a hiring problem. Neither does a manager constantly updating reports, coordinating handoffs, or checking whether projects are still on track. But once those tasks spread across several senior employees, the company starts paying a surprisingly high price for work that could have a clearer owner.
There are a few reasons companies delay these high-leverage hires.
Revenue roles are easier to justify
It’s simple to connect a salesperson to revenue or a developer to product output. The ROI of an operations manager, executive assistant, or project manager is often distributed across the business.
Their impact may show up as fewer delays, faster decisions, better documentation, cleaner processes, and more focused senior employees. Those gains are real, but they’re harder to tie to a single number.
Founders keep absorbing the extra work
Early-stage companies often run on founder involvement. That can work for a while.
As the company grows, though, the founder can become the default owner of hiring coordination, approvals, vendor decisions, reporting, internal communication, and project follow-up.
At that point, the problem isn’t necessarily that the founder needs to work faster. The company needs someone else to own more of the operating load.
This is often when businesses start considering roles such as an executive assistant, operations professional, or Chief of Staff.
Small inefficiencies don’t look urgent
A 20-minute task here and a 30-minute delay there rarely triggers a hiring decision.
But multiply those inefficiencies across several employees and an entire quarter, and the cost grows quickly. This is especially common in companies that rely on cross-functional coordination, project management, internal processes, reporting, and administrative work.
Ownership gets spread across too many people
Another warning sign is when several people are “kind of” responsible for the same process.
One person updates the spreadsheet. Another sends reminders. A manager checks the numbers. The founder steps in when something goes wrong.
That structure creates confusion and makes accountability harder. A strong operations- or project-focused hire can turn scattered responsibility into clear ownership.
Companies try to solve people problems with more software
New tools can absolutely improve productivity, but software still needs someone to design the process, maintain the system, and make sure people actually use it.
A new project management platform won’t fix unclear ownership. A new CRM won’t automatically improve handoffs. An AI tool won’t decide which processes should exist in the first place.
Sometimes the missing piece is simply a person whose job is to make the system work better.
That’s why underrated hires often become obvious only after the company has lived with the bottleneck for too long.
The Hidden Cost of Running Without an Operations Hire
Operational problems rarely arrive as one obvious crisis. They show up as dozens of small interruptions that quietly reduce the output of expensive employees.
A growing company can still hit revenue targets while managers spend hours chasing updates, executives approve routine decisions, and projects move more slowly than they should. That makes the problem easy to ignore.
Over time, though, those inefficiencies become part of the company’s operating cost.
Senior employees spend time on low-leverage work
One of the clearest signals is seeing experienced employees regularly doing work that doesn’t require their expertise.
A finance leader shouldn’t spend hours formatting recurring reports. A VP of Sales shouldn’t be manually cleaning CRM data. An engineering manager shouldn’t have to chase every project update.
Every hour spent on those tasks is an hour that isn’t going toward strategy, problem-solving, customers, or team development.
The goal of an operations hire isn’t simply to take work away. It’s to put work at the right level of the organization.
That’s why roles such as an operations manager, business operations specialist, or project manager can generate value well beyond their own individual workload.
Too many decisions keep going through the founder
Founders naturally make most decisions early on. As headcount increases, that model becomes harder to sustain.
If employees need leadership approval for routine vendor decisions, process changes, scheduling, hiring coordination, or project priorities, the founder becomes part of every workflow.
Decision-making slows, employees wait longer for answers, and leadership has less time for the problems only they can solve.
An executive assistant, operations leader, or Chief of Staff can build better decision systems and give teams clearer boundaries around what they can own.
Projects stall between departments
A project can have great people working on it and still move slowly when nobody owns the handoffs.
Marketing is waiting for sales. Sales is waiting for finance. Finance needs information from operations. Everyone has their own priorities, and the project keeps moving to next week.
This is where cross-functional project management becomes especially valuable.
