Operations Manager Role

Posted Monday, August 18, 2025

Thank you for your interest in WCG. The following is high-level information for our Operations Manager role. This is a U.S.-based, fully remote or in-office role.

A quick note on what Operations means at WCG. This is not a back-office or a data-reporting seat. Operations owns the health of the whole production machine, tax returns, tax plans, and financial statement delivery alike, and reports directly to the Firm Strategist rather than sitting under any one team. It is a firmwide role with firmwide reach.

Who Is WCG

WCG CPAs & Advisors isn't your typical CPA firm, and if you've spent any time in public accounting, you already know that's either a red flag or a relief. For the right person, it's the latter.

Headquartered in Colorado Springs with team members across the U.S. and in India, we're a methodically growing firm with 7 partners, over 90 full-time team members, and projected 2026 revenues of $12.7M, representing about 14% year-over-year growth. We grow because our model works, not because we say yes to everything.

We offer the depth of a mid-size firm with the focus and personality of a boutique. We play in specific sandboxes- small business owners in S Corps, Partnerships, and PCs; complex individual tax, and real estate investors, and we play in them very well. Real estate and rental activity planning alone represents over 40% of our advisory work and is our fastest-growing segment.

No billable hours. No six-minute increments. No stuffiness. We operate on a value-based, next-gen advisory model built around annual service offerings that combine tax return preparation, routine consultation, and strategic planning. A tax return, in our world, is the result of a year's worth of conversations, not a transaction.

If that sounds like the environment you've been looking for, keep reading.

Last updated- June 30, 2026

WCG Team Overviews

India Team

Our India team is not an outsourcing arrangement, and it is not a back office. They are WCG Associates who happen to work from our office in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Same systems, same clients, same standards, same expectations. Oh, and same cool people.

You will find our India Associates embedded across the teams above, mainly Tax Prep, Tax Support, and Accounting Services. They use the same tools as their U.S. counterparts (UltraTax, SurePrep, QuickBooks Online, Xero), correspond with U.S. clients directly, advance along the same career paths, and take part in the same Associate Reviews. Because the work is genuinely shared, an India Associate is part of the client conversation, not a step removed from it.

The team works mostly onsite and is led on the ground by our WCG India Global Services Director. One firm, two countries, one heartbeat.

As of June 30, 2026, we have 15 full-time WCG India Associates.

If you are applying from India, the India Team Differences section of each role spells out what is specific to the Ahmedabad office: onsite work, compensation in INR, core hours in IST, the Saturday schedule during peak season, and the credentials we accept.

Support Team

Everything starts and ends with our Support Team, and we mean that. Their mission is to make clients' lives better and to back up every other team at WCG. The Support Team runs in four lanes:

  • Client Support: Our frontline team handling phone calls, chats, texts, and general email inquiries. First impressions live here. The rest of the WCG team spends every day trying to live up to it.
  • Tax Support: Our largest segment and does the heavy lifting on both ends of the tax return process. They handle front-end data collection (IDP, which stands for Information and Data Processing... yeah, the name is a little stale, but the function is mission-critical) and back-end assembly using SurePrep. They also collect payments, obtain e-file authorizations via Canopy, and file about 75% of our tax return extensions.
  • Human Resources: Led by our dedicated HR Manager who ensures compliance, sure, but whose primary function is supporting the team with their needs from travel and IT to family leave, the firmwide calendar, and beyond.

Operations Team

Operations is a small team with firmwide reach, and it exists to keep the whole machine honest. It is not a back office, and it is not a report factory. Operations owns the health of production across every team, tax returns, tax plans, and financial statement delivery alike.

It is led by our Operations Manager, who reports to the Firm Strategist, with an Operations Specialist handling the heavy data build underneath. The Manager is the one who takes workflow and operational data, reads what it means, and turns it into a decision, a clear ask, and follow-through until the work moves.

