Headway Ops is a distributed team of fractional operators. We run the back office so founders can stay on the work only they can do.
Most small teams run on heroics — someone remembers everything, someone handles the edge cases, someone is permanently in the weeds. We replace that person with a system. Clear inputs, predictable outputs, documented exceptions. Built on tools your team already uses: Airtable, n8n, Notion, Stripe, Zapier, whatever fits.
The job of a dashboard is to make the next decision obvious. We build unified reporting across your real data sources — payments, product usage, community — with anomaly flags and short written summaries. Your 9am review becomes three minutes, not forty.
The work that only lives in one person's head isn't a system — it's a liability. We turn tacit knowledge into written, testable operating procedures. Your next hire onboards faster. Your current team takes real holidays.
Some companies need an operator on retainer, not a full-time hire. We embed with your team on a weekly cadence, run the rituals that keep the business moving, and hand off anything that can be automated or delegated.
We work embedded, not external. A Headway engagement starts with a one-week operations audit — shadowing your week, mapping the real workflows, identifying what's brittle. Then we either fix the top three problems ourselves or hand you a tight plan to fix them in-house. We don't build complexity you don't need, and we'd rather hand work back to your team than hold onto it. Most engagements run 4–12 weeks; some become ongoing retainers when the fit is right.
Headway Ops was founded by Judah Doughty in 2024 as the professional home for a bench of experienced fractional operators. We don't post job openings. We work together when the work calls for it, and we stay small on purpose.
Judah runs operations at London Writers' Salon, a 30,000-member creative community, where he's led the payment infrastructure migration, built the AI-assisted onboarding system, and owns the operator stack end-to-end. Before ops, he spent six years as a stage manager — which turns out to be the same job with different vocabulary.
A 30,000-member creative community.
Payment infrastructure migration. Outseta to Circle, 1,500 paying members, staged over two weeks with validation at every step. Zero member loss. Post-migration reconciliation script still runs every quarter.
An independent media operator.
AI-assisted onboarding built on n8n and Claude. Parses free-text signup responses, routes new members to pathways, drafts personal welcome messages with a human-review gate. 200+ members onboarded, zero complaints.
A theatre production.
Stage management for a four-department, eleven-week production cycle. Zero incidents across five performances. The system we built for cue calling and cross-department handoffs is still in use.
Email us at admin@headwayops.com
Or book a 30-minute call: meet.headwayops.com/discovery