Five Ways to Move Faster – A Guide for Operations Executives

Medium-Sized Business face different problems. Once you grow beyond ~25 employees, executive focus changes dramatically. The sales & marketing efforts of driving customer growth are quickly overshadowed by the need to ensure that your company has the resources available and processes in place to fulfill the demand for your offer.

As an Operations Executive, you are probably well familiar with this transition. Once you really gained market traction, your role quickly changed from coordinator to firefighter as the constant onslaught of missing orders, late projects, and unsatisfactory work began to take the stage that your sales efforts once occupied.

The strategy used to execute this transition is the difference between a company that grows slowly as their margins shrink in response to climbing expenses, and the company that scales rapidly as their expense-to-revenue ratio decreases over time.

Revenue is vanity. Profit is King.

Efficient processes and data-driven decisions are the key to unlocking a strong period of scale within the organization. Unfortunately, very few companies that arrive at this level have the processes and data systems in place to drive them forward to the next level.

Determined to find a new solution, you may have started perusing enterprise software that promises to fix all your process problems for good. Unfortunately, making the jump to enterprise software is far from desirable, and usually constitutes “a last resort” in breaking through the challenges than stand between you and market dominance.

The Problem with Enterprise Software

It’s not a matter of functionality. It’s a matter of time.

The primary issue with these kinds of systems is that they require your organization to undergo a radical change in standard operating procedures to “fit” into their toolkit.

Although you may be able to program in your method of doing things, doing so takes massive teams of people, huge budgets, and an organization-wide reskilling effort to get your employees trained on how to effectively take advantage of the new software.

Some applications (such as SAP, Peoplesoft, Salesforce, and Pegasystems) are so elaborate that they require legitimate specialists with years of training in the tool to rollout the solution. The hard reality is that the expectation is that your organization will be able to rapidly adopt and take advantage of these goliath software programs, is just not realistic.

It’s going to take months of time, hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars’ worth of setup expenses, and thousands of hours of employee time to see an improvement beyond your current state. When it’s all said and done, gaining a return on rollouts like this can take years. Hardly a viable solution for the growth-focused organization.

Now to be clear, there is nothing inherently wrong with Enterprise Software. If there was, the companies that produce it wouldn’t have risen to the exalted market players they have become. The problem is in the transition from your current state to the desired future state. Rolling out an enterprise solution and making this giant switch all at once is very resource intensive.

The ideal situation is to partner with a provider who can manage such a transition in a step-wise fashion without getting in the way of what your organization is currently doing. By approaching process improvement in a step-by-step fashion, you can rapidly experience the throughput improvements that come with improved process architecture without the time losses associated with a full-scale digital transformation.

At Autonomi, we have identified five major areas of improvement that allow you to meet the demand you face NOW while keeping your time and resources focused on fulfilling work and expanding your business.

Strategy 1: Fighting Employee Disengagement and Attrition

One of the largest problems scaling organizations face is employee disengagement and attrition. As the company grows, the individuals within the company feel more and more removed from its goals and aspirations. This is the point where people begin to see their work for you as a job instead of a career. With the demands on each individual in the organization become increasingly intense, those who are not intrinsically motivated to stay with the company will quickly leave.

Seeing as there is already more work than the organization can effectively manage, the last thing you want is to spend precious hours of company time training a continuous cycle of new hires, desperately trying to replace your empty ranks. So, what can be done about this?

The first thing to do is to get rid of as many maintenance tasks as possible for your employees. That is, tasks that are required for the business to function but do not constitute any true value add to the organization. Things like filing paperwork, filling out forms, moving files from one place to another, and other tasks that could be considered tedious.

Every moment an employee is spending on these types of mindless, repetitive tasks is a moment that they are entertaining the idea that their role doesn’t really have a point, and that they are just another faceless cog in your machine. To them, being stuck with these responsibilities feels demeaning and disrespectful. The kinds of valuable people you want in your organization have a very low tolerance for this and quickly depart the organization in favor of someone who put them in a position where they feel more valuable.

This is especially important for your HR team, as their job is now more important than ever. To effectively combat employee attrition, you must be able to use your HR unit as a strategic analytical partner. They need to be empowered to spend their time ensuring they are hiring the right people and shutting down political issues before they start. Studies show that the average HR unit spends up to 8 hour per week per HR employee filling out paperwork and fixing administrative issues. Every hour spent on these kinds of tasks is an hour that isn’t spent searching for those ideal, intrinsically motivated employees that are going to stick by your side for the long haul.