In practice that looks like keeping work correctly staged, assigned, and current in Canopy, aligning Pods to one WCG standard as we grow, forecasting revenue and translating it into hiring needs so we staff ahead of the crisis instead of during it, leading engagement reassignment when people shift roles or Pods, and owning firmwide procedure alignment and the training that supports it.

Someone has to keep the trains running on time and spot the pileup before it happens. That is Operations.

Tax Prep Team

We use Thomson Reuters UltraTax in a dedicated hosted environment, paired with SurePrep (including 1040SCAN) for electronic binders and annotations.

For the 2025 tax year, our team will prepare approximately 6,100 tax returns, a clean 60/40 split between individual and business entity returns. Because our Tax team has a well-documented fondness for summers, we push hard to complete 65% of returns by April 15, leaving May through July open primarily for tax planning work.

For the 2026 tax year, we expect to prepare 7,500 tax returns with the split increasing on the 1040 side given our increasing presence with real estate investors and rental property owners.

Over 50 Tax team members make this happen, including our 15+ dedicated team members in India.

Rental Expert and Tax Strategy Pod

Real estate and advanced tax planning are core niches at WCG, so we built a team specifically for them rather than leaving it to generalists.

The RETS Pod works behind the scenes to support our primary tax Pods on the technical heavy lifting: initial asset setups, cost segregation studies (including fun 3115/481(a) adjustments), the short-term rental loophole, and Real Estate Professional Status (REPS) analysis.

We use a structured three-session process (Foundation, Exploration, and Execution) to map a client's full tax exposure and build an actionable strategy. We replace promoter math with real math, stress-testing every advanced strategy against what we call the 3-Legged Stool: a client's actual cash, effort, and risk tolerance.

2025 tax returns due in 2026 was our first time with the RETS Pod (fka, the rental expert pod). We had some bumps and bruises, and we have a lot of growing yet to do. Our ideal world is for all rental activities and related niche investments to be handled by the RETS Pod, leaving the remaining pieces of the tax return to be completed by other WCG tax accountants. Two exceptions: a real estate holding company that files a partnership return, and a super simple 1040 where the rental and investment activities are the main event. Those get handled tip to tail by the RETS Pod.

If real estate tax strategy is your thing, this is where WCG is investing. We currently have 5 team members in this pod and are aiming for 9-10 by the end of 2026 to support our fastest-growing client segment as we continue the evolution from the original Rental Expert Pod to the 2.0, or the RETS Pod.

AI Tax Prep Pod (Coming November 2026)

WCG is actively building an AI Tax Prep Pod for the 2027 tax season, focused on AI-assisted preparation of individual (1040) returns. The thesis is straightforward: AI tools have evolved into something good enough and fast enough that a small dedicated team using them well can produce high quality and high throughput. The procedures, playbook, and standards do not exist anywhere yet. We are building them from scratch.

The Pod will operate similar to the RETS Pod: a specialized team with its own workflow, its own quality standards, and a direct line into the broader Tax Team. Tax returns prepared by the Pod will be reviewed by experienced reviewers using our standard quality controls. AI does not replace the review function. It changes the preparation function.

We are hiring the Pod Lead now. Podmates will be added as the role and the tooling mature. If you want to be part of building something genuinely new in this profession, this is the time.

Accounting Services Team

At WCG, Accounting Services means Bookkeeping + Analysis, not just reconciliations. There's a meaningful difference, and our clients feel it in their financial reporting, real-time tax planning, and day-to-day decision-making.

Our 11-person team (including a small group in India) each works with 25-30 clients using QuickBooks Online, Xero, and REIHub exclusively. No desktop, no Freshbooks, no whatever whatever. We also use Reach Reporting to give business owners a visual, trend-based view of their financials. Because a graph tells a story that a spreadsheet sometimes can't.

On cadence, we intentionally skip quarterly. Monthly, bi-monthly, and quad-monthly schedules let us smooth the workflow across the year so our team isn't buried in crazy Aprils, Julys, and Octobers. It's a small structural decision that makes a big difference for both the team and the client.

