Operations manager job description for a marketing agency (2027 template)

An operations manager job description for a marketing agency should name one outcome: the agency delivers the work it sold, at the margin it priced, without the owner holding the schedule in their head. Everything else in the posting, from resourcing to billing hygiene to process, is a means to that outcome.

This post gives you a copy-ready 2027 job description for an agency operations manager, the 90-day scorecard that tells you whether the hire is working, the salary logic to set the budget, and the point at which you need a director of operations instead.

What does an operations manager do at a marketing agency?

An agency operations manager owns the machinery that turns sold work into delivered, billed and profitable work. They run resourcing and capacity, keep time and billing clean, enforce scope, and report margin by client, so the owner and the department heads can make decisions on numbers instead of instinct.

That is different from the generic job description you will find on a jobs site. A manufacturing or logistics operations manager manages physical throughput. An agency operations manager manages a different set of scarce things: senior attention, billable hours and client patience. The work is invisible when it goes well, which is why agencies rarely hire for it until something breaks.

Here is what the role covers in a working week:

1. Resourcing. Who is booked on what, who has room, and what the next signed client will do to the schedule.
2. Delivery hygiene. Intake, handoffs, briefs, deadlines and the follow-up nobody else owns.
3. Time and billing. Timesheets complete by Monday, invoices out on schedule, unbilled work found before the month closes.
4. Scope control. Spotting the account that has quietly grown 30% past its retainer.
5. Margin reporting. Margin per client, per department and per service, produced without a four-day spreadsheet exercise.
6. Process ownership. The checklists, templates and rules the team follows because they are written down once and kept current.

If your current "operations" is you, an account director who cares about spreadsheets, and a Sunday night routine, this list is the work that is already happening badly.

Operations manager job description template for a marketing agency

Copy this and edit the bracketed parts. It is written for an agency of roughly 15 to 60 people, where the operations manager reports to the owner or managing director and works alongside department heads.

Job title: Operations Manager

Reports to: Founder / Managing Director

Location: [Remote / hybrid / city]

Summary

We are a [number]-person [SEO / PR / paid media / full-service] agency. We need an operations manager to run the schedule, the numbers and the process behind our client work, so our account teams spend their week on clients and the owner stops being the source of truth for who is doing what.

What you will own

• The weekly resourcing plan across all departments, including the three-week look-ahead and the capacity view for new business.
• Utilization and capacity reporting by person, role and department, reviewed with department heads every week.
• Time tracking compliance. Timesheets complete by the agreed deadline, with exceptions chased the same day.
• The monthly billing cycle with finance: retainers, project milestones, usage-based items and pass-through costs, with unbilled work reviewed before invoices go out.
• Scope and retainer pacing. You flag accounts running past their hours before the overage becomes a write-off.
• Client profitability reporting. Margin by client, by service and by department, delivered monthly and in time to change a decision.
• Onboarding operations: the intake, kickoff and setup steps that every new client goes through in the same order.
• Process documentation and tool administration, including the rules for how work is requested, scoped, tracked and handed off.
• Hiring input. You bring the data on when a department needs another person and which role to add first.

What you bring

• 3 to 6 years in operations, delivery, project management or finance at a marketing, creative or professional services firm.
• Comfort with utilization, realization, effective hourly rate and retainer burn, and the ability to explain them to a creative director in plain language.
• A track record of getting a team to follow a process without making the process the main event.
• Judgment under pressure. You can tell the owner an account is losing money and have the numbers ready.
• Working fluency with agency software: time tracking, project management, invoicing and reporting.

What success looks like

• Utilization within target ranges for every department, with no person above 90% for a sustained period.
• 95% of billable time logged within 48 hours.
• Zero retainers running over budget for more than a month without a conversation with the client.
• Invoices issued by the fifth business day of the month, with unbilled work under an agreed threshold.
• Margin per client visible to leadership by the tenth of each month.

That template is deliberately outcome-led. Notice there is no line about "supporting cross-functional initiatives." If a duty cannot be tied to hours, margin or delivery, it does not belong in the posting.

What should an operations manager's first 90 days look like?

The first 90 days should produce one trusted number, one repeatable routine and one fixed leak. A new operations manager who spends 90 days on "assessment" has produced nothing the owner can use, so set expectations before the offer goes out.

Days 1 to 30: get one honest picture

The operations manager's first job is to establish what is true. That means a clean list of every active client, what each is contracted for, who works on it, and how many hours each person actually logged in the last three months.