A dedicated owner can establish timelines, clarify responsibilities, track dependencies, and keep work moving without requiring a senior leader to constantly step in.
Important processes live inside people’s heads
Fast-growing companies often build processes informally.
One employee knows how invoicing works. Another knows how a new customer gets handed from sales to onboarding. Someone else maintains the monthly reporting process.
That knowledge works until the employee is unavailable, changes roles, or leaves.
Documented processes make growth easier to repeat. Operations professionals can turn informal knowledge into workflows, checklists, documentation, and systems that other employees can follow.
This becomes increasingly important when companies hire remote employees, because distributed teams need clear ownership and accessible information to work effectively.
Small problems keep coming back
Growing companies often solve operational issues one at a time.
A missed deadline gets fixed. A reporting error gets corrected. A confusing handoff gets explained in Slack.
Then the same problem appears again a month later.
A strong operations hire looks beyond the immediate issue and asks why it keeps happening. Instead of repeatedly fixing symptoms, they improve the underlying process.
That can mean changing ownership, automating part of a workflow, introducing a better reporting system, or simply documenting the right way to complete the task.
New hires take longer to become productive
Operational maturity also affects hiring.
When processes are unclear, new employees have to figure out how the company works through trial and error. They spend more time asking where information lives, who approves what, and how different teams collaborate.
Clear systems make employee onboarding, remote team management, knowledge transfer, and cross-functional collaboration much easier.
And that highlights the higher cost of postponing an operations hire: every new employee gets added to the same inefficient system.
As the company grows, the problem scales.
5 Underrated Hires That Can Unlock the Next Stage of Growth
The best underrated hire depends on what’s creating friction inside the company.
One team may need someone to protect executive time. Another may need clearer processes. A third may be struggling to keep cross-functional projects moving.
These five roles tend to create outsized value because they improve how other people work.
1. Executive Assistant
An executive assistant can become one of the highest-leverage hires in a growing company when senior leaders spend too much time coordinating.
The role can own scheduling, meeting preparation, travel, follow-ups, internal communication, documentation, and recurring administrative work.
That matters because executive time is usually one of the company’s most expensive resources.
A strong EA creates more room for leadership to focus on hiring, customers, strategy, partnerships, and decisions that require senior judgment.
This role makes the most sense when the bottleneck sits primarily with one or two executives rather than across the company’s entire operating system.
2. Operations Manager
An operations manager is often the strongest all-around choice when the company has grown faster than its internal processes.
They can own workflow improvement, reporting, vendor coordination, documentation, internal systems, resource planning, and recurring operational projects.
Their biggest advantage is breadth.
A good operations manager can spot where work slows down across multiple departments and build a more reliable way to handle it.
For a growing company with messy handoffs, inconsistent processes, or too much operational work sitting with managers, this can be one of the most valuable hires.
3. Business Operations Associate
Some companies need operational help but aren't yet at the stage where they need a senior operations leader.
A Business Operations Associate can fill that gap.
This person may work on data analysis, reporting, process documentation, special projects, internal research, forecasting, and cross-team coordination.
The role is especially useful when leadership has plenty of ideas for what needs improvement but lacks the analytical or execution capacity to turn them into action.
Business operations professionals can also help companies make better decisions by bringing structure to information that currently lives across spreadsheets, dashboards, and individual teams.
4. Project or Program Manager
Sometimes the problem isn't the underlying process. It's execution.
A company may have strong specialists, clear goals, and enough people, yet important initiatives still miss deadlines because no one owns the full project.
That's where a project or program manager can have a major impact.
They coordinate stakeholders, set timelines, track dependencies, surface risks, and make sure everyone knows what happens next.
Their value increases as work becomes more cross-functional.
A product launch involving engineering, marketing, sales, finance, and customer success can easily lose momentum without someone to connect all those moving pieces.
5. Chief of Staff
A Chief of Staff becomes valuable when the bottleneck is closer to leadership.