New for 2026, we also run a lighter, AI-assisted tier for the engagement that does not need full Bookkeeping + Analysis but still needs clean, tax-return-ready numbers. Think of it as bookkeeping-lite: AI-driven categorization and bank reconciliation that get the books accurate enough to prepare a solid tax return, without the periodic reporting, analysis, and consultation of the full-service tier. It runs on its own separate platform, not in QuickBooks Online or Xero, and it is built for the straightforward client who mostly needs good data at tax time rather than ongoing financial statements.

Accounting Services also handles sales and use tax filings and personal property tax. Clean, focused, genuinely valuable work.

Payroll Processing Team

WCG has processed payroll for over 800 small businesses for years. We're proud of that. But in summer 2026, we're making a deliberate shift, transitioning all payroll clients to ADP or Paychex for client-direct processing.

This isn't a retreat, it's a reset with intention. Payroll processing, done right, demands its own infrastructure, attention, and resources. By stepping back from it, we're doubling down on what we do best: high-level advisory, tax strategy, and the consultative work that actually moves the needle for our clients.

WCG is getting sharper on purpose. Read our Reset With Intention webpage for more information on our 2026 initiatives.

Business Development Team

Our 6-person Biz Dev team is the engine behind WCG's growth, specifically our advisory segment as opposed to tax-only engagements (we call those TOEs). They draft proposals, re-paper existing engagements, handle corporate governance matters like entity formations and S Corp elections, and own the onboarding process from first inquiry to fully engaged client.

The Biz Dev team works hand-in-hand with our Client Acquisition Team (the CAT) to make sure every prospect gets a thoughtful, human experience as they transition into a WCG engagement.

This isn't a sales team. Prospects come to us primarily through our website, content, and referrals. We average 6-7 inquiries per day, and 2 out of 3 are from high income earners who want tax reduction strategies through short-term rentals and other niche assets.

The Biz Dev team's job is to listen well, match the right engagement to the right client, and make WCG easy to say yes to.

Locations

In addition to over 60 remote team members, our physical footprint includes:

  • Headquarters: 2393 Flying Horse Club Drive, Colorado Springs, CO 80921
  • South Dakota: 300 North Main Street, Mitchell, SD 57301
  • Wyoming: 920 E Sheridan Street Suite B, Laramie, WY 82072
  • India: Awfis World Centre, Ashram Road, Ahmedabad, Gujarat

Operations Manager Intro

Most people who are great at this did not set out to run a firm’s operations. You started in some other seat, noticed the thing that kept breaking, fixed it, and kept raising your hand until keeping everyone on time somehow became yours to own. If that is roughly how your career has gone, and the chaos energized you more than it wore you down, keep reading.

This is the person who takes our workflow and operational data, reads what it actually means, and turns it into a decision and a clear ask, then follows through until the work moves. You will not be buried in the spreadsheets, though: your Operations Specialist handles the heavy data build, so your work is judgment, communication, and holding the line across every Pod. This is not a churn-and-burn coordinator seat, because WCG runs on a value-based advisory model and a Pod structure, and the whole machine only works when someone owns how it runs, tip to tail, which means aligning Pods to one standard, planning ahead so we hire before the crisis instead of during it, and keeping work from quietly going stale. You report to our Firm Strategist.

Is This You?

This role is a strong fit if you are…

  • Wired for order. You are energized by bringing order to chaos across a whole firm, not just one team or one Pod.
  • A translator, not a reporter. You take raw operational data and turn it into a decision and a clear recommendation, not just another dashboard.
  • Comfortable holding the line. You can hold people accountable, including Pod leaders and, at times, Partners. At WCG the boss never has to say they are the boss. Your authority comes from being right and being backed, not from a title.
  • Present, even from a distance. You build relationships and earn buy-in through consistency, visibility, and following through on what you said you would do.
  • A builder at heart. You like writing procedures, standardizing how teams work, and helping people understand the why behind their piece of the process.
  • Playing the long game. You want a role with a real path into leadership, not a lateral seat that trades one logo for another.

