I work as a Fractional Chief of Staff and Operations Lead for founder-led teams.

I help leadership translate strategy into execution, reduce chaos, and build operating rhythm.
Most of my work sits inside the Founder’s Office.

Over the last 15+ years, I’ve supported founders, CXOs, and leadership teams across education, consulting, IT services, life sciences staffing, and social-impact organisations.

My work typically starts when:
- Founders are overloaded with decisions and follow-ups
- Strategy exists, but execution keeps slipping
- Teams are growing faster than systems

What I do in practice:
- Act as an extension of the Founder’s Office
- Set execution cadence, governance rhythms, and review systems
- Stabilize cross-functional operations across people, process, and tools
- Implement CRM, workflows, SOPs, and accountability structures

I work best with:
- Growth-stage startups (10–150 employees)
- Founder-led teams scaling operations or delivery
- Remote or hybrid environments

📍 Pune | Open to global remote teams

Mugdha Y K

My first "operations role" had no office.
It had dusty roads, three languages I didn't speak fluently, and
a mandate to coordinate livelihood programs across crafts and agriculture.

No CRM.
No project management tool.
No clear reporting structure.

Just communities, conflicting stakeholders, and outcomes that mattered to real people's lives.

I didn't know it then.
But that was the best operations training I ever received.

Before that, I was an architect. Heritage researcher. Design school faculty.
Every role, completely different context.

Same ask every single time:
Take something complex, ambiguous work and create enough structure that it can move forward.

A lot of the problems I see now have a different shape...
But an identical root cause.
→ Growth had outpaced the structure holding it together.

That's the only problem I've ever really solved.
Across five sectors. Fifteen years. Hundreds of stakeholders.

Because the right system doesn't manage chaos.
It removes the conditions that create it.

Btw, what's the most unexpected place you've learned your work from?

Mugdha Yelkar

Founder’s Office & Operations | Helping founders remove sales & marketing bottlenecks and build systems that convert without team burnout.

Two weeks left in Q1.
And most scaling firms are about to do the same thing they did in January.
Call it a reset. Start fresh. Set new priorities.

Then spend the first three weeks of April figuring out why execution still feels harder than it should.

I've seen this cycle enough times to know, the problem isn't the team.
It's never the team.

It's that nobody stopped to fix the structural thing before the new quarter started.

So in this newsletter I am sharing what you can do before March 31st for better results and easier scaling!

#systemthinking #scale #quarter2 #q2

View newsletter: Systems that Sell: Clarity90

Mid-March hits differently when you're running a scaling firm. Q1 isn't over but it's close enough that you can see exactly how it's going to end. And

Open article: Q1 Isn't Over. But It's Already Telling You How Q2 Will Go. by Mugdha Yelkar • 3 min read

Q1 Isn't Over. But It's Already Telling You How Q2 Will Go.

The operators I've seen struggle in their first 90 days weren't bad at their jobs.

They were good at their jobs, too early. 
They fixed before they understood. 
They optimised before they had trust. 
They moved fast in an environment that needed them to first move carefully.

The best thing you can do in a new scaling firm isn't to show what you know.

It's to show that you know how to read a room before you rearrange it.

In this newsletter we learn exactly that!

Most 30-60-90 plans look the same. Day 1–30: Learn the business. Day 31–60: Start contributing. Day 61–90: Drive impact. Sounds clean. Completely usel

Open article: The 30-60-90 Nobody Handed Me When I Joined a Scaling Firm by Mugdha Yelkar • 3 min read

The 30-60-90 Nobody Handed Me When I Joined a Scaling Firm

I've sat in multiple leadership meetings as an outsider. 
I never speak in the first one. I don't need to.

In my first week with any new client, I ask for one thing:
"Let me sit in your next leadership meeting."

No agenda. No questions. No input from me. Just 45 minutes of watching.
And every single time, I leave that room knowing exactly where the org is breaking.

Here's what I'm actually watching for:

01. Who speaks and who goes silent when things get uncomfortable. 
The silence tells me more than the words.

02. Whether decisions get made or deferred. 
"Let's take this offline" said 4 times in one meeting = nothing is actually getting decided anywhere.

03. How people react when a number is bad. 
Do they problem-solve? Or do they explain? One of these moves the company forward.

04. Whether the same topics come up that came up last week. 
Recurring agenda items aren't discussion points. They're unresolved decisions wearing a disguise.

05. Who's performing vs. who's actually reporting. 
You can see it in the way they talk, the body language, and the eye contact. 

I've never once walked into an engagement where the real problem was what the founder described in the brief.
The brief is never just the problem. 

Think about your last leadership meeting. Was it a decision room or an update room?

We were three weeks in when she said it.
"I haven't taken a full weekend off in two years."
She wasn't complaining. She said it like it was just a fact of running a business.

I'd heard it before. Different founder, different industry, same sentence.

So I asked her to do something uncomfortable.
"For the next five days, log every decision that comes to you."
Big, small, doesn't matter. Every single one.

She came back with good 35-37 decisions in one week.
Hiring approvals. Client email responses. Tool subscriptions. Content sign-offs. Vendor calls. Invoice checks.

37 decisions that lived nowhere except inside her head.
Not because her team wasn't capable.
Because nobody had ever built the system that caught them before they reached her.

Here's what we did and it wasn't complicated:
→ We defined a decision boundary.
Under a certain threshold of risk or cost- the team decides. Full stop. 
No escalation, no approval, no Slack message to founder at 9pm.

