How to Hire an Operations Manager for Your Construction Business

How to hire an operations manager for your construction business - the honest answer is that most contractors do it backwards. They hire before the role is defined, into a business with no systems, and then wonder why the person is not performing.

The ops manager is not there to be busy. They are there to run the operation so you can grow it. That is a different job. Getting the hire wrong costs you a year and sometimes the person who was almost right.

What works - and what I learned building a property maintenance company in London that serviced housing associations and letting agents - is a version of the construction arbitrage model. You hold the prime contract. Subbies and a management layer do the work. The margin stays in the middle. For that to scale, someone has to run operations while you win the next contract. An ops manager is how that layer gets filled.

What an operations manager actually does in construction

The title gets used loosely. In a construction business, the ops manager's job is to own project delivery after the contract is signed. That means managing subbies and site staff, tracking timelines and budgets, handling supplier and client communication, and making sure each job closes at the right margin.

They are not a project manager on a single job. They are managing the pipeline - multiple jobs, multiple teams, at the same time. A general contractor (main contractor in the UK) running construction arbitrage at scale needs someone who can hold that complexity without it bouncing back to the owner.

The sign you actually need one - not just want one

If you are spending more than a quarter of your week on things that do not require you personally - scheduling, chasing subbies, client updates, purchase approvals - and you are running more than a handful of live jobs, you need an ops manager.

Most contractors feel this around the 10 to 20 subcontractor or staff mark. The business is too big to run yourself and too small to have a full management team. That gap is exactly where the ops manager sits.

What the hire costs - and what you get for it

In the US, a construction operations manager earns around $80,000 to $102,000 a year in the middle of the market, with experienced hires at larger commercial firms reaching $130,000 or more (figures in USD - the model and the math are identical in any currency). ZipRecruiter puts the 2026 national average at $90,600.

That is a real cost. Answer this before you post the job: what is one extra project a month worth to this business? If it is more than the salary, the hire pays for itself. If you are currently turning down work because you are too stretched to manage it, the math is straightforward.

How to write the job description that gets the right applicants

Most construction job descriptions list tasks. A good ops manager does not just want a task list - they want to know what success looks like in this specific business.

Write the description around outcomes. What does the business look like six months after a successful hire? State that plainly. Then describe the context: how many projects, what contract sizes, how many subbies, what software is in use.

• State the revenue scale - how many projects a month, what kind of work, average contract size
• Be clear on who they manage and who they report to
• Describe the outcome you want: fewer owner interruptions, better delivery margin, faster handovers
• List the tools they need: scheduling software, job costing, whatever you run the business on
• Include probation milestones - it signals you run a serious operation

The six-week test - the one interview question that matters

Ask every candidate this: if you were out of the business for six weeks - unreachable, no phone, no email - what would break?

Their answer tells you how they think about systems before they have even started. A candidate who lists specific processes and then explains who they would train to cover them is thinking like an operator. A candidate who says everything would fall apart is describing how they work now - not how they would build.

The real test of an operations manager is not whether the business runs when they are there. It is whether the work survives six weeks without them. If it does not, they have not built systems - they have just become the new bottleneck.

This is what separates a good ops hire from a bad one. The job is not to be indispensable - it is to build something that does not depend on any single person. See how to make your construction business run without you for the full version of that principle applied to the whole operation.

The first 90 days - how to set them up right

Most bad ops hires are not bad people. They are capable people dropped into undefined roles with no clear success criteria. The first 90 days is where you prevent that.

• Days 1 to 30: shadow you on every project decision. They are learning how you think, not running things yet.
• Days 30 to 60: take over day-to-day project calls and subcontractor management. You stay available but do not step in.
• Days 60 to 90: running the operation independently. You review outcomes weekly, not daily.

If they are not ready to run independently by day 90, find out why before probation ends. The most common issue: the business has no documented systems, so the ops manager cannot run what has never been written down. Before you hire, get the construction business systemised enough that the new hire has something to follow from day one.

What a bad hire looks like in the first two months

These are the signs a hire is not going to work - most of them visible before the 60-day mark:

• Every subcontractor problem still comes to you, not them
• They are solving issues one at a time instead of building processes to prevent them recurring
• Delivery margin on jobs is not improving - or is getting worse
• They cannot explain what the team did last week without prompting
• They resist writing anything down because it 'slows them down'

None of these alone means end it. But any of them means have the direct conversation now. Waiting until month six is expensive.

Build the business around systems, not people

An ops manager is a person. Systems are what survive people. The best hire you make should be building the systems that make the next hire easier - and making their own role slightly less critical over time. That is what a real operator does.

If the business still depends on any one individual - including the ops manager - you do not yet have a business that runs itself. The ops manager is the mechanism. Systems are the goal.