Operations leadership: a scale-up lesson in ESG

Most startups treat “operations” like the boring bit you sort out after growth. Then growth arrives—new clients, more campaigns, more suppliers, more reporting—and suddenly everything is on fire.

That’s why a seemingly simple agency update from early January matters: The Kite Factory has appointed a managing partner of operations, and the role formally brings ESG into the leadership team. It’s a quiet headline with a loud implication: operational structure is now part of how modern marketing businesses plan for scale, resilience, and net-zero expectations—not an afterthought.

This post sits in our Climate Change & Net Zero Transition series for a reason. If you’re building a UK startup, you’ll find that net-zero commitments, sustainable procurement, and ESG reporting don’t fail because your team doesn’t care. They fail because nobody owns the system.

Why operations leadership is a growth lever (not admin)

Operations leadership is how you turn “we should” into “we did.” In marketing teams—especially fast-growing ones—work breaks down at the handoffs: from strategy to execution, from campaign to measurement, from one account team to another. Operations is the function that designs those handoffs so they don’t rely on heroics.

When an agency creates a senior operations position, it’s usually because the leadership team has hit a ceiling:

• Delivery quality is inconsistent across clients
• Margin is hard to predict month to month
• Hiring has outpaced onboarding and training
• Tools have multiplied, but reporting hasn’t improved
• Sustainability promises exist in decks, not in process

Startups experience the same ceiling—just with different labels. You might call it “we need to stop reinventing everything,” or “marketing is busy but pipeline is lumpy,” or “we can’t answer basic questions in board meetings without a spreadsheet marathon.”

My view: if you’re growing, operations is the highest-ROI leadership hire you’ll delay—and you’ll pay for that delay in wasted spend and exhausted people.

The ESG angle: why it’s moving into ops

The RSS article notes the appointment brings formal responsibility for ESG into the leadership team. That’s not a PR flourish; it’s an operational decision.

ESG work is mostly operational work:

• Defining what you measure (and what you don’t)
• Setting baselines (carbon, travel, suppliers, waste)
• Creating policies people can follow without slowing down
• Building reporting that doesn’t collapse after month two
• Aligning incentives (bonuses, targets, procurement rules)

If ESG sits only with marketing/PR, it drifts into messaging. If it sits with ops, it becomes routine.

What UK startups can learn from this agency move

The lesson isn’t “hire a managing partner.” The lesson is “assign ownership and authority to operations early.” Agencies are a useful mirror for startups because they live and die by delivery consistency, supplier coordination, and measurable outcomes—exactly the conditions startups face when they scale.

Here are three practical parallels.

1) Scaling isn’t adding people—it’s reducing friction

The common startup mistake is assuming scale means headcount. In reality, scale means:

• Less ambiguity
• Faster decisions
• Repeatable delivery
• Predictable measurement

Operations leadership makes that happen by standardising:

• Briefing templates
• QA checklists
• Asset naming conventions
• Campaign launch runbooks
• Retrospectives and learning loops

If your marketing is expanding (paid, content, partnerships, events), a simple sign you need ops leadership is this: two smart people have two different answers to “how do we launch a campaign here?”

2) ESG and net-zero commitments need a “system owner”

Net-zero transition is a systems problem before it’s a messaging problem. In a startup context, ESG often becomes a part-time responsibility shared across finance, people, and marketing. That’s workable—until customers and partners start asking for proof.

In the UK, sustainability expectations are increasingly embedded in procurement. Even when you’re not legally required to report, you’re often commercially required to. Buyers ask things like:

• Do you have a supplier code of conduct?
• Can you report business travel emissions?
• What’s your policy on sustainable media buying?
• Do you track environmental impact in your operations?

An operations leader can centralise the machinery:

• A lightweight ESG data model (what fields you capture, where, how often)
• A reporting cadence (monthly internal, quarterly board, annual external)
• A “definition of done” for sustainability actions (so they don’t fade)

Snippet-worthy truth: ESG succeeds when it’s scheduled, owned, and audited—not when it’s announced.