Expect the picture to be uncomfortable. In a typical 12-person agency billing $150 an hour, a 57% team-wide utilization rate looks healthy until you compare it against the 70 to 75% the pricing assumed. The gap is the money. Our utilization and capacity guide walks the full calculation.

The deliverable at day 30 is a one-page view: contracted revenue, logged hours, utilization and margin per client. It does not need to be pretty. It needs to be trusted.

Days 31 to 60: install the weekly routine

The routine matters more than any tool. A good weekly rhythm for an agency operations manager looks like this:

1. Monday: Review last week's utilization and any timesheet gaps. Chase them before noon.
2. Tuesday: Resourcing meeting with department heads. Confirm the three-week look-ahead.
3. Wednesday: Retainer pacing check. Any account past 60% of its hours by the 15th gets a note to the account lead.
4. Thursday: Pipeline review with the owner. What happens to capacity if the two pending proposals close?
5. Friday: Billing prep. Unbilled work, upcoming milestones, pass-through costs to recover.

By day 60, this should run without the owner in the room. Our agency workflow post covers how to document the steps so they survive staff changes.

Days 61 to 90: fix the biggest leak

Every agency has a leak: a retainer that has quietly doubled in scope, a department sitting at 45% utilization, a billing step that leaves 6% of work unbilled. By day 60 the data shows which one is largest. By day 90 the operations manager should have fixed it, or have a priced proposal to the owner that does.

A single repriced account is the usual win. A $2,500 retainer that quietly takes 24 hours a month earns $104 an hour against a $150 standard rate. The sum is one line, and nobody has done it.

What is the difference between an operations manager and a project manager?

A project manager runs the delivery of one client's work: the brief, the timeline, the tasks and the client conversations. An operations manager runs the system all the projects sit inside: capacity, billing, scope rules, reporting and process.

The practical test is the question each one answers.

• Project manager: "Will this campaign ship on Thursday?"
• Operations manager: "Do we have the people to ship everything we sold this quarter, and will it make money?"

In an agency under about 15 people, one person often does both, and that is fine. Past that size the two jobs pull in opposite directions. Project work is reactive and client-facing. Operations work is analytical and works best in protected blocks of time. When one person holds both, the project fires always win, and the operating system never gets built.

How is an agency operations manager different from a COO or director of operations?

The titles overlap, but the scope grows with the agency. Here is a simple way to think about the ladder:

1. Operations coordinator (5 to 15 people). Handles scheduling, timesheet chasing and admin. Reports to the owner or a project lead.
2. Operations manager (15 to 60 people). Owns resourcing, billing hygiene, margin reporting and process. Reports to the owner or managing director.
3. Director of operations (40 to 100 people). Owns operations across multiple departments or offices, manages other operations staff, and sets targets with finance. Often sits in the leadership team.
4. COO (60+ people). Runs the agency's day-to-day so the founder can focus on growth and clients. Owns the P&L alongside the CEO.

The sizes overlap on purpose. A 50-person agency with simple retainers needs a manager. A 50-person agency with three offices, a white-label arm and a separate production team needs a director. If you are weighing your first operations hire, our guide on when to hire at a marketing agency covers the utilization and cash triggers, and the marketing agency org chart post shows where the role sits.

How much should an agency pay an operations manager?

Budget for an operations manager the same way you would budget for a senior account lead: the role pays for itself only if it recovers more margin than it costs. Pay varies widely by city, agency size and whether the role is remote, so check current postings for your market rather than relying on a national average.

Use this logic to set the ceiling:

1. Take your annual revenue and your current gross margin.
2. Estimate the realistic leak the role will close. Most agencies find 3 to 6 points of margin in unbilled time, uncontrolled scope and underused capacity.
3. Multiply. On $3 million of revenue, 3 points of margin is $90,000 a year.
4. Add the fully loaded cost of the hire, usually 1.25 to 1.35 times salary once benefits, tools and payroll taxes are included.

If the loaded cost is under the margin you expect to recover, the hire is justified. If you cannot name where the margin will come from, you are hiring for relief rather than return, and the job description needs to be sharper before you post it.

What does the operations manager need to see every week?

The operations manager needs a small set of numbers, current to the week, in one place. If any of them takes more than ten minutes to produce, the role will spend its time on spreadsheets rather than decisions.