This role typically works across strategic planning, executive priorities, cross-functional initiatives, internal communication, and decision-making.
A strong Chief of Staff can help turn leadership priorities into execution by ensuring important initiatives have owners, deadlines, and follow-through.
The role becomes especially useful when a CEO is managing multiple strategic priorities across several departments and needs someone who can operate with significant autonomy.
However, companies should be careful about seniority here. A growing business with mostly administrative or process problems may get more value from an EA or operations manager than from a highly senior Chief of Staff.
The goal is to match the hire to the bottleneck.
The most impressive title isn't always the highest-leverage hire.
So, Which One Is Actually the Most Underrated?
If you had to pick one, the Operations Manager is probably the most consistently underrated hire at a growing company.
The reason is simple: operations touches almost everything.
A good operations manager can improve how work moves between teams, create clearer processes, organize reporting, manage vendors, document recurring workflows, coordinate internal projects, and take operational decisions off leadership’s plate.
That gives the role a wider impact than many companies expect.
Operations Managers create leverage across departments
Most specialist hires improve one part of the business.
A marketer strengthens marketing. A salesperson adds sales capacity. A developer increases engineering output.
An Operations Manager can make several of those teams run more smoothly at the same time.
For example, they might:
- Standardize the handoff between sales and customer success.
- Improve monthly reporting for leadership.
- Create a better process for managing contractors and vendors.
- Document recurring finance and administrative workflows.
- Coordinate cross-functional projects.
- Build internal systems for approvals and requests.
- Identify repetitive tasks that could be automated.
The value comes from reducing friction across the company, not owning one narrow function.
They turn informal processes into repeatable systems
Small companies can operate successfully with a lot of information living in Slack messages, spreadsheets, and employees’ heads.
Growth puts pressure on that model.
Once a company adds more employees, customers, projects, and departments, informal processes become harder to maintain. What worked with 15 people can create confusion with 40.
An Operations Manager helps turn those informal habits into repeatable business processes.
That could mean creating onboarding checklists, documenting approvals, establishing reporting routines, defining ownership, or building workflows that make it easier for employees to know what happens next.
Those improvements make scaling more predictable.
They give managers and executives time back
The impact also shows up in senior employees' calendars.
Without clear operational ownership, managers often become responsible for whatever falls between departments: scheduling, reporting, coordination, documentation, follow-ups, and process fixes.
An Operations Manager can absorb much of that work while improving the system behind it.
If one hire gives several senior employees even a few hours back every week, the productivity gain can quickly spread across the organization.
They can grow with the complexity of the company
Operations roles are also flexible.
An early operations hire might initially focus on documentation, reporting, vendor management, and internal coordination. As the company grows, the role can expand into business operations, workforce planning, process improvement, strategic projects, and operational leadership.
That makes operations particularly useful for companies going through rapid change.
Still, an Operations Manager won't always be the right answer.
If nearly all the friction centers on one executive, an Executive Assistant may create more immediate leverage. If major initiatives keep stalling between teams, a Project Manager may be the better hire. And if the CEO needs help translating strategy into company-wide execution, a Chief of Staff could make more sense.
The point isn't to hire an Operations Manager because the title sounds versatile.
It’s about identifying where the company is losing time and momentum, then hiring the person best positioned to remove that constraint.
How to Tell Which Underrated Hire Your Company Actually Needs
Once you've identified that the company needs more leverage, the next step is figuring out where that leverage should come from.
Start with the bottleneck rather than the job title.
Look at where work slows down, who keeps getting pulled into tasks outside their core responsibilities, and which problems repeat. The pattern usually points toward the right hire.
If the CEO is the bottleneck, look at executive support
A founder can become the company's default decision-maker, coordinator, scheduler, and problem-solver without realizing how much time those responsibilities consume.
If leadership spends a significant part of the week managing calendars, following up on action items, organizing information, or coordinating people, an Executive Assistant may create the quickest improvement.
