Welcome to The Operator's Handbook

WTF is the point of this?

Yet another business newsletter!

Why am I doing this to myself? And why am I doing this to you and your already overflowing inbox?

Over the last 10 years I’ve been an operator at companies like Uber, Meta and Rippling. My work has ranged from scrappy 0 ->1 efforts (launching new countries or products) to growing and optimizing business and product lines that touch millions of users.

During that time I have realized that while everyone seems to agree on the importance of execution, there is very little in terms of concrete training or guidance on how to execute well. Startups and high-growth companies are famously bad at onboarding, so I had to figure out most things on the job through trial and error.

Let’s take an example from B2B SaaS. There are dozens of articles that talk about CAC Payback Periods, a metric that tells you how long it takes to recover the cost of acquiring a customer. They cover the basic concept and show you how to calculate the metric with a simple, neat formula (the ratio of Sales and Marketing spend vs. newly acquired MRR or gross profit).

Unfortunately, things aren’t that simple in practice. Once you try to tackle this problem in real life, you are quickly left with a bunch of unanswered questions:

• What Marketing and Sales expenses should you include? Should you take expenses from the current period or a prior period?

• Do the payment terms matter?

• What if I want to know this metric by Marketing channel? Is that even advisable?

• What concrete decisions can I make with this metric, and what pitfalls should I avoid?

When I cover a topic in this newsletter, I’ll make sure to cover tactical implementation so that you can directly apply it on the job.

This extends beyond “hard” topics like CAC Paybacks to things like problem solving, planning, project management or stakeholder management.

• How do you become a strategic thought partner instead of just executing tasks that are given to you?

• How can you make sense of data and distinguish signal from noise?

• How do you make decisions with incomplete information?

For all of this, I will not only provide high-level frameworks, but also continue where other content ends and share hands-on, tactical examples and templates.

Essentially, I’m writing the content I would have liked to have on the job during the last decade as an operator. I hope you find it helpful; let me know what resonates and what you’d like to see more of.

Thanks for reading!