The Day I Learned What Operators Actually Do
Rio de Janeiro, 2014. We were four months into production on a national Adidas football campaign ahead of the World Cup. A week in Brazil to find the right pitch. Grassroots players flown in from across the world. Celebrities. Drones. A lighting rig with an interactive element that had taken weeks to design. Dolly tracks running the length of a football field. A six-figure budget and a storyboard we were genuinely proud of.
Then, about an hour before we were meant to shoot, the brand pulled 70% of our time on the pitch.
Not some of it. Seventy percent.
Every shot we’d planned, every setup, every carefully lit scene we’d spent months building toward, was gone. We had what felt like nothing. Two hours, maybe three if we pushed it, to capture a campaign that was supposed to fill twelve.
I didn’t call a meeting. There wasn’t time. The decision happened in about thirty seconds: get every camera off every tripod, put them in the hands of anyone on set who knew which end to point at the subject, take the lights off the stands, go mobile, get on the pitch, and shoot everything. The storyboard was dead. We were making a different film now.
The campaign got a million views in its first two days online.
I’ve thought about that day a lot since moving into the world of operational advisory. What I’ve come to believe is that directing taught me the most important thing about running operations inside a growth-stage business, and it has nothing to do with leadership theory or management frameworks.
It’s this: the plan is not the job. Executing under the conditions you actually face is the job.
Every fund principal I’ve spoken to in the GCC talks about operators. They want operators in their portfolio companies. People who can execute. What they describe, when you press them, is usually someone with a strong CV, sector experience, and good judgment. All of those things matter. But none of them tell you how someone behaves when the pitch changes an hour before the shoot.
That’s the thing film sets teach you that almost nothing else does. A shoot is a closed system with a fixed budget, a fixed number of hours, a cast with call times, and light that moves whether you’re ready or not. Every decision is a tradeoff made in real time against a hard constraint. You cannot defer. You cannot escalate. You cannot wait for more information. The day is happening and you are either capturing it or you’re not.
That’s not unlike what an operator faces inside a company that has just taken on growth capital and is now expected to perform against a plan built on assumptions that haven’t fully met reality yet. The market is different than modelled. The hire took longer than expected. The product isn’t quite where it needs to be. The investor is asking questions. The plan, the beautiful plan, is already partially wrong.
What matters in that moment isn’t strategic intelligence. It’s the ability to read what’s actually in front of you, make a fast call with incomplete information, and keep the team moving in the same direction while you do it.
I am not a trained operator in the traditional sense. My background is in film, production, and brand strategy. When I co-founded 47X Group, I was the marketer in the room, not the finance person or the seasoned operator. I’ve been honest about that from the start.
But what I’ve noticed, working alongside people who are exceptional operators, is that the skills that actually predict performance in the field are much closer to production than to corporate management. Reading a room. Holding a team together under pressure. Knowing which part of the plan to kill and which to protect. Making the call before the moment passes.
The GCC is full of well-funded companies executing against plans that were built in a different set of conditions. The operators who thrive in those environments aren’t the ones with the most polished frameworks. They’re the ones who can get the cameras off the tripods and onto the pitch before the light goes.
