Your business is growing. You have customers, a team and systems in place. From the outside, things probably look pretty successful.
So why does everything still seem to depend on you?
You’re answering questions your team should be able to answer. You’re jumping between emails, finances, customers, staff and suppliers. You’ve introduced new systems, but somehow you’re still filling the gaps between them.
And taking a proper day off without checking what’s happening feels surprisingly difficult.
This is often the point at which a business needs business operations support.
What is business operations support?
Business operations support is about improving how your business actually works day-to-day.
That might mean looking at your systems and processes, how information moves around the business, who is responsible for what, how work is tracked, what your numbers are telling you, or why particular jobs always seem to require your involvement.
The important bit is that these things aren’t looked at in isolation.
A problem that looks like an admin problem might actually be a process problem. A team problem might be caused by information being held in the wrong place. A cash-flow headache might start much earlier in the journey because jobs aren’t being completed, recorded or invoiced efficiently.
That’s why simply fixing the thing that’s making the most noise doesn’t always solve the underlying problem.
Isn’t that just business consultancy?
Not quite.
A consultant will often analyse a business, make recommendations and leave you with a report or plan to implement.
My approach is much more hands-on.
I work inside the business, initially spending time onsite so I can understand what really happens rather than what is supposed to happen.
I talk to the people doing the work. I look at the systems you’re already using. I follow processes from beginning to end. And I notice the workarounds, duplicated effort and little frustrations that have become so normal that nobody questions them anymore.
Then I help you make the changes.
I’m not standing on the sidelines giving advice. I get involved.
When does a small business need operational support?
There’s rarely a particular turnover, team size or moment when a light comes on saying You Now Need Business Operations.
Instead, there are usually symptoms.
You might recognise some of these:
- Your team regularly comes to you for information or decisions.
- Important information lives in your head, inbox or various spreadsheets.
- You’ve added systems as you’ve grown, but they don’t work particularly well together.
- You’re constantly dealing with the urgent rather than improving the important.
- Processes have developed piecemeal rather than by design.
- You’re duplicating work or entering the same information in several places.
- You don’t have easy access to the information or numbers you need to make decisions.
- Things get missed unless you personally keep an eye on them.
- Taking time away from the business creates more work before or afterwards.
- The business is successful, but running it feels harder than it should.
None of those necessarily means something is badly wrong.
Often, they simply mean the business has outgrown the way it used to work.
Why does this happen?
Small businesses rarely begin with beautifully designed operations.
They don’t need them.
When there are one or two of you, you can talk across the room. You know what’s happening with every customer. You remember which invoice needs chasing and you know that Dave always does that particular thing on a Thursday.
Then the business grows.
More customers. More people. More transactions. More systems. More information.
The informal ways of working that were perfectly adequate when the business was smaller start to creak.
The problem is that businesses don’t usually stop growing for three months while somebody redesigns everything.
So another spreadsheet gets created. Another app gets bought. Someone invents a workaround. The owner keeps a few more things in their head because explaining them seems to take longer than simply doing them.
Individually, each decision makes sense.
Collectively, they can create a business that’s far more complicated to run than it needs to be.
What does a Business Operations person actually do?
There isn’t a standard checklist – and that’s rather the point.
I might discover that the biggest difference would come from improving how jobs move through the business.
Or clarifying who owns particular responsibilities.
Or getting useful financial information in front of the owner.
Or replacing three disconnected spreadsheets with one straightforward process.
Or documenting something that currently only one person knows how to do.
Sometimes technology is the answer. Sometimes the business already has perfectly good technology and isn’t using it effectively.
And sometimes the best solution is remarkably simple.
I describe myself as a Solutions Explorer for exactly this reason. I don’t arrive with a predetermined solution and try to make your business fit it.
First, I understand.
Then we identify what’s getting in the way, improve it and embed a better way of working.
What should change as a result?
The goal isn’t to create a business full of processes for the sake of having processes.
It’s to make the business easier to run.
That might mean your team can find what they need without asking you.
You can see what’s happening without chasing everybody.
Work moves from one person to another without falling through the cracks.
Your numbers give you useful information rather than simply recording what happened three months ago.
And when something needs your attention, it’s because it genuinely needs you – not because you’re the only person who knows where something is or what happens next.
Ultimately, good business operations create something much more valuable than tidy systems.
They give the owner capacity.
Capacity to think, make decisions, develop the business – and occasionally leave it alone without wondering what’s going wrong in their absence.
Not sure what needs fixing?
You don’t need to diagnose the problem before asking for help.
In fact, many of the business owners I work with start with little more than:
“I know this shouldn’t be this difficult.”
That’s enough.
My job is to get inside how the business works, untangle what’s happening and find the changes that will make the biggest difference.
If your business is growing but has become harder to manage as a result, take a look at Who It’s For and How I Work – or get in touch and we can start with a conversation.