In a home service business, the operations manager is in charge of the field: technicians and crews, the schedule, equipment and job quality. Each day they match people and trucks to the booked work, then fix what makes jobs run late or come back. Unlike a general manager, they don't own sales or the full profit and loss.
Operations Manager · Any home service business · Word (.docx) · No email needed.
Operations Manager job description template
Free to copy. Replace the highlighted fields, delete anything you don’t offer, and set your pay range before you post.
[Company name] · [City, State]
Operations Manager
[Full-time / part-time] · [Base pay range and pay period] · Reports to [general manager, chief operating officer or owner]
Position summary
As operations manager at [Company name], you'll run our field work from the first truck out to the last job closed. You'll plan crew and technician schedules, assign work by skill and location, keep equipment and supplies ready, and check job quality and safety. You'll report field results to [the general manager or owner] each week.
What you’ll do
Plan staffing and schedules so booked work has the right [technicians or crews] on the right days, busy season included.
Lead the [service, install or crew] supervisors and field leads: set expectations, coach, and handle discipline with [HR or the general manager].
Set routes and assignments with dispatch to cut drive time and keep jobs on schedule.
Keep trucks, equipment and supplies ready, and hold spending on parts, materials and repairs to the [operations budget].
Run the field safety program and check job quality through ride-alongs, site inspections and callback reviews.
Tell sales and the office how much capacity is open each week, so no job is promised before there's a crew for it.
A typical day
Review today's board with dispatch: who's out, which jobs are urgent, and where the gaps are.
Hold a short morning meeting with field leads on assignments and safety.
Visit job sites or ride along to check work and help crews clear problems.
Handle escalated customer issues about timing, quality or property damage.
Check supply levels and truck and equipment repairs, and order what's needed.
Close the day with completed jobs, overtime and tomorrow's schedule.
What you need
[5+] years in field service or crew operations, including [2+] years supervising technicians, crews or field leads.
Has built and run daily schedules in [field service or scheduling software].
Has run safety meetings and stopped unsafe work on site.
Uses labor, utilization and callback numbers to change schedules or coaching within the week.
Bachelor's degree in business, operations management or a related field, or equivalent experience.
Nice to have
Hands-on field experience in [your trade] or another home service trade.
Experience managing a fleet, equipment maintenance or a parts inventory.
Has cut drive time or overtime through better routing or scheduling.
Physical requirements
Frequent job site visits: standing, walking on uneven ground, climbing ladders, and working in heat, cold or tight spaces [as your work requires].
Lifting up to [25] pounds during inspections or when helping a crew.
With or without reasonable accommodation.
Schedule and work environment
Time split between [office location] and crews out in [your service area].
Weekday hours of [days and times], with [early starts, on-call duty and extra hours] in [peak season].
Pay and benefits
Base pay: [range and hourly or salary basis]. Additional pay: [overtime, bonus or incentive terms, or none].
Benefits: [health, dental, vision, retirement, paid time off, and when eligibility starts].
How to apply
Apply at [application link]. Our process is [phone interview, in-person interview, and next steps]. Contact [hiring contact] if you need an accommodation during the application process.
How the operations manager role changes by industry
Every operations manager matches people and equipment to the booked work. What changes by trade is the unit being scheduled: a technician on a service call, a crew on a multi-day job, a route of recurring stops, or a truck hauling loads. Each industry's Role Blueprint is built around that unit and the numbers that go with it.
Go over these with your field leads every week, and base each target on the jobs your crews finished last season.
Share of booked jobs completed the day they were scheduled: [your target].
Callbacks or rework visits per completed job: [your target].
Billable hours as a share of paid field hours: [your target].
Customer rating after the job: [your target].
Safety incidents and equipment downtime: [your target].
Before you hire an operations manager
Name what they'll run. Say how many technicians, crews or trucks the role oversees and whether it covers service, installs or both. Running a few crews and running a full service department are different jobs.
Walk them through a bad morning. Give finalists a real schedule with a crew lead out sick, a truck in the shop and an urgent job. Ask what they'd move, who they'd call first and what they'd tell customers.
Check their field credibility. Crews follow managers who know the work. Ask which jobs they've done themselves, and if you can, have them ride along with a crew before you make an offer.
Ask how they fixed a callback problem. Look for someone who traced callbacks to a cause, such as one crew, a skipped step or a bad part, and changed the process instead of only sending a truck back.
When applications come in, Iris interviews applicants by phone using your requirements. Your team reviews the answers and decides who to meet.
Operations Manager interview questions
Two of the 10 questions in our operations manager interview guide, and what a strong answer sounds like.
Situational · Running the day
It's mid-morning. A crew finishes early on one side of town, while across town a technician is running [two hours] behind with three calls left, one of them a new customer who took time off work. What do you move?
A strong answer: Checks whether the early crew has the skills and parts for the late calls, moves the new customer's job to them if so, has dispatch call every moved customer before their window passes, and later finds out why the technician fell behind, such as a job booked too short.
Behavioral · Capacity planning
Tell me about a time sales booked more work than your crews could handle. What did you do, and what changed afterward?
A strong answer: Saw the gap early, told sales and the owner with numbers, rebuilt the schedule so the most urgent work came first, had customers called before the day, and agreed a lasting change with sales, such as a weekly capacity number or set lead times. Can say what happened next.
O*NET lists "Operations Manager" as a job title in the same occupation as general managers, but at a home service company the role is narrower. The operations manager owns how the field performs: who goes where, whether the work was done right, and whether crews worked safely.
How is an operations manager different from a production manager?
Roofing, remodeling and other project trades may have a production manager who takes signed jobs through to completion. An operations manager usually has a wider field role that can take in service, maintenance, dispatch, the fleet and the warehouse. Where a company has both, operations usually sits above production.
What is the median pay for an operations manager?
Operations managers fall in the BLS group for general and operations managers, whose U.S. median was $50.85 an hour, or $105,770 a year, in May 2025. The group spans all industries and includes general managers, so local job postings are the better guide to pay for a home service operations manager.
When is it time to hire an operations manager?
When the owner or general manager spends most days on the schedule and job problems instead of sales, hiring and the numbers. Rising callbacks, jobs running late and equipment nobody owns are other signs.
What should an operations manager job description include?
The teams the role runs and how many technicians or crews that means, who it reports to, the scheduling software, the service area, on-call duty and peak-season hours, and what the bonus is tied to.
Is the HireBus Role Blueprint free?
It is. The operations manager template above is free to copy, and the Word version needs no sign-up. The industry list on this page has a version for each trade.
HireBus Role Blueprints: 66 industry versions of the operations manager job description, reviewed for publication on October 20, 2026.
The BLS group for operations managers also includes general managers, and it spans every industry, not just home services. General and operations managers share one O*NET occupation: 3,599,000 were employed in 2025, and O*NET rates growth as faster than average (5% to 6%), with about 285,000 job openings a year, on average, from 2025 to 2035.
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