Operational infrastructure

Build the systems your startup can't afford to hire for right now

Early-stage founders move fast, and systems rarely keep up. Information ends up in multiple places. Processes live in people's heads. New team members struggle to find what they need. Orbit builds the operational foundation that makes your company run like a serious organisation. In four weeks, at a fixed price.

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Engagement
Fixed scope
Delivery
Four weeks
Focus
Early-stage founders
The thesis

Why Orbit exists

Between raising and hiring, there's a gap of months, sometimes years, where operational chaos compounds quietly. A COO comes at month twelve. A chief of staff at month eighteen. Until then, the cost is invisible — until you try to scale.

That gap is widening. AI-assisted building means small teams are shipping production-grade products faster than ever, but internal systems aren't keeping pace. Startups raising $4–6 million with fewer than five employees are managing enterprise-scale workloads on pre-seed level infrastructure. The external product looks serious. The inside often doesn't match.

The cost of operational chaos

You raised the round.
The chaos came with it.

Post-raise, the operational load multiplies faster than headcount. The cost is invisible until you try to scale.

i.

No single source of truth

Information lives across Slack, email, Notion, and shared drives that are hard to keep on top of. Finding what you need takes longer than it should.

ii.

Processes in people's heads

Onboarding depends on who's available. Recurring tasks get done differently every time. One person leaves and institutional knowledge walks out with them.

iii.

Delegation paralysis

You know you should hand things off. Without documented processes or clear ownership structures, delegation creates more work than it removes.

iv.

Invisible to your own team

No dashboard. No shared view of what matters. Every meeting starts with ten minutes of status updates that should have been visible before anyone sat down.

v.

Onboarding costs you weeks

Each new hire needs someone senior to hold their hand through basics that should be documented. Your time goes to orientation, not building.

vi.

Looking unready to investors

When a board member asks a simple operational question and it takes three days to answer, the competence signal is wrong. The chaos is showing.

The operating model

Gravitational hierarchy

The founder's attention is the scarcest resource in any early-stage company. Orbit builds the infrastructure layer that lets everything else run without pulling you in.

01

Centre: the founder

Product decisions, fundraising, hiring, strategy. The work that only you can do and where your attention compounds.

02

Infrastructure: the build

Shared drive architecture, operational dashboards, documented SOPs, visual process guides. Built to institutional standard. Delivered in four weeks.

03

Outer field: the team

A team that can find what they need, follow documented processes, onboard without hand-holding, and operate without pulling the founder in for basics.

Cleo Lowe
Founder, Orbit Ops
View LinkedIn
Behind the scenes

Built in the room
where it actually happens.

I have eight years of C-suite support, from founder-led startups to the right hand of a COO at one of the world's largest alternative asset managers. I'm passionate about building with AI as a creative tool, and I love helping startups get off the ground — I'm building my own venture here for some of the same reasons you are.

The Foundation Sprint comes naturally to me. I've seen how to execute this work at scale and don't need hand-holding to deliver it for a small team. This isn't a consultant's report. Or a VA's task list. This is real infrastructure, built correctly and handed over.

Background
EA to COO · Global finance
Startup experience
Fintech · Social impact
C-suite support
8 years across 3 organisations
Based
London, United Kingdom
Scope of engagement

The Foundation Sprint

The engagement

Four weeks. Fixed scope. Yours to keep.

The Foundation Sprint is a single, fixed-scope project. Orbit spends four weeks building the operational infrastructure your company needs and hands it over. No ongoing dependency. No retainer required. A permanent foundation your team actually uses.

Everything is built async and delivered in structured phases.

Week one
Discovery and architecture


Weeks two and three
The build


Week four
Documentation, handover, and a live walkthrough with your team

Shared drive architecture

A structured, logical information system built around how your team actually works. Everything findable. Every folder named and organised with intent. No more hunting.

Operational dashboards

A single view of what matters, built for your tools, your team, and your cadence. Status visible without a meeting. Progress tracked without chasing.

Standard operating procedures

Core recurring processes documented clearly. Written, tested, and formatted so that any team member can follow them, not just the person who created them.

Visual process guides

Complex workflows turned into clear, scannable visual documents. Onboarding, approvals, handovers. Legible at a glance rather than buried in a paragraph.

Team handover and training

A structured walkthrough of everything built, with your team present. Not just a delivery. A handover designed to make the system stick from day one.

Optional: monthly maintenance

For founders who want the infrastructure kept current as the company evolves. A lightweight async retainer to refine, update, and extend the foundation as you grow. Scoped separately.

Investment

One service. Fixed price.
No hourly billing.

Founding rate
The Foundation Sprint
Available to the first two clients only, in exchange for a testimonial. Save £1,000 on the standard rate.
£2,500
one-time project fee
  • Shared drive architecture
  • Operational dashboards
  • Core SOPs documented
  • Visual process guides
  • Team handover and walkthrough
  • Four-week fixed delivery
Apply for founding rate

What you walk away with

At the end of four weeks, your company has a shared drive your team can navigate, dashboards that surface what matters, processes that are documented and repeatable, and a structure that scales with you. You own all of it. No ongoing dependency on Orbit unless you want it.

Orbit works with a small number of clients at a time. The founding rate is available to the next two clients only.

Next step

Ready to build something
that actually holds?

A twenty-minute conversation about where your systems are breaking down and what a Foundation Sprint would actually build for your company. No pitch. No pressure. An honest assessment of whether Orbit is the right fit.

Start the conversation →