Did you know that two thirds of startups never deliver a positive return to investors?
While many founders have brilliant ideas, profitability requires operational efficiency -- a less sexy skillset.
As companies grow from scrappy startups to early-stage businesses, they frequently neglect the evolution of their business practices and operations. Operations roles are often seen as mere overhead, making it hard to justify the expense. This mindset leads to the dangerous belief that “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” or “we’ve always done it this way.” These attitudes quickly become bottlenecks that hinder scaling efforts.
Some companies assume that hiring more employees will naturally increase output and productivity. While there’s some truth to this, it’s based on a significant assumption: that you’re hiring the right people for the right roles. This assumption can be risky when your systems, processes, and project management practices are not yet optimized. Until your systems and teams are running like well-oiled machines, it’s hard to know what you truly need. There’s a limit to how many people you can hire before realizing that to scale efficiently and profitably, you need robust, connected systems and effective, automated processes.
A common misconception, and one of our favorites, is that there isn’t the budget for an operations consultant. But what if I told you that our work pays for itself? In fact, the systems, processes, automations and project management practices we develop for our clients consistently save them more than the cost of our services — every single time, typically within the first year.
“Systems and processes are not glamorous. They are never in the spotlight like the product of service offering of a business — nor should they be. But without them, there is no business. They are often the critical piece needed to get your company to the next level. You simply can’t afford to overlook them”. —Tanya Saracino, CEO, Execution Over Theory
Research shows that it takes an average of 9.5 minutes to get back into a workflow after switching between digital applications. The more applications your company has, the more updates employees have to make, leading to increased context switching, reduced productivity and ultimately, decreased profitability.
Let’s look at an example.
Imagine a company with just one employee who needs to update a CRM, project management software and a spreadsheet. Each update takes about 15 minutes, including the 9.5 minutes required to switch tasks. That’s 45 minutes per update or 1.85% of their time per week.
Now, let’s quantify this in dollars.
If the employee makes 10 updates a week with inefficient systems and processes, that’s $18K in annual operational expenses (OPEX) for the company.
With a team of three employees, those 10 updates per week cost $54K in OPEX annually.
For a team of 10, the cost balloons to $540K per year. And remember, some processes take much longer than 15 minutes. Every minute spent navigating under-optimized systems and manual processes increases OPEX, reduces profit, and pulls employees away from value-add work.
It’s clear how costly inefficient systems and processes can be as companies begin to scale.
As experts in operational excellence and digital transformation, companies often reach out to us when it becomes apparent that they need help. Some common challenges we hear from clients include:
Lack of insight into what the team is working on
No idea where works stands and how close it is to completion
Everyone working in different ways
Varying priorities across teams/departments/programs/pillars
No global view
Data integrity issues
Reporting is messy, manual and cumbersome
“There’s never been a client that I’ve worked with that hasn’t saved more in OPEX than the price of the engagement. The work we do is quantifiable and shows up in many different facets of the business: teams increase output, manual processes are automated, data integrity increases, the right work is prioritized and systems are customized for both the work and the user. The results reduce employee overhead and streamline corporate operations, thereby increasing profit. The more your company scales, the more OPEX savings they’ll see.” — Tanya Saracino, CEO, Execution Over Theory
How many 15+ minute processes do you have at your company?