Published 18 Feb 2026 · Depesh Vyas

Case Study: From $5K to $220K MRR in 19 Months — The Operations Playbook

Business type: B2B marketing services
Starting point: $5K MRR, 6 clients, 4–5 team members, founder working 80 hours/week
End point: $220K MRR, 180 clients, 40+ team members, founder working 25 hours/week (strategy only)
Timeframe: 19 months

The Situation When I Arrived

The business was new. The founder had built something real — 6 clients, a small team, a product that was working well enough to retain early customers. The growth potential was clear. What wasn't in place was any operational infrastructure whatsoever.

The founder was working 80-hour weeks managing the team, writing copy, running sales, handling client communication, and making every operational decision. There was no delivery funnel — each client engagement was assembled from scratch. There was no hiring process — the team existed because the founder had found people personally. There were no KPIs, no documented standards, no process for bringing new clients into the business in a repeatable way.

Everything ran through the founder. The business's ability to grow was directly capped by how much the founder could personally process in a week.

The first month was the most critical. The goal: get the founder out of day-to-day execution within 30 days so he could focus entirely on sales and strategy, while I built the operational infrastructure underneath him.

What Was Built in Month 1

The delivery funnel. The first thing built was a standardised delivery process — a clear workflow from client onboarding to work completion that every client went through in the same way. This sounds basic because it is. But before it existed, every new client required the founder's direct involvement in setting up the engagement. After it existed, onboarding was handled by the team against a defined checklist, with the founder's involvement reduced to a single strategic kickoff call.

The delivery funnel also established what "done" looked like for each type of work. Not vague quality guidance — specific checklists that every deliverable was checked against before going to the client. This removed the founder from the quality review loop for standard work.

Team capacity system. With 4–5 people and 6 clients, team capacity wasn't the constraint. But the absence of visibility into capacity was. There was no way to know who had bandwidth for a new client, who was overloaded, or when the team needed to hire. A simple weekly capacity tracking system — available hours, allocated hours, utilisation rate per team member — gave the founder and me visibility that didn't previously exist. This immediately prevented the ad-hoc overloading that was producing quality failures.

L1 hiring pipeline. The founding team was in place, but there was no process for bringing in the next person. A basic hiring pipeline — a clear role definition, a structured evaluation process, and a fast way to test candidates on real work before committing — meant that as the client base grew, the team could grow ahead of need rather than scrambling to hire after becoming understaffed.

Removing the founder from day-to-day. Within the first 4 weeks, the founder's involvement in daily operations went from constant to almost zero. Delivery was running against the new funnel. The team had a clear daily cadence. Escalation rules defined what came to the founder (client relationship risk, strategic decisions, budget approvals) and what the team resolved independently (delivery questions, standard client communication, operational decisions within scope). The founder moved entirely into sales.

Months 2–6: Scaling the Infrastructure

With the founder free to sell, revenue started moving. By month 3, the business had doubled to $10K MRR. By month 6, it was at $30K MRR. The operational challenge shifted from building the foundation to scaling it — hiring ahead of growth, maintaining delivery quality as volume increased, and ensuring the systems that worked at 20 clients still worked at 50.

The key work in this phase: formalising the hiring process as a continuous pipeline rather than a reactive emergency, building team lead roles so management didn't centralise back to me as headcount grew, and introducing a KPI framework that gave the whole team visibility into how the business was performing week to week.

This phase also produced the first real culture work. Culture in a fast-growing team isn't accidental — it's built deliberately. We established clear standards for what the team was accountable for, created regular forums for the team to give and receive feedback, and built the expectation that team members owned their outcomes, not just their tasks. New hires onboarded against documented role expectations, not tribal knowledge passed down from whoever happened to sit next to them.

Months 7–19: Scaling to 40+ People and $220K MRR

The second half of the engagement was about building the operational infrastructure to handle a team 8x larger than where we started. By month 12, the business was at $80K MRR with 20+ team members. By month 19, $220K MRR with 40+ team members.

At this scale, the operational challenges are meaningfully different. It's no longer about the founder stepping back — the founder was already out of operations entirely. It's about ensuring that the management layer below the COO is strong enough to run the business, that delivery quality is maintained across a team of 40 who can't all be directly supervised, and that the systems built for 10 clients still function correctly for 180.

The founder's hours went from 80 per week to 25 per week. The 25 hours were almost entirely strategy, key client relationships, and sales. Everything else — team management, delivery oversight, hiring, operations, quality control — was running without him.

What Actually Drove the Growth

It's worth being direct about this because the growth number is significant and the temptation is to attribute it to something clever. The growth was driven by one thing: the founder was freed to sell.

When the founder was working 80-hour weeks managing operations, he had roughly 7–8 hours per week available for sales. When operations were running without him, he had 20–25 hours per week for sales — more than three times as much. Combined with a delivery infrastructure that could actually handle new clients without the wheels coming off, the business grew proportionally to the founder's increased selling capacity.

This is the fundamental lever. Operational infrastructure doesn't generate revenue on its own. It creates the conditions where the person most capable of growing the business — usually the founder — can actually focus on growing the business, rather than keeping the existing one from falling apart.

What This Means for Your Business

The specific systems built for this business were designed around its specific constraints. Your business will have different bottlenecks and therefore different priorities.

But the pattern is consistent: the operational infrastructure comes first, the founder gets freed from execution, the founder's capacity moves to growth, and the business grows. The starting point is always an honest assessment of where the current constraints are — not where they should be in theory, but where they actually are in practice right now.

Depesh Vyas is the founder of VBOG (Vyas Business Operations Group). He works with service business founders at $10K–$40K MRR who are stuck in execution. VBOG takes a maximum of 3 companies at a time. The starting point is a $500 Operations Audit. Applications for the current cohort are open.