If the CEO instead needs support managing strategic priorities across several departments, a Chief of Staff may be a better fit.
The difference largely depends on the level and type of work that needs to move away from the executive.
If workflows are the bottleneck, hire an Operations Manager
Look for processes that require constant explanation or intervention.
Maybe customer onboarding works differently every time. Vendor approvals bounce between employees. Reports are created manually. Nobody knows exactly who owns an internal request.
Those are strong signals that the company needs operations management and process improvement.
An Operations Manager can standardize recurring processes, clarify ownership, document workflows, and build systems that stay maintainable as headcount grows.
If projects keep slipping, hire a Project or Program Manager
A company can have enough people and still struggle to execute.
If important initiatives regularly miss deadlines because employees wait on each other, priorities shift without clear communication, or nobody has visibility into the whole project, you may have a project management problem rather than a capacity problem.
A Project Manager gives cross-functional work a clear owner.
That person can manage timelines, dependencies, meetings, deliverables, and risks while allowing specialists to focus on their part of the project.
If decisions lack good information, consider Business Operations
Sometimes leadership has enough execution capacity but lacks visibility.
Important numbers may live across different spreadsheets. Reporting takes days to assemble. Teams use different metrics. Managers struggle to answer basic questions about performance.
A Business Operations Associate or Analyst can improve business reporting, operational analytics, forecasting, KPI tracking, and strategic planning.
This type of hire is especially valuable when a growing company has accumulated plenty of data but hasn't built a reliable way to turn it into decisions.
If sales has people but the system is messy, consider RevOps
Hiring another salesperson won't solve every sales problem.
If reps spend too much time updating the CRM, leads get routed incorrectly, forecasting is unreliable, or marketing and sales use different definitions for the same funnel stages, the bottleneck may sit in revenue operations.
A RevOps hire can improve CRM workflows, reporting, lead management, sales processes, forecasting, and coordination between marketing, sales, and customer success.
Sometimes the fastest way to increase sales capacity is to help the salespeople you already employ spend more time selling.
If hiring itself has become the bottleneck, invest in recruiting
Growing companies can also reach the point where managers spend too much time sourcing candidates, reviewing applications, scheduling interviews, and following up with applicants.
That slows hiring and takes managers away from their actual jobs.
A recruiter or talent acquisition professional can create a more consistent recruitment process, candidate pipeline, interview structure, and hiring workflow.
Companies can also work with a recruiting partner such as South when they want to add remote professionals without building an internal recruiting function from scratch.
The common thread across all these scenarios is simple: hire for the constraint you have now, rather than the organizational chart you think you're supposed to have.
A company with 30 employees may need an Operations Manager before it needs another department head. Another may get far more value from an Executive Assistant than from an additional specialist.
The best underrated hire is the one that removes enough friction to let the rest of the team move faster.
The Leverage Test: Should You Make This Hire Yet?
An underrated hire can create real value, but timing still matters.
Before opening a new role, look at how much time, focus, and execution the current bottleneck is already costing the business. The stronger the pattern, the easier it becomes to justify the hire.
A simple leverage test can help.
1. Are senior employees spending too much time on lower-value work?
Look at what your managers, directors, and executives are actually doing during the week.
If highly paid employees are consistently handling scheduling, project follow-ups, manual reporting, CRM cleanup, vendor coordination, or administrative work, you may already be paying for the missing hire indirectly.
The question is whether those tasks could move to someone whose role is specifically designed around them.
That’s often the clearest signal that an operations manager, Executive Assistant, coordinator, or project manager could create more leverage.
2. Does the same operational problem keep coming back?
Recurring problems usually point to a system issue.
Maybe approvals constantly run late. Reports always require last-minute cleanup. The same customer handoff breaks every month. Teams repeatedly ask who owns a certain task.
When employees keep fixing the same issue manually, the business needs more than another temporary workaround.