A quick reality check…

A meaningful part of this role is enforcing standards and delivering accountability, which will not win you popularity contests. You win people over with sincerity, not with insincere niceness. You are also operating across a distributed firm, most of it remote, with WCG leadership based in Colorado Springs, so your presence has to be intentional wherever you sit. Being easy to ignore is the failure mode.

Tax season is when this role is under the most load. That is exactly when the machine strains and accountability matters most, so it is the stretch where you are most needed and most visible, and stepping back when things get loud is not an option. The weeks are long in the spring and fall, with much lighter summers as the trade. The Hours section below has the specifics.

This is a build, not a turnkey seat. You are stepping into a function we are still growing, so early on you will spend real time untangling work that has been spinning without a clear owner. The authority that comes with the role is earned, not handed to you on day one, and progress here is measured over seasons rather than weeks. WCG also runs on Pods, not a shared work pool, and we only behave like a pool in the last week of tax season when everyone grabs a bucket. If a pool model is all you have known, this is a different operating philosophy and you need to believe in it.

Operations Manager Basics

Applicants Must

  • Have experience inside a public accounting firm, ideally in an operations, workflow, or production-management capacity.
  • Bring a track record of building and standardizing repeatable procedures across teams, then driving real adoption. Writing the procedure is the easy part. Making it stick is the hard one.
  • Be comfortable living in spreadsheets and Google Sheets, reading dashboards, and building clean task-tracking and KPI views. This is a data-informed role, not a data-analyst role. The heavy data engineering, the pivot tables, the query functions, the raw exports, is handled by your Operations Specialist who reports to you. Your job is to take that data, interpret it, and turn it into decisions and accountability. The bar is judgment and communication.
  • Be organized and direct, and hold people accountable without waiting to be asked twice.
  • Be comfortable with an advisory model built on annual engagements, planning, and consultation, and with a Pod structure rather than a shared work pool. Pods have their unique challenges and benefits, and WCG is a Pod system firm (sidebar, we were Pods, went to a pool and now we are back to Pods… for good).
  • Embrace AI for research, email smoothing, reporting, and automation. WCG is going full-tilt on AI, and Operations is part of that.
  • Want to own and build a function, not just maintain one. The role rewards initiative and forward planning, not waiting for a task list.
  • Have at least a Bachelor’s degree.

Nice To Haves

  • A background preparing tax returns and looking for a professional left turn works well here too.
  • Experience turning operational and financial data into forecasting and staffing plans.
  • Comfort building light dashboards and reporting on your own when needed.

Compensation

$110,000 to $128,000 total compensation, depending on experience. The Director of Operations role sits above this range. Bonuses, where offered, are based on overall firm performance along with qualitative intangibles, and are considered in addition to total compensation.

Reporting Manager

Firm Strategist

Operations Manager Role Responsibilities

You will work alongside every WCG team and our Pod leaders, report to the Firm Strategist, and have an Operations Specialist as a direct report. Your duties include WCG’s general Firm responsibilities plus, or as modified by, the following:

