Justin St. Louis Wood is an operator's operator who has built and scaled BizOps and RevOps at fast-growing SaaS companies and now leads new initiatives and operational efficiency at Novisto. He started in finance — his degree is in finance — but had no interest in institutional financial markets and gravitated to the underdog startup story, beginning at a 10-15-person marketing-and-analytics startup that was acquired quickly, then a ~500-person startup working on strategic partnerships and ecosystems. From there his career turned ops-focused: special projects, revenue operations, and right-hand-to-executive roles where he amplifies leaders with data and builds new systems, automations, and workflows from scratch across finance and go-to-market teams. His operating philosophy is to build from first principles — set the foundation before layering on advanced techniques — and, in the AI era, to rebuild systems entirely rather than embed AI into old workflows: custom 'hubs' built in tools like Replit that eradicate vendor spend, paired with agent 'spokes' and a human at the tail of the loop. He thinks in systems in his personal life too, from mixed martial arts to fitness, and believes small, consistent, compounding habits — not big one-day wins — are what carry over into great operations work.
“But that's my first instinct. It's build first, then ask questions.”
“You as a builder simply need to create like a working prototype. You're not going to have the complete scope, but you build things first. And then with collaboration, you get the stuff that you're missing.”
“The three pillars that we would assess are number one, volume, number two, accounts, and number three is the accuracy and validation.”
“You have to augment [a spreadsheet] to a level that it operates like a business intelligence tool, not a static spreadsheet.”
“At the end of the day, the talent that you have, the people that you have is the company that you build.”
“It's a very big quality gate, assessing only opportunities that you have the ability to close reasonably — and also within the quarter, not just within a year.”
“Can we build something from scratch entirely to completely solve the need and potentially eradicate the need for a certain vendor, a certain platform that we're paying every month?”
“You're eliminating the need to have this really convoluted, terribly orchestrated tech stack that you have currently into something that's deeply proprietary, deeply internal to the company.”