Business Operations to smoothly run your business and delivery
As you build your business, you’ll want a majority of your focus to be on building and running the first three systems we’ve covered: Authority, Profit, and Client Conversion.
These are the Growth Systems - the fuel that gets your business going, that brings cash in the door. These are the systems that need to be built and strengthened first so your business reliably brings in revenue.
Until you know your business model and make sure the math ‘maths’ for your revenue and profit targets, setting arbitrary revenue goals only goes so far in informing your actions.
Until you have identified the marketing and sales strategies that consistently work for you, hiring people to execute on bad-fit tactics is a cost, not a leveraged investment that you’ll make back.
And focusing on automations, tools, and tech to streamline delivery actually adds fragility into your system if you’re still tailoring your niche and offers.
But once you’ve built the foundations for the Growth Systems, the bottleneck shifts to how you manage the back end of your business.
You’ve started to hit capacity, revenue or time ceilings and want more resilient ways to run your business so you can sustainably operate for the long-term.
You’ve likely been grinding in your business for a few years, doing most things yourself as you test and try things out to grow. All of your processes live in your head, your tech stack looks like a splatter map, and you might feel like you’re just winging it every day.
So for you to scale or stabilize for long-term stability, you need to shift your business-building to how your business operates and where your business is headed from a strategic perspective.
You’re building the Scale Systems: Delivery/Internal Operations, People, and Strategy/Management.
Business Operations: Aligned Tasks, Time, Processes, and Tools for Smooth Delivery and Behind-the-Scenes Operations
People Systems: Defined Roles, Responsibilities, Training, and Communication Rhythms to Ease the Burden of Running the Business
Manage What Matters Systems: Clear Goals, Plans, Scorecards, and Forecasts so You’re Always Managing what Matters in Alignment to your Vision
Today, we’ll deep dive on the Business Operations Systems.
We’re focusing on two parts:
Smooth Delivery: Clear and streamlined processes and tools to ensure a seamless client experience
Business Operations: Managing your internal operations for easeful running of the business across time, tasks, and processes/tool management.
Smooth Delivery: Ensuring a seamless client experience
The Client Experience has 3 major components. To ensure this seamless client experience, you’ll want a clear purpose (what does success look like?), documented processes, and the tools and tech to help eliminate errors and ensure consistent, efficient delivery.
Onboarding: From invoices, contracts/payments, to setting the tenor of the client experience, your onboarding experience should add value, help you set expectations and maintain scope, help the customer get results quicker, and reduce churn/increase satisfaction.
This might look like an automated series of onboarding emails for a community, with dripped out instructions on how to engage. Or maybe it’s a detailed questionnaire collecting all of the assets you’ll need for your work together.
A strong onboarding system means that the client knows how to get started, reinforces norms and communication, and no steps are missed.
Client Communications/Delivery: How the service or product is delivered matters just as much to the client as the result - and informs how much it costs you to deliver it. Having clear systems for ongoing delivery includes:
Clear communication processes and project management timelines,
Processes to manage scope and track client progress
Ways to standardize delivery tools and processes so you can deliver on scope and on budget internally
This isn’t just for delivery-based businesses. If you run group programs, memberships or communities, or sell digital products, you’ll want clear ways to communicate with customers about upcoming events, how to get help with a product, or where to access tools and resources.
And as you get more experience, you’ll start to develop templates and too
Offboarding: The end of a client experience can turn people from clients to champions - or can lose trust all together.
Wrap Up: Do you have a strong wrap up process to ensure a smooth handover of deliverables? Do you have a community offboarding process, or communicate what happens at the end of a course?
What’s next: Is there a clear path to what’s next in working with you?
Results and Feedback: And of course, you’ll want to capture results and feedback - quantitative and qualitative, both positive and opportunities.
Business Operations: Managing your internal operations for easeful running of the business across time, tasks, and processes/tool management
Now we’re getting to the systemic heart of the Growth and Scale stages: how you’re managing all of the moving parts through process and tools.
For all of your systems to run smoothly, you need a clear way to track, align, and manage your time, your tasks, your ideas, all of your templates and tools. And you’ll need documented processes for the core processes of your business and any process you want to delegate.
Task and Project Management/Work Tracking: What are the demands on my time?
If you’re operating out of your inbox, managing through Slack convos, or operating off of a single post-it with a scribbled to do list… I see you, and I also encourage you to have a more structured way to outline all of the demands on your time and your team’s time.
