4 Steps To Building Strong Business Operations
Operations is not just a buzzword: it’s the backbone to any business. Building an efficient and optimal workflow means all aspects of your business interplay and run smoothly, enabling sustainable growth. In our recent masterclass, Master Your Workflow, operations expert Rohan Inneh broke down the four key steps to strong business ops. Find out what they are here.
Step 1: Map
The best way to start optimising your workflow is by literally drawing or mapping it out. “Oftentimes, when you can see your business visually, the problems or the inefficiencies become glaringly obvious,” Rohan says.
He recommends using a large piece of paper or whiteboard to enable better visual oversight of your processes. Once it’s laid out in front of you, it’s much easier to flag any issues.
Look for bottlenecks and redundancies: tasks and processes that can be simplified, streamlined or just removed entirely. For example, there may be admin that was crucial at one stage of your business, but is now unnecessary and takes you away from more growth-oriented activities. Identify what these are and eliminate them from your workflow.
How to map your workflow
Swimlane flowchart: Maps different processes according to the area of the business responsible for it. This is useful for observing the interlinking of different players - for example, customer, payment processor and shipping warehouse - and spotting any shortcomings in the set-up.
Service blueprint: Puts the customer experience at the centre of your workflow, allowing you to frame the journey around your user. This framework divides your processes into frontend and backend actions, which makes it easier to visualise how everything works together to cater to the customer. “You're actually optimizing your business to make your customers happy,” Rohan says.
Step 2: Standardise
Standardising your processes is crucial for improving consistency, limiting errors, onboarding new team members, and generally making your business less reliant on yourself.
A Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) is like a recipe: a step-by-step document that details all the components of a particular process.
An SOP should include:
Purpose The goals of the procedures
Procedures The activities involved
Scope The extent or limitations of the procedure
Stakeholders Those responsible for carrying it out
Signed approval Approval of the key team member
Step 3: Automate
“We want to automate because there are repetitive things in the business that probably take too much too much time”, Rohan says. Being weighed down by tireless admin won’t generate revenue, so automate the tasks that can run themselves.
Rohan lists the five main areas that can most easily be automated:
Customer service Install a chatbot on your website. This isn’t just for answering queries but also driving revenue, by helping the customer along in their order journey
Invoicing and payments Automate your regular payments
Inventory management Optimise your stock management according to what sells best - and avoid disappointing customers when unavailable stock is mistakenly sold
Marketing (customer acquisition, retention or winback) Schedule automated marketing, such as abandoned cart emails, to trigger based on the customer’s action
General admin Find software that optimises your inevitable day-to-day tasks
Step 4: Track
Once you’ve got built robust operations, you need to review them regularly.
“Identify opportunities to improve a process. Find out how you're going to improve it, execute it, and review how what execution went for you, and just keep going over that cycle,” says Rohan. Once every 1-2 months, monitor and measure to ensure that your processes are as up-to-date and relevant as possible, as this will keep you driving revenue.
