The Optiml
Operating System+
A 90-day backbone that turns the team across Zürich, Munich and London into one auditable operating rhythm. Built the way you build REDI: structured inputs, clear decisions, a clean audit trail.
Built from public sources, before we've spoken. This is the operating system I would install at Optiml in one quarter, and the numbers I would run it on. Where I have it wrong, that is the conversation I want.
What this role is really for.
Four reads on the operating reality, before the plan. Each one shaped how I scoped the 90 days.
A backbone, not an admin seat.
The brief says it twice: own company-wide operations, not office management. The job is to translate the founders' vision into operating rhythm, and to give the org clarity, accountability and speed. I scoped this as a systems-builder role from the first line.
Runway is bought. Now build the engine.
The €8M Seed, co-led by KOMPAS and Planet A with BitStone, The Bau Ventures and Innovation Endeavors, extended the operational horizon. The next 18 months turn that capital into a Series-A-ready operating system. That is what an Ops hire is for at this exact stage.
Three entities, one company.
Zürich HQ, plus satellites in Munich and London, means CH / DE / UK legal, payroll and employment surface. The work is making three jurisdictions feel like one org: shared comp logic, shared cadence, shared information, clean compliance under FADP and GDPR.
Founder bandwidth is the scarce asset.
Petkov, Campos and Dehnert carry product, tech and commercial. Every hour they spend on cadence and coordination is an hour off the product. The Head of Ops hands that focus back by owning OKRs, hiring ops, reporting and board prep.
The first 90 days.
Diagnose, install, scale. Each deliverable maps to one of the six Year-1 objectives in the brief.
- Operating audit: map every recurring meeting, decision and report. Cut the duplicates. OBJ 4
- Stand up one source of truth in Notion: company wiki, decision log, live org map. OBJ 1·4
- Lock the 12 board metrics and their definitions with the Fractional Head of Finance. OBJ 2·5
- 1:1 with every team lead. Surface the three bottlenecks slowing delivery. OBJ 4
- Launch the rhythm: weekly ops review, monthly business review, quarterly OKR and board cycle. OBJ 1·2
- Run the first full OKR cascade: company → function → team, one page each. OBJ 2
- Ship comp framework v1: role leveling and salary bands across CH / DE / UK. OBJ 3
- Set the performance cycle: light, quarterly, tied to OKRs not theatre. OBJ 3
- Automate reporting: one dashboard, refreshed weekly, no hand-built decks. OBJ 2·5
- Build the hiring engine: scorecards, pipeline, onboarding that holds past 50 people. OBJ 3
- Close governance gaps across entities: contracts, payroll, data residency. OBJ 4
- Build the Series-A operations data room: 18 months of clean metrics, one board pack that runs itself. OBJ 5
The operating rhythm.
One heartbeat for the whole company. Decisions surface fast, owners are named, nothing waits for a meeting that is two weeks out.
Async standup
One thread in Slack. Yesterday, today, blockers. No meeting. Blockers surface in under a day.
Ops review
The live metrics, the open risks, the decisions due. One owner per line. We leave with actions, not notes.
Business review
Function leads present against OKRs. Burn versus plan. What we will stop, start, keep next month.
Reset & board
New OKRs, board pack, comp and performance checkpoint. The quarter closes on one page everyone trusts.
One goal, cascaded.
An illustration, not a prescription. How a single company objective reaches a team without losing its edge.
The numbers the board sees.
Twelve, no more. Same definitions every quarter. The four that set the Series-A clock up top, the supporting cast below.
These are my twelve. For a company selling decision intelligence to institutions, I would weight burn multiple and net retention over raw logo count. Which two would you swap?
The readiness cockpit.
Your product turns messy inputs into one auditable decision. So does this. Seven workstreams, each with an owner and an exit metric. Apply the 90-day plan and watch Series-A readiness move.
Three jurisdictions, one audit trail.
The administrative and legal surface across entities. Owned with the Fractional Head of Finance and external providers.
I do not own the bookkeeping. I own the system and the audit trail. The Fractional Head of Finance keeps the ledger. External providers run accounting, payroll and legal. My job is one comp logic across three countries, clean compliance, and a board pack the auditors never argue with.
Why me.
No adjectives. Three links and two sentences.
I build the connective tissue. At Decathlon Switzerland I run activations and CRM: cross-functional systems, data and cadence at retail scale. Before that I co-founded a B2B / B2G SaaS company from zero, ran revenue as a fractional CRO, and scaled commercial operations across eight markets. EMBA, EDHEC, top of class. EU citizen, already in Zürich.