Simple rule-based automations are a perfect solution here as you can take advantage of the exacting precision of a computer to make sure everything gets done quickly and accurately. This both frees up your employee’s time to do more valuable tasks and promotes a feeling of progress within the organization. They can spend less time processing onboarding documents, filling out executive reports, filing invoices, and sending progress updates, and more time fulfilling client work, managing expectations, building relationships, and breaking into new markets.

When your people have more time to focus on what elevates the company, they feel like they are truly contributing value. This in turn gives them the lasting intrinsic motivation that makes them take ownership of their piece of the organization. People don’t leave things they own.

Second is ensuring that information across your organization is available system wide. Everyone in your organization should be able to easily find out what your company is doing, why you are doing it, and how it plays into the further reaching goals of the organization.

I’m not saying that your new analyst needs to know your growth strategy for next 4 quarters, but I am saying that if he wants to know that and is told no because he’s a lowly analyst, he isn’t going to be your analyst for long.

We have a bit of a radical belief at Autonomi that everyone in the organization should be able to find out what anyone else in the organization is doing, should they want to know. There is no need for NTK or compartmentalization in a company, as that just makes the company seem secretive and shady. It’s akin to there being some type of “club” that only those who are “special enough” get to be in, while everyone else is somehow lesser than those who are in the know.

Now normally, the issue of information distribution isn’t political like this. It’s practical. There are many different people working on many different things and having a continuous distribution of information or meetings based around it seems like more of a time sink than a value add.

The key here is establishing a system-wide intranet where the high-level goals and work efforts of each organizational unit is on display for everyone else to see. At a glance, an employee can login to the system, check out what’s going on in the company, and ask questions about anything they are curious about. Many organizations take this a step forward and make a full-blown social media network out of this, but that isn’t completely necessary.

All you need is a central place where the short-, medium-, and long-term goals of each department, and how those goals play into the overall goals of the company is readily available for view. This can be as simple as a joint spreadsheet. Having a connected communications network like this also helps with personal accountability, as every individual is now perfectly aware of how their work impacts the rest of their team, and the rest of the organization.

Couple this with an occasional town hall meeting, and now everyone has a clear understanding of what is happening in the organization, and what their piece of the puzzle is.

Knowledge of your place in the company is ownership, and again, people don’t leave things they own.

If you’d like to get deeper into combatting employee attrition in scaling companies, we have an entire series on it here.

Strategy 2: Centralizing Your System of Record

As an emerging business leader, you likely have an established Client Relationship Management System that allows you to keep track of each prospect/client and what services you have provided to the client throughout their lifetime with your organization.

Unfortunately, most organizations are not fully taking advantage of their CRM. The system is much more than just a place to store information about a client. It’s a centralized area that stores the most important facet of your business: your clients. With proper systems in place, the CRM can be used to automatically assign tasks, quickly find detailed information about the client’s interaction with the company and understand the time-value of your clients so you can prioritize work that has higher organizational returns.

You see, when problems arise (as they often do in a scaling organization), any time spent on trying to find the information necessary to solve the problem is time wasted.

Inefficiency rears its ugly head when your customer support team has to navigate through several different systems with a frustrated client on the line who keeps getting put on hold.

It shows through when orders get lost and you don’t know why.

It shows any time the client’s confidence in your abilities is shaken because he asks a question about his account your employees cannot answer.

It’s the cause of every red project you’ve ever had.

When you have the entire history of a client in one place, fixing and preventing problems becomes as easy as doing a simple lookup. Your employees can easily find the one email conversation they had 6 months ago where your previous salesperson promised them something you can’t deliver and explain the situation away with ease. Your waitlisted prospect that hasn’t been talked to in a week can be reassured that his project is next up before he abandons hope and moves on with a competitor. Your project manager can easily pinpoint what is going wrong in any given project and fix it without spending their entire day on the phone in virtual meetings, and save time by allowing the system itself to automatically assign work.

