Simply put, business operations are all the systems and processes that a business uses to deliver its end product. Whether the company is service or product based, all businesses utilize some form of software and have some form of daily, weekly, or monthly tasks.
All too often early employees create what will become business operations without knowing it. During the start-up stage, employees are usually generalists who wear multiple hats. These generalists work together to build the product or deliver the service offering of the business. As they have a wide array of responsibilities they’re working on, they tend to build processes that work for them, helping them to complete their tasks. This means that there are different processes used by different employees, even when the employees are in the same department or completing the same task. Which is a long way to say, that there are multiple people doing different things, in different ways, in different systems and none of it talks to each other. At best, this lack of standardization slows a growing company and worst, it increases OPEX and reduces profit. It may also steer some leaders to over hire, adding resourced to help complete something that good process could fix.
As the company scales, employees become specialized. As new people are brought on, the generalists share how they “have done things” in the past. Most times, unknowingly, passing on processes that they created during the foundational years inside systems that were never customized for a specific job function.
What usually comes next is too many cooks in the kitchen. Everyone has their own way of working. Everyone has their own opinions on how work should get done but no one really knows how to architect the applications they’re using or how to create scalable processes that benefit both their department and the company as a whole. In fact, it’s rare that someone has the vantage point to understand the big picture of the company. And it’s even rarer that someone understands the corporate goals and can break them down to the departmental level, and take it one step further, to create processes and customize applications that employees use on a daily basis.
Finding and hiring someone with this skill-set is like finding a unicorn.
Fortunately, this is what Execution Over Theory specializes in.
As operations experts with over a decade of tech experience in the heart of the Silicon Valley, we can understand the back-end of some of the most popular applications (Salesforce, Hubspot, Jira, Asana, Netsuite, Quickbooks, etc); in addition, we love working smarter, not harder. Which means we love building streamlined, automated processes that help free up employees to focus on value-add work. Instead of manually inputting information into multiple systems, our solutions allow critical key metrics to be changed in one application and flow throughout the rest of the platform. Systems that surface real-time key metrics are critical for leadership, investors and financiers. Crafting strategies based on the most current, up-to-date data is invaluable and only possible with a thoughtfully platform.
If you find yourself thinking, “there has to be a better way of doing this” or “this could be automated” we’d love to help!