Someone needs to own the process behind the problem.
That’s where operations, project management, or business operations roles can create lasting improvements.
3. Is the founder still involved in decisions that could belong elsewhere?
Founder involvement is valuable when the decision requires founder judgment.
It becomes expensive when leadership still approves routine expenses, checks project statuses, resolves scheduling issues, or answers the same operational questions every week.
If the organization can’t move without constant founder input, the company has a delegation bottleneck.
Depending on the work involved, that may point toward an Executive Assistant, Operations Manager, or Chief of Staff.
4. Are responsibilities spread across too many people?
Pay attention to processes where ownership is difficult to explain.
If one person starts the task, another updates the system, a manager checks the work, and an executive follows up when something goes wrong, the workflow probably needs clearer accountability.
Growing companies often reach this stage because responsibilities evolve faster than job descriptions.
A dedicated hire can consolidate that work and create clear ownership, standardized workflows, better documentation, and stronger accountability.
5. Would the hire improve the output of several other employees?
This is the most important question.
Suppose an Operations Manager could save three managers four hours each week. Or an Executive Assistant could give a founder another day of focused work. Or a Project Manager could help an engineering, marketing, and sales team launch projects faster.
That’s where the economics get interesting.
The ROI of a leverage hire should include the productivity they unlock in everyone around them.
You can think about it with a simple framework:
Leverage created = time saved across the team + delays avoided + higher-value work employees can return to
You don’t need a perfect calculation. Even a rough estimate can show whether the company is spending more by leaving the bottleneck unresolved.
If the same constraints are affecting multiple employees every week, the question may no longer be whether you can afford the hire.
It may be whether you can afford to keep operating without one.
Don’t Hire a Senior Operator to Fix a Broken Role
Once a company recognizes that it has an operations problem, the next mistake is often hiring too senior too quickly.
A growing company may decide it needs a Chief of Staff, Head of Operations, or VP of Operations when the actual problem is much more practical: someone needs to own scheduling, reporting, project coordination, documentation, or a recurring workflow.
Senior titles won’t automatically create more leverage. The role still needs to match the work.
Match the seniority to the problem
Start by looking at the level of decisions the person will actually own.
If most of the work involves calendar management, follow-ups, meeting preparation, and administrative coordination, an Executive Assistant may be the better fit.
If the problem is recurring workflows, internal systems, vendor management, and process improvement, an Operations Manager is probably closer to what the company needs.
If someone needs to manage timelines and dependencies across several teams, a Project or Program Manager may be enough.
A Chief of Staff makes more sense when the work involves strategic planning, executive decision support, company-wide priorities, and cross-functional leadership.
Senior hires need senior-level problems
A highly experienced operator should spend most of their time on work that requires judgment, prioritization, and organizational influence.
If they're mainly updating dashboards, scheduling meetings, chasing status updates, or maintaining basic processes, the company is paying senior-level compensation for work that could sit with a more appropriately scoped role.
That can also make the job harder to retain.
Experienced candidates generally want enough ownership and complexity to justify the position. A vague senior title attached to mostly tactical work can frustrate both sides.
Sometimes the role itself needs to be redesigned
Hiring problems also happen when companies combine several unrelated responsibilities into one job description.
An "Operations Manager" might be expected to handle HR administration, finance reporting, customer onboarding, recruiting, executive support, and project management all at once.
That creates an unusually broad role and makes it harder to find the right candidate.
Before hiring, separate the responsibilities into three buckets:
- Strategic: planning, prioritization, decision support, process design
- Operational: workflows, reporting, coordination, vendor management
- Administrative: scheduling, documentation, data entry, follow-ups
The mix tells you a lot about the seniority and profile you actually need.
Build the role around the outcome
A useful job description should make the expected impact clear.
Instead of writing:
"Support operations across the company."
Define outcomes such as:
- Reduce the routine operational work managers handle.
