You Already Know Your Back End Is a Mess. Here's Why You Haven't Fixed It.
- Kelsea Koenreich
- 11 minutes ago
- 7 min read
I sat down with Aveline Elfar recently and spent an hour nodding along to everything she said.
Aveline founded AE and Co., a boutique operations agency that has spent seven years going into six, seven, and eight-figure businesses, auditing the back end, and building the systems that let those businesses run without the founder in every decision.
Operations are the piping in the house. Sales and marketing are the water. You can have all the water you want, but if there is no piping, you are going to have floods everywhere. And yet most founders I work with, the ones making real money with teams in place, have been so focused on turning the water on that nobody built the pipes.
Most founders already know this. They know their back end is messy. They know things are not documented well enough. They know their team is coming to them for things that should have a system. The reason they have not fixed it is not ignorance. It is that looking at what is broken means looking at how they have been operating, and that is uncomfortable.
It means admitting that the confusion on the team is a communication problem they created, that delegation is failing because the job was never defined clearly enough, that the reason they cannot step away is structural and not just a bad timing situation. So they keep turning the water on and hoping the pipes figure themselves out.
The Mistake That Feels Like a Solution
The most common pattern Aveline sees when she audits a business is a founder who knows she is the bottleneck, knows things are messy, and decides the solution is to hire someone.
She told me about an e-commerce founder who made protein bars. He had absolutely no processes in place, knew he was the bottleneck, and decided the answer was to hire more people. But they were getting hired into chaos. Nobody had the information they needed. Nobody knew where things lived. The new people could not do their jobs because the jobs had never been defined, documented, or systematized. They just added more hands to a fire that needed a different kind of attention.
Hiring is not a systems solution. It is a symptom of not having systems. When you bring someone into a business that has no clear infrastructure, you are not relieving yourself. You are creating a training burden, a confusion burden, and eventually a replacement burden, because that person is going to leave or underperform and you are going to blame the hire instead of the environment they walked into.
Aveline's phrase for this is one I am borrowing permanently: clarity is kindness. If you are not giving your people clear processes to follow and clear direction, they are not going to be able to do their job well. That is not a them problem. That is a you problem, and specifically a systems problem.
What an Operations Audit Actually Finds
When Aveline goes into a business, she does not start by implementing. She pops the operational hood first. She wants to understand the tech stack, why the team is operating the way it is, where the bottlenecks are, and what is underneath the symptoms the founder has been describing as people problems.
The symptoms she hears most often from founders: I feel like I am working too much. My team is not doing what they are supposed to. I am constantly answering the same questions. Things keep falling through the cracks.
These sound like people problems. They are almost always infrastructure problems.
She told me about an eight-figure founder who was still messaging her team in Slack every single day about client communication issues, payments failing, things that should have been automated or systemized months or years before. She was in the operational weeds of a business doing eight figures, putting out fires that a proper workflow would have prevented from starting. The founder's time was going toward things that a well-built system could have handled without her, which meant her time was not going toward the things only she could do.
The problem with a messy back end is that it is invisible from the outside. The revenue looks fine. The clients are there. The team is technically in place. Aveline said something about this that stuck with me: when she gets into a business, there is almost always way more going on internally, with profit, with systems, with team, than it looks like from the outside. The founder has been carrying the gap between what the business appears to be and what it is costing her. What nobody sees is the cognitive load, the team's confusion, the hours lost to information that lives in someone's head instead of in a documented process, the new hire who takes six weeks to get up to speed instead of six days because there is no onboarding that works.
The Three Things That Move the Needle
When I asked Aveline for the highest-impact operational changes most founders overlook, she named three.
CRM. If you run a service-based business, you need a single place where everything about your clients lives: where they are in the process, how they are communicating, what has been done, what is outstanding. Without it, that information lives in your head or in someone else's head, and when that person goes on vacation or leaves, so does the information. Go High Level is what her team recommends most often for all-in-one functionality, though if you already have something like ActiveCampaign set up and working partially, the move is often to clean it up rather than replace it.
Project management tool. ClickUp is her team's preference, though she is clear that the tool matters less than how it is set up. She has walked into businesses with overcomplicated project management systems that nobody uses and businesses with nothing at all. Both are problems. The goal is simple and clean, built for how the business runs specifically, not for how someone else's business runs. A template you found online is not a system. It is someone else's system that may not fit yours at all.
Automations. This is where most founders either overthink it or skip it entirely. Aveline's advice is to start with the native integrations that already exist in the tools you are paying for before spending money on anything new. Zapier is powerful and her team uses it, but you do not need to add a connector if the two tools you are using can already talk to each other. Look at what you have first. Look at what features you are paying for and not using. Bloated tech stacks, meaning tools with overlapping functionality, are one of the first things she finds in every audit, and fixing that alone saves founders hundreds of dollars a month and hours of confusion.
The Half Nobody Talks About
One thing I want to add from the advisory side, because I see the other half of this every day: the tactical pieces only work when the founder is willing to change how she operates. Aveline builds the infrastructure. The work I do is on the internal operating system of the CEO. Both have to change. You can have the most beautifully organized ClickUp setup in the world and still be in every decision, still answering every question, still the person your team waits on before anything moves. The infrastructure is the container. What you put in it and how you show up inside it is what makes it work.
The Quick Win You Can Do This Week
Track your time. Six weeks minimum, three months if you can. Use an app, Aveline uses Toggl, or even a spreadsheet, but be honest. Track exactly what you are spending your hours on and where you are getting interrupted. Not what you think you are spending your time on. What you are. Those are usually different things, and the gap between them is where the first fixes live.
Once you know what is eating your time, look at the workflows that break most often or that bring your team to you most frequently. Those are the ones to document and systematize first. What does your team ask you about repeatedly? What process consistently goes sideways? What information does a new person need that currently lives only in someone's head? Start there. Not with a massive overhaul. With the specific workflow that is causing the most friction right now.
Document it. Assign ownership. Check it in a month to make sure it is still working. Processes are not a one-time thing. They change as the business changes, which means they need to be revisited, not just created and forgotten.
Aveline's team once helped a founder go from sixty-hour work weeks to ten through exactly this kind of targeted work. Not a massive overhaul. A focused project that identified what was eating her time and built something to handle it. The fixes were not groundbreaking. They were things the founder already suspected needed addressing. She just had never taken the time because she was too busy answering messages and putting out fires.
Where to Go Next
If you are ready to look at the infrastructure and do this work at a deeper level, two options.
The Mom Founders Table Mastermind is where we redesign the full operational structure of your business alongside the identity work that makes it stick. Twelve months, your people, your pricing, your processes. Applications are open now.
And if you want to work directly with someone who will audit your tech stack, build your systems, and get your team running the business, go find Aveline. Her work is exactly what it sounds like and she is the real thing.
Find her at avelineelfar.com or on Instagram at @avelineelfar. If your back end needs attention and you have been putting it off, she is who I would call.
