Taking the day-to-day running of a store off the person who founded it, so they can go back to the work only they can do.
Most of the founders I work with are still doing operations themselves. They are answering support email at eleven at night, fixing listings on a Sunday, and pushing the growth work to next week for the fourth month running. The store is usually fine. The person running it has become the bottleneck.
That is the problem I work on.
Day to day: order processing and chasing fulfilment, customer support across email and chat, product listings and catalogue work, and the spreadsheet and process work sitting behind all of it. Past that, paid media on Pinterest, Google, Meta and TikTok, conversion rate work, and Shopify development when the theme needs to do something it does not currently do.
Delivery runs through ScaleWise VA, the agency I founded and run. I scope every account and stay directly involved in some of them; the rest of the work runs through a team spread across five countries, which is the only reason support coverage across time zones is possible at all.
Handing an entire operation to people who have never seen your store is how you get a month of cleanup. What works is picking the task that costs you the most hours and the least judgement, usually support or order processing, and moving only that first.
It gives both sides a cheap way to find out how the other works. If we are wrong for each other, you have lost a few weeks on one workflow rather than restructured your whole business around a decision that did not hold.
Mostly writing things down. Almost no store I have taken over had its process documented anywhere except in the founder's head, and the handover is the first time anyone has had to say out loud what happens when a customer asks for a return on day thirty one.
That part is slow and it feels like it is not the work. It is the work. Every ambiguity that survives the first month turns into an inconsistent answer to a customer three months later, and by then nobody can remember what the rule was supposed to be.
Expect to be asked a lot of questions in weeks one and two, and noticeably fewer by week four. If the questions are not slowing down by then, something is wrong with how we documented it and I would rather redo that than let it run.
Stores where the product is the problem. If returns are high because the item does not match the listing, better operations make it worse rather than better, because you are now shipping the mismatch faster and answering the complaints more politely. Fix the listing or the product first, and the operations problem gets smaller on its own.
I am also a poor fit if what you want is one person for a fixed number of hours a week doing only what they are told. That is a real thing to want and there are people who do it well. What I run is a team that takes responsibility for an outcome, which costs more and is worth it only if you actually want the decisions off your desk too.
A revenue number. I do not know your margins, your suppliers or your market, and anybody quoting you a percentage lift before they have seen your account is quoting you a number they made up.
What I will tell you, after a call and a look at the store, is which specific hours I think I can take off you in the first month and what it would cost. If the honest answer is that you are too early to need this, I will say that instead.
Message me on WhatsApp or email hello@scalewiseva.com with what the store is and what is eating your week. The first call is thirty minutes and is mostly me asking questions.