- Create consistent reporting across departments.
- Document and standardize key internal processes.
- Improve project handoffs between teams.
- Give leadership better visibility into execution.
Clear outcomes make it easier to hire the right level of talent and evaluate whether the role is working.
The goal isn't to add the most impressive operations title to the org chart. It's to hire someone with enough experience and authority to solve the problem the company actually has.
Why an Underrated Hire Can Deliver More ROI Than Another Specialist
When a team feels stretched, the instinct is usually to add another specialist.
Sales is busy, so hire another salesperson. Marketing has too much work, so add another marketer. Engineering has a backlog, so bring in another developer.
Sometimes that’s exactly the right move.
But if the real problem is poor coordination, unclear ownership, slow approvals, or too much administrative work sitting with senior employees, adding another specialist can increase headcount without fixing the constraint.
That’s where a leverage hire can produce a different kind of ROI.
Specialists add capacity. Leverage hires improve the system.
A specialist usually increases output inside one function.
An operations professional can improve the environment in which several functions operate.
For example, an Operations Manager might streamline reporting for finance, improve handoffs between sales and customer success, coordinate vendors, document internal processes, and reduce the amount of follow-up managers need to do.
That creates a multiplier effect.
If one person helps five employees spend more time on higher-value work, the return from that hire extends beyond their individual output.
Time saved across the team has real value
Suppose three managers each lose four hours a week to reporting, coordination, approvals, and process issues.
That’s 12 hours of management time every week.
Over a year, that becomes hundreds of hours that could have gone toward customers, strategy, hiring, coaching, or revenue-generating work.
A strong operations hire can consolidate part of that workload and build systems that reduce it permanently.
The value comes from both taking work off people’s plates and preventing the same inefficiencies from returning.
Better execution can matter more than more capacity
Companies sometimes assume growth problems come from having too few people.
In reality, some teams already have enough talent. They simply aren’t operating as efficiently as they could.
A sales team may need better CRM processes before another rep. A marketing team may need stronger project management before another content hire. A leadership team may need executive support before adding another senior manager.
That’s why you should evaluate hiring leverage, team productivity, operational efficiency, and role ROI before opening another specialist position.
The right question isn’t always, “Where do we need another pair of hands?”
Sometimes it’s:
“Which hire would make the people we already have significantly more effective?”
That question can lead to a very different hiring decision, and often a much higher-leverage one.
Can You Hire These Roles Remotely?
Yes. Many of the most underrated hires at growing companies also happen to work well in a remote setup.
That includes roles such as:
- Operations Managers
- Executive Assistants
- Project Managers
- Business Operations Associates
- Revenue Operations Specialists
- Recruiters
- Finance and administrative professionals
These jobs depend heavily on communication, documentation, coordination, analysis, and process ownership rather than physical presence.
The key is making sure the role has clear responsibilities and enough overlap with the rest of the team.
Time-zone alignment matters more for high-leverage roles
An operations professional or project manager may spend much of the day coordinating with different departments. An Executive Assistant needs access to leadership during working hours. A RevOps specialist may work closely with sales and marketing throughout the day.
That makes real-time collaboration especially valuable.
For U.S. companies, hiring remote talent in Latin America can make these roles easier to integrate because professionals across the region can overlap significantly with U.S. business hours.
That’s particularly useful for jobs involving:
- Live meetings
- Executive support
- Cross-functional projects
- Internal communication
- Approvals
- Customer or vendor coordination
- Fast-moving operational issues
Remote hiring can also expand the candidate pool
A growing company doesn’t necessarily need to limit its search to people within commuting distance of headquarters.
Hiring remotely gives companies access to a much larger pool of experienced professionals across operations, finance, recruiting, project management, executive support, and revenue operations.
It can also make it easier to match the hire's seniority to the problem.
For example, a company may need an experienced Operations Manager but struggle to justify the cost of one in a high-cost U.S. market. Looking at Latin American talent can open up more options while maintaining close collaboration with the U.S. team.
