In this episode of Founders, Future, host Jae Encarnacion sits down with Aaron Hovivian, Project Lead at The Collab Team, an operations powerhouse helping visionary entrepreneurs scale without crumbling under their own growth. Aaron shares his 11-year journey from fixing "redheaded stepchild" problems for clients like Pete Vargas and Pedro Adao to building a 22-person team that acts as a "scaffolding" for businesses on the hockey-stick climb. He reveals his unique retainer model (10K for 120 hours of ops firepower) and the "Gap Analyzer" tool that diagnoses team fractures—then dives in to fix them alongside founders, not just consult from the sidelines.
Aaron unpacks why slow, steady scaling beats explosive growth (hint: avoid the "black eye" of collapsed infrastructure) and how mastering the unsexy—like committing to one project management tool—saves visionaries from whiplash. He also shares hard-won lessons from migrating clients between CRMs, rolling out EOS systems, and why the best sales tactic is "grabbing a shovel" to solve a founder's ugliest ops problem for free. For entrepreneurs drowning in ideas, his closing advice is gold: "Choose your thing. Relentlessly pursue it. Don’t pivot until it’s baked—or you’ll leave your team with half-finished chaos."
