Before you hire an operations manager, try this

What an operations manager costs in the UK

There is no single official salary for an operations manager, because the title means different things in different businesses. The Office for National Statistics codes the job by industry: an operations manager in a warehouse, a bank and a cleaning company each land in a different group. For an owner-run business, three ONS groups cover most of what people mean by the title.

The figures below are median full-time pay for the tax year to 5 April 2025, the latest the ONS has published, with employer National Insurance and the minimum workplace pension added at the rates for 2026 to 2027.

How those figures are worked out

• Office manager is ONS group 4141. It is the closest match to an operations role in a small office-based business.
• Manager in other services is ONS group 1259, managers and proprietors in other services not elsewhere classified, which is where the ONS codes an operations manager in, for example, a cleaning or recruitment business.
• Functional manager or director is ONS group 1139, the senior end: someone who runs a function across a larger business.
• Employer National Insurance is 15% on pay above £5,000 a year. The minimum employer pension is 3% of earnings between £6,240 and £50,270.
• Recruitment fees, a bonus, a car, a laptop and holiday cover are not included, and at this level they can be part of the package.

What you would actually be paying for

An operations manager earns their salary by doing two things: deciding how the work should be done, and making sure it is done that way. The first is about systems and judgement. The second, in a small business, is mostly chasing, checking and admin.

In many small businesses the owner's problem is not a lack of management. It is that nothing is written down, so every job needs the owner, and that the owner spends most of the week on admin that someone else could do. Hiring a manager into that does not fix it. You pay a manager's salary for someone to discover the same thing, and then either write the systems themselves or do the admin.

Try this first: write the systems down

Before you advertise, spend a few weeks doing the part of the operations job that only you can do: getting how the business runs out of your head and onto paper.

• For two working days, note what you are doing every 30 minutes. Mark anything that repeats and does not need you personally.
• Pick the three jobs that repeat most often and follow the clearest rules. Write each one as a one-page procedure: what it is for, what starts it, the steps, the limits, and when to ask you.
• Write down the decisions you make again and again, such as refunds, discounts, which supplier to use, and what counts as urgent. A rule you can write down is a decision you no longer have to make.
• List the numbers you check each week and where each one comes from.

Then hand the admin load to a VA

Once the work is written down, most of the doing can be handed over. A virtual assistant can run the inbox and diary, chase invoices and suppliers, keep the CRM and spreadsheets up to date, prepare bookkeeping for your accountant, and pull the weekly numbers together, working from the procedures you have written.

What a VA should not do is make the judgement calls an operations manager is paid for. They follow your rules and bring you anything outside them. That keeps the decisions with you while taking the hours off you, which is often all the business needed.

It is also far cheaper. A full-time VA hired direct at the expert rates in a published rate guide for Filipino VAs (see sources), last updated in April 2026, costs $1,200 to $2,000 a month. At the Bank of England's rate on 24 September 2026, $1.3220 to the pound, that is about £10,900 to £18,150 a year. A managed service costs more than hiring direct, and a good deal less than a UK hire.

Give it three months

Run the business this way for a quarter, and keep adding procedures as new questions come up. By the end you will know which of two situations you are in.

• Your week has room in it again, and the business runs on the procedures with you making the calls. You did not need an operations manager; you needed the systems and the help.
• The admin is handled, but decisions are still queuing at your door, and the business is bigger than one person can direct. Now you do need a manager, and you are in a far better place to hire one.

When you genuinely need an operations manager

Some businesses need an operations manager, and trying to avoid one costs more than hiring. These are the signs.

• You have a team of people who each need day-to-day direction, and you cannot give it and run the business as well.
• Decisions, not tasks, are the bottleneck: things wait because only you can decide, and they cannot be written down as rules.
• Work happens in several places at once, such as sites, properties or crews, and someone has to be responsible for all of it in real time.
• You need someone to own a budget or a set of results, and answer for them, not just carry out a process.
• Legal or regulatory responsibility needs a named person in the UK who is present and accountable. Take advice on what your sector requires.

If you do hire, the groundwork still pays

Written procedures and a VA handling the admin are not wasted if you end up hiring. A new operations manager who joins a business with its processes written down and its routine work already running can start managing from the first month, instead of spending months finding out how things work.

It also changes the job you advertise. Instead of a manager who will also have to do the admin, you can hire for judgement and leadership, and pay for those, while the VA carries on with the routine.

Where Mango & Co. fits

This is the first half of that route. We recruit and vet VAs for your role, set the one you choose a paid task from your real work before they are hired, contract and pay them, and supervise them from the UK. Your procedures live in our workspace, where your VA signs each one and signs again when it changes, and they stay with you if your VA ever changes.

If you are weighing up an operations manager, our free plan at /fit takes about three minutes and shows which jobs you could hand over first, and what a VA would cost next to a UK hire.