Clear ownership matters more than location
Remote work won’t fix a poorly defined role.
If the company hires an Operations Manager without deciding what they own, or brings in a Project Manager without giving them authority to manage timelines, the same problems can continue.
The biggest factor is clarity.
The person should know:
- Which processes they own.
- Which decisions they can make independently.
- Which teams they work with.
- What success looks like.
- Where their responsibilities begin and end.
Get those pieces right, and many of these high-leverage roles can be just as effective remotely as they are in the office.
For growing companies, that means the search for an underrated hire doesn’t have to stop at the local talent market.
Find the Hire That Gives Your Team More Leverage With South
Growing companies don’t always need another specialist in the busiest department. Sometimes the better move is hiring the person who helps the entire team work better.
That could be an Operations Manager who cleans up messy processes, an Executive Assistant who gives leadership more focus, a Project Manager who keeps cross-functional work moving, or another high-leverage professional who removes a recurring bottleneck.
The right hire should create more capacity than their job description suggests.
If you’re looking for experienced remote professionals who can help your company operate more efficiently, South can connect you with pre-vetted talent across Latin America.
You’ll get access to professionals who work in U.S.-aligned time zones, communicate fluently in English, and can integrate into your existing team across operations, finance, recruiting, project management, executive support, and other business functions.
Schedule a call with South and find the remote hire who can give your team more leverage.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is the most underrated role at a growing company?
For many growing companies, an Operations Manager is one of the most underrated hires. The role can improve workflows, reporting, documentation, project coordination, and internal systems while freeing managers and executives to focus on higher-value work.
The best answer still depends on the bottleneck. An Executive Assistant, Project Manager, Business Operations professional, or Chief of Staff may create more leverage in some companies.
When should a startup hire an Operations Manager?
A startup should consider hiring an Operations Manager when recurring internal work starts consuming too much leadership time, processes become inconsistent, projects require constant follow-up, or responsibilities are spread across several employees.
A good rule of thumb is to look for repeated operational friction rather than one-off problems.
Should you hire an Executive Assistant or Operations Manager first?
Hire an Executive Assistant when most of the bottleneck sits around one executive, especially scheduling, communication, meeting preparation, follow-ups, and administrative coordination.
Hire an Operations Manager when the problems are broader and involve company-wide processes, workflows, reporting, vendors, documentation, or cross-functional execution.
What types of hires create the most leverage?
High-leverage hires usually improve the productivity of several other employees. Common examples include Operations Managers, Executive Assistants, Project Managers, Revenue Operations Specialists, Business Operations professionals, and Chiefs of Staff.
Their value comes from removing bottlenecks, improving systems, and giving other employees more time to focus on their core responsibilities.
How do you know when your company needs an operations hire?
Common signs include managers spending too much time on coordination, repeated process problems, unclear ownership, inconsistent reporting, slow approvals, and projects falling behind between departments.
If several employees are regularly losing time to the same operational issues, it may be time to create a dedicated operations role.
Can operations roles be hired remotely?
Yes. Many operations roles work well remotely because they center on communication, reporting, documentation, project coordination, and process management.
For U.S. companies, hiring remote talent in Latin America can also provide strong working-hour overlap, which is especially useful for roles that collaborate across several departments throughout the day.
Is an Operations Manager worth hiring at a small company?
They can be, especially when operational work is already pulling founders and senior employees away from their primary responsibilities.
A smaller company may also consider a more junior operations professional if the work is mostly tactical. The right level depends on process complexity and how much independent decision-making the role requires.
What should an Operations Manager own at a growing company?
Depending on the business, an Operations Manager may own internal workflows, reporting, process documentation, vendor coordination, operational projects, approvals, resource planning, and cross-functional initiatives.
The strongest roles have clear ownership and measurable outcomes, not a vague responsibility to “help with operations.”
