Business Strategy, Defined
Your organizational strategy and systems provide structure for all areas of your business and help them work together to achieve the results you’re after. Plus, they support your people in performing the essential functions your business needs to keep it growing in the right direction. When you have an organizational strategy and systems in place, you experience:
Ease in onboarding new team members and clients
Efficiency with getting routine and project tasks completed
Excitement about creating and implementing new projects
Decrease in overall production costs
Increase in team performance
Sustained long-term organizational growth
Confidence with taking on new clients and projects
When we think of business strategy, we usually think about sales or marketing and how we’re going to grow our businesses. That’s great, however, you need internal systems to support every area of your business. You may have a great sales or marketing strategy, but the internal processes support making them happen with ease. Without systems in place, you’ll waste much of your valuable time and money trying to figure out the status of each project, who is doing what, and if it’s going to be delivered on time. This causes so much frustration, not only for the CEO, but the whole team.
Setting Up Awesome Systems for Success
Systems are the foundation for every aspect of your business, from marketing to mastering profit margins. Without them, the feeling of overwhelm can seem unbearable. When we collaborate, we teach you how to break down all your biggest boulders into manageable parts.
Dissolving those feelings of overwhelm is the very first step in our process. It’s what consistently makes our clients say they feel safer than they ever have before doing their work in the world.
Learn more about the process...
This process begins by...
1
Taking inventory of your current projects, tasks, content and distractions. We compile a list of your burning fires that need immediate attention, the things you absolutely don’t need to be doing anymore and want to take off your plate, project needs, and future things you’d love to have.
2
Creating your company’s command center, which is a container to hold your projects and ensure you get everything done (by the right person at the right time).
3
Organizing your filing system so that you and your team have a centralized place to search, find, and access files with ease.
Get Your Time and Freedom Back by Creating Standard Operating Procedures
After we’ve got your foundational pieces built, we then determine what standard operating procedures need to be created so that you can take what’s in your head and get it down on paper. Once this happens, you get to experience the freedom that comes along with handing these items over to someone else on your team to take care of for you, which allows you the breathing room you so desperately seek.
Are you wondering about which items require a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)?
Here’s how you know you need to create one:
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You have a task/project you want to delegate to someone.
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You have to re-create a process each time you do it and have nothing written down or you have notes about it scattered in various places
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You find yourself performing routine tasks that only you know how to do.
The key is to provide a structure to document your systems and processes so you can build with consistency and everyone is clear on what is required to get things done.
Core Company Documents that Make Onboarding Easy
It’s important to create essential documents that are needed in your business for you to scale so you can feel confident about going after your goals. This means that you need to take a look at the questions you need to answer every time you onboarding a new team member.
Core Documents Include:
Product offerings + pricing
Program details
Company handbook
Your mission, vision, and values
Canned response documents per department
Filing system instructions
Hiring documents
Company organizational chart
Training schedules
Brand style guides
When you have these documents put together, you no longer have to repeat the same conversation over and over again, worry about whether you’ve covered everything in onboarding, and can deliver these to your new hire to review in advance of your kick-off call, which will provide them the opportunity to ask better questions because they’ve been briefed on your business.
Why Foundation Building Matters
We’ve worked with various types of businesses over the last several years with revenues that range from
$300,000-$300 million per year.
from online coaches, authors, speakers, marketing and consulting agencies, musicians, behavioral health clinics, and they all have experienced the same feeling. When they come to us, they are overwhelmed, burnt out, and don’t know where to start in terms of digging themselves out of the mess they’re in.
When you don’t have systems in place, you suffer.
Having a lack of systems creates confusion from team members, frustration from CEO’s and management, and leaves the team as whole feeling stressed out because they have no idea where to find things, what is expected of them, and how to deliver their work successfully. The result is that overall morale is low and the business feels like it’s fragile and may collapse at any moment. Operating without these pieces in place will leave you feeling like something may drop at any moment, which perpetuates fear that spreads like wildfire through your company. We’ve seen this over our years of working with clients and it’s painful for everyone involved.
Strategies Are Not Systems
You may have created a strategy for what you would like to accomplish in various areas of your business and that’s awesome, BUT, you need the systems in place to support the implementation pieces and to provide instruction for HOW you’re going to produce the vision outlined in your strategy. Without this, your chances of executing with ease lower substantially. Systems hold your strategy so that you can make your vision come to life.
Consulting for Small Business
Let’s take a look at the different roles:
Most times if you’re great at strategy and creating the vision, you’re usually not good with the systems and implementation pieces. There’s a great book called Rocket Fuel that speaks to the different roles required for successful strategy, vision, and business operations. There’s also different types of people you can hire that have considerable knowledge and experience with running operations, creating systems, and implementing strategies.
Online Business Manager (OBM): OBM’s provide support virtually for online based businesses and are equipped to come in and work at a high level to run operations, projects, team members, daily management, provide metrics, and develop systems. They vary in types of skill sets and background experience. They are usually contractors that step into businesses either short or long-term to provide direct support to the CEO. OBM’s also take the lead on implementing the strategy.
Consultant: A consultant is a professional who provides expert advice and is hired to come in to work on a specific area of your business. They have a specific objective and deliverables that are agreed upon before the work happens. Consultants help to develop clear strategies based on their expertise that move businesses forward.
Coach: Coaches are professionally trained, experienced, and skilled in assisting individuals or teams support in order to develop their skills, performance, plus provides advice and guidance on how to move forward when they feel stuck or want to take themselves or their businesses to the next level. It’s best to bring in a coach when your strategy and implementation pieces don’t seem to be working properly. This will help you determine what’s going on and why.
Businesses may need the support of either one or all of these professionals as they grow their businesses.
As a CEO, it can be hard to see the big picture when you’re working in the business on a daily basis, which is why these people are so essential. They can help you see things that may not be in your awareness, show you where things are breaking down, and guide you forward in a way that feels good.
Hiring someone from outside of your organization makes sense when you and your team can’t figure out how to move forward and keep struggling with the same issues over and over again. Having a fresh set of eyes on your business and a different perspective from someone that isn’t involved in the day-to-day operations provides a great deal of value. We need others to help shine a light on what we can’t see as business owners, operators, and team members. It allows us to get the support we need to show up awesome.