Two assistants replaced a role Verge had been trying to fill for seven months
A four-person team was losing thirty hours a week to order processing, supplier chasing and returns.
Results
The challenge
Verge had been trying to hire an operations coordinator for seven months. The founder was personally processing supplier orders at 11pm, and support response times had slipped past two days during their strongest growth quarter.
What we did
Spent the first two days documenting the eighteen recurring processes that were consuming the most time, before matching anyone to the role.
Placed two part-time assistants with overlapping coverage rather than one full-time — which removed the single point of failure that had made the previous arrangement fragile.
Trained against the documentation, not by shadowing, so the founder lost about four hours to onboarding instead of four weeks.
Assigned a Katalyst operations lead to run weekly quality reviews and hold cover for absence.
The outcome
Around thirty hours a week came back to the core team. Support first-response time fell from 41 hours to 13. The documented SOPs became the onboarding material for two later hires.
“They were productive in week one because Katalyst handled the training, not us.”
- Shopify
- Zendesk
- Notion
- Slack
- QuickBooks