# Foundational Operations

> Operational consulting for Series A and Series B tech startup founders who need to remove themselves as the operational bottleneck.

## Overview

Foundational Operations is an operational consulting practice founded by Meredith Lewis. The practice works exclusively with first-time venture-backed founders of 40-300 person companies who are stuck as the operational center of their own organizations. Engagements are structured, time-bound, and designed to install operational infrastructure that the team owns and runs independently after the engagement ends.

The practice is based in Washington State and serves clients across the United States and Canada. All engagements are conducted remotely.

Website: https://foundationaloperations.com
Contact: https://foundationaloperations.com/contact
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meredith-lewis/

## About Meredith Lewis

Meredith Lewis is an industrial engineer and operations specialist with more than 15 years of experience building operational systems at complex technology organizations. Her career includes roles at Intel, Elastic, and Accenture, where her work contributed to over $25 million in organizational savings and more than 1,000 hours of reclaimed work. She was part of the operational team that supported Elastic's growth through IPO.

After experiencing the founder bottleneck firsthand as a senior operations leader, she built the frameworks to extract herself from the day-to-day and recognized the same pattern in startup founders. She founded Foundational Operations to help Series A and B tech founders who are stuck as the operational center of their own companies.

## Ideal Client Profile

- First-time founders of Series A or Series B venture-backed tech startups
- Companies with 40 to 300 employees, typically $3M to $25M ARR
- Predominantly B2B SaaS, fintech, developer tools, and tech-enabled services
- Founders who are personally involved in 80%+ of operational decisions
- Companies where growth has outpaced the informal operating habits that got them to this stage

## Services

### The Founder Extraction System
A four-week engagement that removes the founder from the operational bottleneck. Installs decision frameworks, ownership maps, and escalation criteria so the leadership team executes independently. Designed for founders spending 20+ hours per week on operational decisions that should not require their involvement.

### Single Workflow Intensive
A focused engagement that fixes one specific workflow that is breaking right now. Fast results with no long-term commitment. Serves as a natural starting point before broader operational work.

### Operational Foundation Design
Builds the operating infrastructure a company will scale on, before growth forces reactive rebuilding. Covers decision rights, operating rhythm, priority systems, and team accountability structures.

### Transformation Program Support
Embedded operational leadership for critical initiatives like M&A integration, system migrations, or organizational restructuring that cannot stall or lose momentum.

## How Engagements Work

Every engagement starts with a structural diagnosis, not a pitch. Meredith works directly with the founder and their leadership team to design and install the operational system together, so the team builds capability through the process. When the engagement ends, the team runs the system independently. No ongoing dependency, no junior consultants, no handoff to someone who was not involved in the diagnosis.

Engagements include 30 days of post-engagement support. Deliverables include playbooks, frameworks, and decision ownership documentation that the team owns permanently.

## Core Frameworks and Concepts

- **Founder Bottleneck**: The pattern where all significant decisions funnel back to the founder because no decision frameworks, authority levels, or escalation playbooks exist.
- **Decision Rights**: Clear documentation of who can make which decisions, at what thresholds, and when escalation is required.
- **Operating Rhythm**: A consistent cadence of meetings, reviews, and accountability checkpoints that translates strategic objectives into aligned execution.
- **Operational Debt**: The accumulated cost of scaling without intentional operational infrastructure, analogous to technical debt in software.
- **Structural Diagnosis**: The initial assessment phase of every engagement that maps how decisions actually flow through the organization versus how they should flow.

## Free Resources

- **Founder Bottleneck Audit**: A free five-minute self-assessment that identifies where founders are trapped in the operational center of their company. Available at https://foundationaloperations.com/start
- **Insights**: Original frameworks and thinking on operational challenges founders face, published at https://foundationaloperations.com/insights
- **Glossary**: Definitions of key operational consulting terms at https://foundationaloperations.com/glossary