Role-Specific Duties

  • Taking operational and workflow data, much of it prepared by your Operations Specialist, and turning it into clear problems, recommendations, and actions for Pod leaders and WCG leadership.
  • Owning workflow management across all Pods, making sure tax returns, tax plans, and financial statement delivery are correctly staged, assigned, and current in Canopy.
  • Enforcing what we call the dirty four on every subtask: the assignee, the status, the due date, and clear notes on why a task is or is not progressing. When work goes stale, you chase it down with the responsible Pod leader.
  • Aligning Pods to one WCG standard, driving the “this is how we do business” layer as we grow, including reviewing recorded Pod huddles for agenda adherence, accountability, and firmwide consistency.
  • Building the annual revenue forecast with your Operations Specialist and pressure-testing it as our client mix shifts from advisory-heavy toward tax-only engagements with a la carte planning, then translating that forecast into a staffing plan across both tax preparers and the support team.
  • Defining recruiting needs from that plan, by team and Pod, full-time versus seasonal, and timing, so we hire ahead of demand rather than in crisis.
  • Leading engagement reassignment when an Associate resigns, changes roles, or shifts Pods, working with the affected Pod leaders to identify what moves, set the criteria for why, and manage the client communication that goes with it.
  • Balancing workload across Pods, including coordinating cross-Pod support during peak periods.
  • Coordinating cross-team communication among tax, accounting services, and business development to find efficiencies and resolve bottlenecks.
  • Administering firmwide procedure alignment and the production training that supports it, since production spans tax prep, tax plans, and financial statement delivery alike, coordinating with Pod leaders on technical training and with the Firm Strategist on leadership development.
  • Setting and tracking internal deadlines and completion goals, for example extension completion rates by Pod, so work does not bunch up in the final week.
  • Building and maintaining operational dashboards and the Rundowns, including the Runbacks that feed Pod input back into them, to keep teams and leadership informed.
  • Developing and adjusting quality control measures for accuracy, timeliness, and compliance with WCG service standards.
  • Generating and analyzing utilization and performance reports, including Accounting Services Realization, Revenue By Pod, and year-over-year client retention.
  • Managing and developing your Operations Specialist.

General Firm Duties

  • Guiding WCG along the path of success.
  • Promoting WCG culture and encouraging excellence and high team morale.
  • Developing and implementing WCG goals, procedures, and policies in coordination with other Partners, Directors, Managers, and Associates.
  • Identifying improvement gaps and assisting with deploying corrective measures.
  • Providing feedback, concerns, and recommendations to WCG leadership to continuously evolve Operations.
  • Participating in reviews of our workflow and practice-management tools.
  • Helping keep the workflow moving.
  • Training and leading fellow Associates.
  • Other tasks related to operations, tax, accounting, and consultation as requested.

Operations Manager responsibilities and duties will change from time to time depending on circumstances, your skill set, and the firm’s needs. They are reviewed, modified if necessary, and agreed to during Associate Reviews.

Hours Requirements

All salaried positions must work 1,900 hours annually / 12-month trailing period. This is hands-on-keyboard, butts-in-seats (unless you have a standing desk) work-related time spent on WCG activities. This is not billable hours- as a reminder, WCG does not do time-based client billing or have "charge hours" in favor of retainer / fee-range engagements.

Holidays, office closures, PTO, and other paid time off do not count toward and are not deducted from the 1,900-hour requirement, because your time off is genuinely yours.

WCG does not set a weekly minimum number of hours. That said, each team has different busy seasons and hours-

  • Client Support. Works a schedule close to the tax team cadence below, just a bit lighter, and covers a handful of Fridays through tax season since the firm stays open to clients. It is a custom setup, so we will walk you through the specifics.
  • Accounting Services. Works the same hours as the Tax Prep team below, but the busy season starts about 6 weeks earlier and also ends sooner.
  • Operations and Strategy. Those in operations and strategy roles typically follow the tax team cadence.
  • Tax Prep. For tax team members, our experience historically is that 55-60 hours per week during tax season (roughly 10 weeks) and 50-55 hours per week during extension season (roughly 8 weeks) are needed to find success, with lighter hours the rest of the year (for example, 30-32 hours per week during summer).
  • Other Support. Certain roles, such as Human Resources, Business Development and others, follow a typical 40-hour work week across all weeks.

As a firm, most Associates are off on Fridays outside of tax season except for those mentioned above. If you are confused, that is OK. WCG tries to be flexible and as such, it is a challenge to convert flexibility and fluidity into a bullet list. We can review with you directlyto clear up the madness. Please refer to the WCG Associate Handbook for additional information.