A good workload management system has a full picture of the tasks and projects you’re actively working on or are in the backlog visible in one place, so you can plan accordingly, balance work and capacity across you and your team, and ensure that nothing is missing from your collective workload and task list.
Centralizing your tasks in one place ensures clarity on who owns what, when it’s due, and transparency of all comments and conversation so nothing gets missed during handovers.
This could be a digital task manager if you run a remote team, or a giant set of post-its divided up by client work, active projects, run the business tasks, and your backlog of dream projects.
Spoiler alert? The tasks for building business systems and running business systems are often missing from most todo lists because they are tasks originating from you, not tasks originating from someone else. These tasks and projects must get on your radar and be actively worked on as well by you or someone else to create long-term business resilience.
Time and Energy Alignment: How are you aligning your time supply?
Time tracking, time blocking, ideal week creation… I don’t care how you do it, but you must have a clear plan for deciding how much time gets allocated and gets spent on client work, marketing and sales activities, team management, and business operations.
Having a clear plan for how you’re aligning your time and energy - and seeing if work actually takes the time you expect - clarifies your client capacity and informs your pricing.
Understanding how you spend your time informs your marketing strategy because you’ll know the real return on investment from a time and cost perspective of activities.
And proactively planning your time allocations means you’re being honest about what you and your team can take on without neglecting parts of your business.
What business model are you, and where will your time be spent?
Process Documentation: Writing down the steps for running your core business processes
This isn’t about creating long checklists that no one ever uses and references.
Documenting process are how you give your team clarity, confidence, and step-by-step certainty, minimize human error, reduce training over time, and turn expectations from implicit to explicit.
They won’t have to try and read your mind!
Starting from the core systems that drive the business, or the core tasks you want to delegate, you’ll document your process.
Define: What’s the purpose of the process? What does success look like, when does this process happen? What are the major steps, the information needed along the way? What are the exceptions that break the process?
Design: Document the process, starting with DOING the process. The great news about AI tools? You can record your screen, or talk through the process and have tools create a step-by-step plan for you to start with.
Deploy: Start using the process, adding things you’ve forgotten and changed over time.
Information Management: A place for everything, and everything in its place
So you’ve got tasks, client data, project outlines, processes, notes, ideas, stickies, journals, Google Drive templates, Canva graphics,…. aaaaaaaah! You never know how to find anything in your business - and hell if your team can find anything.
A strong Information Management system defines WHAT information goes WHERE, and HOW it’s organized and WHEN it is maintained.
You might use an “all-in-one” system like Notion, or a series of tools both analog and digital.
Typically this is the information that will need to be managed:
Sales and Marketing Data: Client and Customer Information, Referral Sources, etc.
Customer/Client Projects
Active Tasks and Internal Project Plans
Backlog Projects and Strategy Ideas
Resources: Graphic/Brand Assets, Client Tools and Resources, Internal Tools (Passwords, Forms, Vendor Lists)
Content: Finished Content, Content Ideas, Content Pitches
Processes and Policies: Team Onboarding and Policies: Core Business SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures)
Email: Process, store, and manage information
And a strong system has clear parameters for WHEN it’s managed: Refreshing resources yearly or quarterly, archiving client projects or finished projects, cleaning out your tasks every month.
You won’t build all of these things out at the start!
You’ll start building little by little: task management and information management for you to save you time. Process steps for the processes you run.
You’ll time block, or simply set guardrails on when people can book certain appointments on your calendar.
Then you’ll start adding tech, documenting processes, and incorporating your team into the fold, building these systems as you go.
But if you have a baseline of these core systems, you can build properly as you grow instead of figuring it all out once you’re tired of never knowing how to put your fingers on what you need.
Assessment Questions
Delivery Process:
Onboarding: Do you have an onboarding process sets expectations and accelerates the time to value for your customers?
Delivery Systems: Can you easily deliver your service through documented processes and systems?
Client Communications: Do you have clear processes to communicate with customers working with you?
Offboarding: Do you have an offboarding process to close out your service, capture feedback and results, and lay the groundwork for future sales?
Internal Operations:
Task Management: Are all of your tasks and projects collected in one centralized and transparent location?
Time Management: Do you have clarity on how you and your team spend your time?
Process Management: Are your core business processes documented?
Information Management: Have you set up systems to organize tools, templates, resources, contacts, and other business information?