The Ultimate Guide To Business Operations

As an entrepreneur, especially in the world of online business, you often start your journey by wearing all of the hats required to keep your business afloat. Not only are you responsible for providing the stellar service that your clients have hired you for, but you’re also leading the charge on drumming up new business through marketing initiatives, refining your customer experience, and developing your overall business strategy. All of the pieces of that puzzle makeup — you guessed it — your business operations!

Developing a solid foundation for your operation structure is integral to the success of your business, especially as you continue to evolve and hire team members. So let’s break down what that all means in the Ultimate Guide to Business Operations…

Introduction to Business Operations

At its core, the operations of your small business is an extensive web that maps out the foundation of your business, providing an overview and important at-a-glance- insight into the work and strategy of your organization. Not only can an operational structure help to define your goals and ensure that your efforts are aligned with said goals, but it can also help to define roles and responsibilities as your business grows and your team expands.

The fact of the matter is that as businesses evolve, issues and inefficiencies in your operational structure become more apparent. These problems can manifest in losing customers, spending time on tasks that don’t move the needle and align with your goals and wasting money on bloat because you don’t have a finger on the pulse of your business.

Why Your Business Needs An Operational Structure

Common Goals Reflecting Your Overall Strategy

Your operations will speak to and reflect the values and mission of your company. Not only will this help to ensure that your day-to-day efforts actually support achieving your goals, but a well defined Ops structure and strategy can be communicated to your team to facilitate their buy-in and investment in your business goals as well.

An added bonus is that you can clearly communicate your mission, goals and values to potential candidates during the hiring process to determine if they are the right fit for your organization and the operational principles that you have defined.

REAL-WORLD APPLICATION:

Allow your team members to understand the role their work plays in your organization’s success by painting the picture of how the tasks they perform support the ultimate goal, and then be sure to communicate how much you value that support.

For example, your virtual assistant may feel like their efforts are valued (and continue to bring their A-game) if you can demonstrate that the time they’ve spent pitching you to podcasts or media outlets has actually increased the number of members in your coaching program.

Information Shared Seamlessly

As teams expand and your client roster increases, communication breakdowns as a result of an undefined operations structure can be detrimental to the success of your business. Having clear guidelines on how your team communicates, collaborates and tracks and stores information is a foundational component of your Ops strategy.

It’s important to ask where your team will find what they need to do their jobs efficiently, without having to wait on files or documents. Additionally, this structure will ensure that your team knows who needs to approve certain deliverables and when.

Solid communication both internally (between team members) and externally (with clients) will help to mitigate errors, oversights and missteps as it relates to your client experience but also in working to achieve the goals of your business.

REAL-WORLD APPLICATION:

You’ve just onboarded a graphic designer to create a new digital product that requires a quick turnaround. Where are they finding your brand assets? Do they have easy access to your font files, your logos and brand colours, the approved stock images and headshots?

An information-sharing framework can be the difference between simply sending a shared folder link with all of the pertinent information and hitting that deadline, and scouring your folders on your desktop, your team member’s archives and anywhere else files might be hiding before totally missing your scheduled launch date.

Support Client Experience Efficiently

Let’s face it… without clients or customers, you don’t have a business. At best, you have an expensive hobby. Your business operations will not only support your clients in the service or product you deliver to them but a strong operations strategy will also take into account the life cycle of your client. It is through this that you can determine what offerings you should develop to allow your customer to continue their journey with you.

Having your workflows and processes defined, especially as it pertains to your client experience allows you to identify inefficiencies or bottlenecks and determine solutions that are more easily implemented by simply revising the existing process (and not recreating the wheel because your operation framework hasn’t already been documented).

REAL-WORLD APPLICATION:

You’ve brought on a part-time team member to help onboard the new members of your mastermind but you haven’t mapped out an onboarding process, well, ever. The focus should be efficiently onboarding your new members and delivering a stellar client experience… but your team member first needs to fumble through the process and determine inefficiencies in real-time. This leaves your clients questioning their next steps, feeling unclear about what they should expect from you.

Allow For Planning and Adaptability

By now, it shouldn’t be a surprise that external obstacles can drastically impact your business but that doesn’t have to mean failure! With an operational framework, you can work to define new ways to reach your goals, in spite of potential setbacks.

Being adaptable is a key skill in entrepreneurship but being able to make sound decisions as you deal with obstacles is only possible when your business goals are supported by strategic operations.

REAL-WORLD APPLICATION:

As part of your operational process, you took the time to establish your annual goals and built out your offers to support those goals. You’ve got a clear understanding of how many courses you need to sell or mastermind spaces you need to fill in order to hit your monthly revenue goals.

But amongst the turbulence in the economy as a result of a global crisis, you’re seeing the trends that show your customer is not in a position to make large investments in your services or products. Rather than casting your launches aside and chalking them up as failures, you can work to adapts to the current circumstances and find ways to allow your ideal client the opportunity to work with you.

This may look like offering a lower ticket product (such as a masterclass) in addition to your signature course. Perhaps you can add flexible payment plans to your mastermind to make the investment more manageable for your ideal client.

In both instances, being adaptable while still keeping your goals at the forefront of your decision-making process is a direct result of your business operations.

Looking for support in running your business like a business? I’ve opened a limited number of spots for a Strategic Ops Power Hour. We can address your biggest operational pain point and develop tangible solutions that you can implement right away. CLICK HERE to register.