UPDATE! You might see reference to 2,100 hours elsewhere. As of June 8, 2026, we are moving to the 1,900 hour version above to simplify and remove confusion.

Operations Career Path

The career path for Operations Manager includes Director of Operations and Partner. At WCG, a Director carries partner-level authority without the equity buy-in, and that authority is exactly what this role can grow into.

How To Join The WCG Team

Here is the step by step process-

Candidate Questionnaire

Click on the button below to complete a quick Candidate Questionnaire and upload your resume.

Initial Conversation

If we like your detailed and thoughtful responses, we schedule a Teams chat with some WCG big shot:

  • Accounting Services Team. You will meet with Karlee Tiesler, Director of Accounting Services, for U.S. and Surbhi Setia, WCG India Team Director for our India candidates.
  • Tax Support / Client Support. You will meet with Tonya Duval, Director of Support Teams for U.S. and Surbhi Setia, WCG India Team Director for our India candidates.
  • Tax Return Preparation Team. You will meet with Jason Watson, CEO and Partner, for U.S. and Simar Singh Bagga, WCG India Team Manager for our India candidates.
  • Operations, Strategy, Others. You will meet with Terra Plamp, Firm Strategist or Jason Watson, CEO and Partner, for U.S. and Simar Singh Bagga, WCG India Team Manager for our India candidates.

We intentionally have a WCG leader host the first conversation since we can quickly assess alignment and basis for moving forward. If it's not a heck yeah, then it's a no thanks, right? Let's find that out sooner rather than later.

It is slated for 75 minutes to give you plenty of time to get your questions answered and gain familiarity, though it often runs shorter. This is purely to get a feel for each other. We can teach you anything… short of being nice, being professional, being energetic, being someone we can work with. Taxes? Easy. Accounting? Got you. Ability to hold a meaningful conversation? Well…

Fit Alignment

After that initial meeting, and if we believe there is a basis to work together, we ask you to complete our Fit Alignment Assessment. It takes about 30 minutes and helps us understand where you would slot in. Most WCGers have taken it, so we have a good baseline. We are cautious with how we read it- it is not pass or fail, and it usually just underscores what we already gleaned from your questionnaire and our chat.

Final Rounds

Not all roles need additional interviews. If necessary, we introduce you to other members of our recruitment team depending on the role and location. For example, a U.S. bookkeeper might chat with Michelle Ihlefeldt where an India bookkeeper might chat with Sumit Sirwani. After you chat with at least two of them, we get together and talk behind your back.

Offer Letter

Finally, one of the big shots checks in to see if you have any additional questions, and to start formulating a role with the team, compensation, start dates, etc. Then an offer letter is presented. Yay!

Radio Silence

Once an offer is accepted, then there might be a lot of radio silence depending on start date. As things get closer, we order a background check. For remote positions, we also do a tech survey to see what you need, and we start to discuss travel plans.

It’s The Final Countdown

In true one hit wonder Europe fashion, about 30 days before your start date, training materials and a schedule are presented and it's the final countdown.

And away we go!

join the WCG team

Join The WCG Team

Apply online to join the team- answer some questions and upload a resume!

Apply Online!

WCG Careers

Learn about our comprehensive training process, made to balance team experience and client service.

2026 Benefits

WCG 2026 benefits summary outlines health insurance (United Healthcare Choice Plus HDHP, employee-only), dental, and vision coverage.

Associate Handbook

This Associate Handbook was developed to describe some of the expectations we have for all associates and what you can expect from WCG.

WCG CPAs & Advisors is a full service consultation and tax preparation firm located in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and we look forward to working with you!

Tax Planning Season

Tax planning season is here! Let's schedule a time to review tax reduction strategies and generate a mock tax return.

Tax Planning Services
Bookkeeping Services

Tired of maintaining your own books? Seems like a chore to offload?

Accounting Services