7 Signs You Might Need an Operations Guy

When Do You Need an Operations Executive?

Growing a business is daunting. You, as a founder and CEO, have no more important responsibility
than to communicate the vision of the company,
constantly and to everyone.
It can not be accomplished if you are tied down
to the day-to-day execution and administration.
An operations executive can free your time.

Many businesses fail because the CEO did not do
what was most important for growth and revenue generation.
They will say that there was not enough time, money or resources.
46% of failures are due to incompetence.
30% of failures are due to unbalanced experience on the management team.
11% of failures are due to lack of experience with the product or service being sold.
I say that many fail to see that operations help is exactly what they needed
to bring experience, balance, and to free up the CEO’s time.
Below are seven signs that you might consider bringing on an operations executive.

Are You Spending More than 25% of the time in day-to-day activities?

If you are spending more than 25% of your time on day to day management of the business,
then you may be doing a disservice to the growth of your company.

Are You Building Systems “Willy Nilly”?

Building a company on a strong foundation of best practices, systems, and processes
in a planned approach is critical to ability of a company to grow and scale.
An operations executive will take time to consider
the current foundation and the future foundation
to lay out a path with a systematic approach.

Is There a Pragmatist on Your Team?

Investors are use to seeing a CEO with confidence, and surety
that the plan to grow the company is on point and will not meet with any problems.
They see this while knowing that a large percentage of investments will fail despite the optimism.
These concerns can be overcome by knowledge that the team also has a professional pragmatist
with the experience to eliminate problems
before they can occur and overcome other obstacles
that will inevitably pop up along the way.

Are You a Hyper Focused Founder?

Some companies have hyper-focused founders
that can not resist spending all of their time in product development
or selling
or any area of passion and expertise.
The passion and expertise for the area can be well served by the founder,
but it will leave many other areas neglected.

Are Your High Lifetime Value Customers being properly cared for?

If your company is selling to customers with a high lifetime value,
it is imperative that the systems be in place
to execute on delivery and customer experience.
In a new company, it’s hard for a CEO to hang back
with existing customers with the pressure of company growth.

Are you ready to grow the company beyond Salesman #1?

Almost all founders are salesman #1 when starting their company.
You have to be. But what do you do when you need salesman #2 and #3 and so on?
Are you going to stop selling to set up account management and customer service systems?
Who is going to put the systems in place to support the sales organization?

Can Your Company Afford to be Leaky?

It’s not uncommon for new companies to have leaky buckets of revenue,
expenses and margins when growing fast.
An operations executive that will find the leaks and get them closed.

Originally published at bigsoftwareideas.com on January 11, 2017.