Rebuilding the operating system behind a growing multi-location food business.

Staff discipline was slipping. Expense leakage existed. The previous operations manager had been removed. But the deeper problem was harder to see: the business had outgrown the way it was being managed.

Willy’s had expanded to roughly seven or eight locations. As the footprint grew, informal relationships and founder-led decision making were carrying more operational weight than they could reliably hold. Employees could bypass managers and go directly to the owner. Branch purchasing created room for inflated expenses. Reporting was inconsistent. Some workforce health and operating certifications had lapsed.

The business did not simply need another document or a strategy presentation. It needed an operating layer.

I did not enter Willy’s intending to become its Head of Operations. The gap in the business made that necessary.

I stepped into the operating role while a permanent successor was being developed. Branch managers and zonal supervisors reported through the structure I was overseeing. I could direct managers, discipline staff, approve or reject expenses and make hiring decisions. Process changes and dismissals still required founder approval.

Daily work included management reporting, inventory review, expense approval, recruitment, staff meetings, branch issues, customer-experience training and coordination with the founder. Reporting was initially very frequent; as the operating rhythm became clearer, the cadence reduced.

One of the biggest operational risks was not simply theft. It was that weak processes made leakage easier to hide.

A branch could purchase an item for ₦5,000 and report ₦10,000 for reimbursement. When every location sourced independently, verifying each expense consistently was difficult. We tightened expense approval and moved more purchasing toward centralised procurement, reducing the opportunity for that kind of leakage.

We also strengthened inventory controls and consolidated reporting across operations, production, supervisors and cashiers so discrepancies could be surfaced rather than buried inside separate records.

The work moved beyond reporting into the organisational conditions that made good operations possible.

We reviewed staff contracts, clarified reporting lines, strengthened recruitment, replaced a number of poor-fit staff with competency-based hires, and trained frontline teams on customer experience and corporate communication.

We also completed workforce medical screening and renewed relevant operating documentation, while strengthening hygiene procedures and requiring repairs and improvements in food-preparation areas where standards needed to be raised.

Not every change was welcomed. Staff pushback was one of the hardest parts of the engagement. People who had become comfortable with a relaxed operating environment experienced new reporting, controls and accountability as “too much.” The transformation challenge was therefore behavioural as much as procedural.

The business continued opening locations while the operating model was being strengthened.

I supported recruitment and training for new staff, visited locations and helped create enough management structure for expansion to continue without every new branch simply adding another layer of founder dependency.

The work later extended into commercial strategy: looking at product economics, bundles and ways to increase average customer spend using the existing menu rather than relying only on more customer acquisition.

The engagement did not make the business perfect. It made it more operable.

Portfolio note: this case intentionally avoids publishing individual employee health information, disciplinary records and other confidential personnel details. Financial and operational artifacts are shown selectively to demonstrate the nature of the work without exposing unnecessary client-sensitive information.

Businesses grow in stages. The habits that help a founder build one stage can constrain the next.

A consultant can redesign structures, build reporting systems, recruit stronger people and introduce controls. But there is a limit to what any intervention can accomplish if leadership is not prepared to transfer authority along with responsibility.

Systems can create capacity. Leadership has to create the space for that capacity to work.