Now this might sound like a huge effort, but it doesn’t have to be hard. Tie your email system to your CRM so that every email to and from a give client is automatically logged to the CRM. This let’s everyone who interacts with them quickly understand the history of the contacts they have had with your company. This is especially important if you have handoff processes where employees from multiple organizational units interact with the same client.

You can also use a centralized system of record to tie your sales outreach systems to your CRM so that you can have an understanding of what has been important to the client from day 1, and what you need to do to fix the relationship if things are going astray. You can tie your marketing tools to your CRM so you know exactly what ads your client has seen and what emails they received before they made the choice to purchase. You can tie your logistics manager to the CRM so you can see that your client’s next order might run you out of stock and give them ample warning ahead of time to save the relationship.

Making these connections should be a relatively straight-forward expansion of your current CRM framework. At Autonomi, we track all Activities, Notes, Emails, Files, Deals, and Changes for each client, allowing us a transparent view into any client or prospect in our pipeline.

Setting up integrations like this should be rather straightforward depending on what CRM system you are using. We believe that this is one of the most important things you can do to enable scaling in your organization, so if you’d rather not mess with this yourself and just have it done, we can have you rolling in no more than 3-4 weeks.

Strategy 3: Standardizing Task Allocation

One of the weakest points of any business fulfillment process is its task management system. Keeping track of the work that needs to be done, how it is getting done, and how long it takes quickly becomes very messy if tasks are not allocated appropriately. Add in timelines, strategic initiatives, and dependencies, and it’s easy to see why a good project manager demands a considerable compensation package.

Now, for product-based businesses this is not as drastic a concern as the processes around order fulfillment are standardized by default. There is typically little question about how much stock should be kept on hand, the depletion rates, and the lead time. For product-based companies, setting up an automated inventory manager that can submit orders automatically when products on had fall below a certain threshold is all that’s required to enable seamless scalability. If you run a product-based business and don’t have this in place, implementing it will truly change the framework of your entire operational process.

Task allocation is of primary concern to service-based organizations and internal functions of the organization that require a productive, coordinated work effort between multiple employees in multiple business units. In this case, the need for proper time allocation becomes critical.

As the primary method by which you are generating returns is employee man hours, ensuring that those hours are spent effectively is the key to scale.

This is where system of record centralization really becomes important. Without getting too technical, I’d like to introduce the concept of a State-Dependent Workflow.

A State-Dependent workflow is one in which the client’s position in your prospecting or fulfillment process is the main deciding factor on what actions your organization takes with respect to that individual.

You are likely doing this already. You know that if the prospect has received a proposal but has yet to sign, that they need a follow-up, and if the fulfillment team has completed work for the client, it needs to be approved by the team lead before it’s ready for their view.

Your team likely also has metrics on how long each step of given process takes. Fulfilling a certain series of tasks may take 12 workhours, a critical meeting may take 2, etc. If you are able to gather information regarding what steps are required for each part of your prospecting and fulfillment funnel, and how much time each step takes, you now have the ability to approach the fulfillment effort more strategically.

When you define what personnel (or team of personnel) is required for each state in the process flow, what tasks they must complete, and how long those tasks are anticipated to complete, you can look at your employees’ availability in terms of capacity and coordinate work efforts with regards to each employee’s available capacity.

Now up to this point, this is likely all review for the seasoned Operations Executive. Where the value add really comes in is connecting the State-Dependent Workflow to the CRM so that tasks are assigned automatically based on capacity. By connecting your CRM to a Project Management Software, the workflow, deadlines, and dependencies can be automatically assigned to proper personnel and populate their task lists. You can further add capacity tracking to this system, such that work can be automatically distributed to the personnel that can complete the tasks the fastest, optimizing your workflow throughput in a very practical way.

Automated capacity tracking also allows you to forecast more effectively. When you combine a system like this with Centralized System of Record, you can ensure that the best work is always prioritized, and that as much of it as your organization can sustainably manage is being done. This system is capable of dynamically expanding in line with your organization, allowing you to maintain this optimal level of control regardless of the scale your organization reaches.