→ We built one weekly async check-in.
Not a meeting. A shared doc updated every Monday. Status, blockers, decisions made. 
She reads it in 10 minutes and stays in the loop without being in the room.

→ We killed three recurring meetings.
They weren't driving decisions. 
They were driving the feeling of alignment. There's a difference.

→ We documented the 10 decisions she made most often.
Turned each one into a simple criteria. 
Now her team makes them- using her judgment, without needing her present.

Three weeks later, she saved her time and sanity. 
Just by stopping the unconscious tax that founder dependency puts on every single day.

The business didn't slow down.
It quietly started running without her in every room.

Have you ever felt this way?

The most expensive question you're not asking your ops team.
I've walked into 7+ organisations as an ops strategist or consultant.

And in the first week, I ask every head of the team one question:
"What do you spend the most time on that feels like it shouldn't be your job?"

The room always goes quiet for a second. Then someone says it.
And what comes out of that conversation has never once been what the founder expected.

- The weekly report that takes 3-4 hours because the three tools don't talk to each other. 
- The follow-up emails were sent manually because nobody built the trigger. 
- The onboarding/delivery doc that gets recreated from scratch every. single. time

Small things that are running every week. 
Draining the people you most need thinking, not doing.

The founder didn't know →  because nobody told them. 
The team didn't say → because it felt like complaining.

That silence? That's where inefficiency lives.

Here's what I've learned after years of doing this:
Your team knows exactly where the system is broken. They're just waiting for someone to ask.
So ask.

This month, when you are on a 1:1 call, just ask without any agenda, 
"What are you doing that feels like it shouldn't be your job?"

The answer will tell you more about your org's ops health than any audit will.

Would you give this a try?

A while ago, I worked with a founder who was convinced they had a lead problem.

What else can it be, when: 
Marketing was doing amazing, Inbound was steady, and the pipeline looked full.

But revenue wasn’t moving.

At first glance, it didn’t make sense to be honest.  

The leads were real. The interest was genuine. The team was working hard.

What we found instead was something quieter.
- Follow-ups were inconsistent.
- Handoffs between sales and site visits were fuzzy.
- No one really owned what happened after the first conversation.

Leads weren’t dropping off because people said no.
They were dropping off because no one was clearly responsible for the next step.

Once ownership and follow-up rhythm were fixed, conversions improved, without spending another rupee on lead gen.

That experience stayed with me.

Most businesses don’t lack demand.
They lack momentum.

If leads are coming in but revenue feels stuck, it’s worth asking:
At what stage do your leads usually go quiet?

Burnout isn't caused by a heavy workload.

It's when a laptop fan starts screaming, it’s rarely because of the one app you’re using. 
Because of the 47 tabs open in the background.

And that some tough "Background Processing." 

In high-growth companies, your team is the hardware.
But "Unclear Ownership" is the malware.

When a project lacks a System of Record, it never truly "closes" in your team's mind. 

It stays open as a mental tab:
- Did that invoice actually go out?
- Who was supposed to update the CRM after that call?
- Is the client waiting for me, or am I waiting for them?

This isn't just "stress." It's Cognitive Friction. 

When your people spend 30% of their mental energy just trying to remember what’s pending. 
They only have 70% left to actually execute. 

You’re paying for 100% of their talent but losing 30% to "System Noise."

And while, scaling isn't about working harder. 
It's about Memory Offloading. 
A durable system is a "Command + Q" for the brain. 

So, if your team looks exhausted, don’t buy them a wellness app. 
Audit your Handoffs. 
One clear owner and one source of truth. 

Look at your current to-do list today.
How many "mental tabs" are you currently running?

(5 = Total Zen. 15 = My internal fan is screaming.) 👇

Sales closed it. 
Delivery inherited it. 
Nobody transferred the context in between.

That's not a communication failure. That's a missing system.

And it plays out the same way in every scaling firm.
Different teams, different industry, identical tension.

This newsletter breaks down exactly where the handoff breaks and what fixing it actually looks like.

Every scaling firm I've worked with has a version of this story. Sales closes a deal. Delivery scrambles. Something slips. Client escalates. Sales get

Open article: 
Why Your Sales and Delivery Teams Are Always at War by Mugdha Yelkar • 3 min read

Why Your Sales and Delivery Teams Are Always at War

You’re paying for 100% of your team’s talent, 
But losing 30% to "Context Drops."

IT's when the Sales team had spent weeks building trust.
The Delivery team spent 5 minutes destroying it by asking questions that had already been answered.

This is the "Game of Telephone".

Read to know more about it and the exact  breakdown of "Client Context Bridge" I implemented to fix this.

I feel like I'm running a relay race where everyone is dropping the baton. That’s what a founder told me three weeks ago. Their agency was growing fas

Open article: The "Game of Telephone" in Handoffs by Mugdha Yelkar • 2 min read

German Teacher

Institute of Social Studies Trust (ISST)

Qualitative Research on Self-Help groups in India, with a special focus on Guna, Madhya Pradesh

Consultant

Consultant under the project 'Qualitative study on  the sustainability of SHG's under the National Rural Livelihoods Mission (NRLM)'

Data Collection Consultant 

Sahapedia.org

Sahapedia-UNESCO fellow

T.I.M.E. (Triumphant Institute of Managment Education)

Guest Faculty

Ford Motor Company

Lead the implementation of Engineering changes and Change Management at Ford's Sanand Engine Plant. Also Lead the Implementation of Quality Operating System(Q.O.S) for MP&L (Material planning and Logistics) dept. in a Greenfield project site.Internal Auditor Cerification by TUV SUD for ISO 9001-2008 Audit.

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