3) Marketing performance is an operations problem too

Startups often treat marketing measurement as a tooling choice: get a CRM, add GA4, plug in attribution. Tools help, but performance improves when ops decides how the organisation uses tools.

That means:

• Consistent lifecycle stages in CRM
• Shared definitions (SQL, opportunity, pipeline, CAC payback)
• Rules for UTMs and campaign taxonomy
• A single source of truth for weekly growth reporting

If you want more qualified leads in 2026, you don’t just need better creative. You need operational discipline so your data is trustworthy and your team can iterate quickly.

The “Managing Partner of Ops” checklist for a startup

You may not hire a managing partner tomorrow. But you can copy the structure behind the title.

Answer first: You need one senior owner responsible for operational clarity across growth delivery and ESG execution.

Here’s a practical checklist you can implement in stages.

Stage A (0–30 days): decide what ops owns

Pick ownership areas and write them down. If everything is shared, nothing is owned.

A good initial scope for a startup looks like:

1. Delivery system: planning, prioritisation, resourcing
2. Measurement system: dashboards, definitions, reporting cadence
3. Sustainability system: ESG metrics, supplier policy, travel policy
4. Quality system: QA, retros, playbooks

If you have a climate change or net-zero narrative, ops should also own the evidence trail—the proof behind claims.

Stage B (30–60 days): install repeatable rituals

Operations becomes real through rituals. A few that work across early-stage teams:

• Weekly growth ops meeting (30 min, same agenda every time)
• Monthly performance review (what worked, what didn’t, what changes)
• Quarterly ESG check-in (baselines, actions, supplier updates)

Keep them boring. Boring is reliable.

Stage C (60–90 days): build the “minimum viable ESG” framework

A startup-friendly ESG framework should be small enough to keep alive. Start with what you can actually measure.

A minimum viable approach:

• Carbon hotspots: business travel, cloud/hosting, office/work-from-home (where relevant), suppliers
• Procurement: list top 20 suppliers and tag which are sustainability-assessed
• Policies: travel hierarchy (rail before air where feasible), remote-first meeting default, event waste plan
• Reporting: one internal dashboard with 8–12 metrics that update monthly

If you operate in marketing or media, consider adding a basic approach to sustainable media buying (brand safety, supply path transparency, and carbon-aware delivery where possible). You don’t need perfection—just a system that improves.

People also ask: do startups really need operations leadership?

Yes—when growth creates coordination costs. A rule of thumb I’ve found useful:

• If you’re running 3+ active channels (e.g., paid search, paid social, content, partnerships)
• If you have multiple stakeholders approving work (founders, sales, product)
• If you can’t ship campaigns predictably every month

…then you’re already paying an “ops tax.” You’re just paying it through chaos instead of a role.

What if you can’t hire yet?

If hiring is off the table, assign an interim operations owner (often a Head of Marketing, Chief of Staff, or Finance lead) and give them time and authority. Not “fit it in.” Real time.

A scrappy setup that works:

• One person owns the process
• One shared dashboard
• One campaign taxonomy
• One monthly ESG update

It won’t be perfect. It will be stable. Stability is what allows growth.

What this signals for 2026: net-zero transition is becoming operational

The broader direction is clear: climate commitments are shifting from brand positioning to operational capability. Customers, investors, and partners increasingly expect proof—especially from B2B suppliers. The Kite Factory’s leadership move (bringing ESG responsibility into operations leadership) reflects that reality.

For UK startups chasing leads in 2026, here’s the stance I’d recommend: treat operations and ESG as one combined growth enabler. Better ops improves speed and margin. Better ESG improves procurement readiness and trust. Together, they reduce risk while you scale.

If you’re building your marketing engine right now, ask your team one question: who owns the system that turns sustainability and growth targets into weekly behaviour? If the answer is “everyone,” you’ve found your next leadership gap.