Strategy 4: Automating Cross-Platform Processes

Here is where we get into the challenges that are easiest to solve, but the hardest to deal with. All too often when you grow a business, you rely on specialized systems for every function. It’s not uncommon to have a strong email marketing solution, a CRM solution, a project management solution, an invoicing solution, and a bookkeeping solution within the same company. In our experience, it’s fairly common to see a product stack that’s similar to the following:

• Drip.io for Email Marketing
• Hootsuite for Social Channels
• Hubspot for the CRM
• Monday.com for Project Management
• Xero for Invoicing
• Intuit Online for Bookkeeping

All these systems perform their function well, and so long as you have dedicated personnel on top of each solution, things tend to run smoothly at the lower levels. However, when you begin to scale, communication gaps between the organizational units that are dependent on each of these systems turn into critical issues that affect every part of the business. The more reliant your organization is on human-to-human communication for cross-system functions, the more apt it is to make mistakes that bring client workflows to a screeching halt. Forgetting to send out an invoice, or worse, jumping the gun on a project completion meeting before its actually done can leave a massive stain on the reputation of your organization, an unacceptable situation in the midst of a rapid growth phase.

Simple connections between systems using an iPaaS (integration platform as a service) solution such as Zapier or Mulesoft are the key to ensuring errors like this are a thing of the past. These programs offer low-code/no-code solutions for tying your systems together. They allow you to automatically pass data between systems when a triggering event is hit, ensuring that cross system handoffs are perfect, every single time.

The flowchart-style setup of these systems makes putting these together a breeze. If you’d rather not mess with it, specialists are able to set up connection points like this in as little as a single day. If you have yet to invest in a cross-system integration solution, it is sure to be the greatest return on investment out of any upgrade you make to your business process layout.

Strategy 5: Consolidating Data for Strategic Decision Making

This one is explicitly for the executive level. One of the greatest issues with rapidly scaling is making sure the decisions you are making at each step are the right ones. If this is your first run as a leader in operations, you’ll be facing decisions at a scale you have never made before. If you are experienced, you’ll already understand the importance of what I’m about to say.

The key to ensuring that you can coordinate an efficient system of processes that can meet the growing demand of your business is having immediate, real-time access to KPIs. Being able to see, in real time, exactly what is going on in with your business enables you to make sound decisions in the critical moments that make or break your company.

Now, when you have disjointed systems (as you often do at the beginning of a scaling effort) it is imperative that the data from each system is aggregated into one, central location for your consideration.

This isn’t about being able to see where a given process needs to be improved. Every reasonably strong business solution has some form of metrics aggregation that allows you to see what is happening within it. This is about being able to make sophisticated decisions that affect the entire organization.

Examples of this:

“We have $91,000 left in the budget for this quarter. Is that better spent on marketing, hiring, or bonus packages. Should it be split in some way? What is the optimal way to put that capital to work.”

“There are two major issues standing in the way of achieving your yearly revenue goal. One is that you need to take on four more projects to get it and you only have capacity for two. The other is that one of your key vendors has you on the waitlist for the system rollout that will close out two of the projects you are already working on. Where is the best place to apply pressure?”

When you are able to see an aggregation of your sales, finances, and fulfillment KPIs all in one place, you can form a clear picture of the state of the organization and what exact decisions need to be made to take it to the next level.

The easiest way to do this is to use an iPaaS solution to funnel all of your desired data points into a centralized Tableau Dashboard. In doing so, you’ll be able to see what employees are moving the needle the most, and what priority you need to take when empowering departments to do what needs to be done to increase workflow and maintain stability during this strenuous period of growth.

Another way, albeit a less “pretty” solution, is to have an automated system that can consolidate exports from each organizational unit into one, coherent report that is delivered to you on a daily (or at the least, weekly) basis.

Either way, a relatively strong IT team should be able to put together such a solution rather quickly. At Autonomi, we build this solution directly into our centralization offerings, enabling the entire process suite to serve as one, totally integrated solution at every level of organizational altitude.

Wrapping Up

By applying a few clever upgrades to your current systems layout, you can remove the need to perform an invasive “digital transformation” across your organization. Using the strategies listed here, improvements can be realized in days instead of months, and can be implemented for price tags that are an order of magnitude lower than what can be expected from a full system migration.

At Autonomi, we enable growing businesses to avoid technological hiccups by applying this exact style of systemic improvements. If that is something that interests you, we’d love to see how we may be able to help. Our mission is to provide emerging business leaders like you the tools and knowledge they need to succeed in this modern, competitive environment.