The weekly set:

• Utilization by person and department, against target. See the utilization rate definition for the formula.
• Retainer pacing, meaning hours used against hours contracted, with the percentage of the month elapsed alongside it.
• Capacity look-ahead, meaning booked and available hours for the next three weeks, by role.
• Timesheet completion rate, the share of expected hours actually logged.
• Unbilled work, the hours and dollars delivered and not yet invoiced.
• Margin per client, using fully loaded payroll against contracted revenue. The agency gross margin definition shows how to calculate it.

When these live in four tools, the first six months of the role go to stitching them together. Verbial puts time, pacing, capacity and margin on the same screen, so the operations manager starts the week with the picture instead of building it. You can see how that works on the capacity planning and profitability pages, and the agency capacity planning post explains the method behind the numbers.

What interview questions find a strong agency operations manager?

The best interview questions ask for a number, a decision and a mistake. Candidates who have run operations at an agency or a similar services firm answer in specifics. Candidates who have only managed projects answer in principles.

Seven questions worth asking:

1. "What utilization rate did you target for designers, and why that number?"
2. "Tell me about an account you discovered was unprofitable. What did you do next?"
3. "How did you get a team to complete timesheets on time without becoming the timesheet police?"
4. "Walk me through how you decide whether to say yes to a new client when the team is at 85%."
5. "Describe a process you wrote that people actually followed. What made it stick?"
6. "What would you want to see in the first week to understand our margin per client?"
7. "When would you tell an owner that a client should be repriced or dropped?"

Listen for the candidate who asks about your data before answering. That is the person who will get to the truth in the first 30 days.

What are the common mistakes when hiring an agency operations manager?

Most failed operations hires fail for one of four reasons, and all four are fixable before the offer goes out.

1. Hiring a project manager and calling it operations. The person is excellent at timelines and has never seen a margin report. The operating system never gets built.
2. No authority over the numbers. If the operations manager cannot get timesheets enforced or scope pushed back, they become a reporting function with a title. Agree up front that they hold the line on time logging and retainer scope, with the owner's backing.
3. No tooling. An operations manager given five disconnected tools and a deadline will spend the year building a reporting layer. Decide on the system first, or at least give them the mandate to choose one in the first 30 days.
4. Owner stays the bottleneck. If every resourcing decision still goes through the founder, the new hire is an assistant. Hand over the schedule explicitly and stay out of it for a quarter.

The fix for all four is the same: write the success metrics into the job description, as the template above does, and review them at 30, 60 and 90 days.

Frequently asked questions about the operations manager job description

What does an agency operations manager do?

An agency operations manager runs the system behind client work: resourcing, time tracking, billing, scope control and margin reporting. They make sure sold work is delivered on schedule and at the margin the agency priced.

What should an operations manager job description include?

It should include the outcomes the role owns, such as utilization targets, timesheet compliance, billing timelines and margin reporting, plus the experience required and a 90-day scorecard. Avoid vague duties like "support cross-functional initiatives."

When should a marketing agency hire an operations manager?

Most agencies reach the point between 15 and 25 people, when the owner can no longer hold the schedule in their head and margin surprises start appearing. Utilization above 85% in a department for two months, unbilled work above 5% of revenue, or a monthly close that takes more than a week are the usual triggers.

What is the difference between an operations manager and a director of operations?

An operations manager runs operations for one agency or one team, usually reporting to the owner. A director of operations manages across departments or locations, often leads other operations staff and sits on the leadership team. The step up usually comes between 40 and 100 people.

What tools does an agency operations manager need?

At a minimum: time tracking, a schedule or capacity view, invoicing and a way to report margin by client. The role works best when those four share one data set, because stitching them together by hand takes most of the week.

How do you measure an operations manager's performance?

Measure outcomes the role controls: utilization within target by department, percentage of billable time logged within 48 hours, invoices out by the fifth business day, unbilled work under threshold and margin per client reported by the tenth of the month. Review at 30, 60 and 90 days, then quarterly.

What to do this week

You can do three things before you post the role.

1. Write down the three numbers you wish you had every Monday. Those are the first lines of the job description.
2. Pull the last three months of hours by client and compute margin on your five largest accounts. If that takes you more than an afternoon, you have found the role's first project.
3. Copy the template above, delete the duties that are not true for your agency and add the one that is: the thing that goes wrong every month that nobody owns.

If you want the operations manager's weekly view from day one, see how Verbial works.