How to become the Operations Manager your Tech Startup didn’t know they needed
Startups are crazy.
It takes a dash of insanity, a fair amount of intelligence and both hard and soft skills, as well as a whole lotta grit to take a risk and start a new business in a difficult economy, spending other people’s money whilst trying to make a success of it.
Working for a start-up sometimes feels like you’re on a fun roller coaster ride, but you’re not quite sure if your seat belt is fastened.
Wheeeee!
I joined Custos as employee number 5 back in May 2016. When you join a young startup, there’s a strong probability that the founders don’t really know how to create well defined job specs (yet); or they simply don’t have time. This leaves you to figure it out for yourself.
Important: if this level of self-managing autonomy freaks you the heck out, you’re probably not quite ready yet to work at an early stage startup.
Here’s how you can go about creating an operations manager role for yourself at a startup:
1. Study the business and its processes
Get your hands on literally everything you can, and study it. Become one with it. We’re talking founders’ docs, old pitch decks, contracts, random to-do lists, CIPC documents, shareholder resolutions, MOI’s, and the list is almost never ending. I had to throw myself into a Dropbox folder with a rich, deep and incredibly complicated governance history. I’m going to be honest: I wasn’t quite nailing this one when I started working at Custos. I still discover crucial documents in that folder two years later. Facepalm.
2. Learn how to pitch the business
You’re working for a startup now. Bitches like Pitches. People are going to ask you what the business does. After studying literally everything about the business and having a serious case of the information overloads, you’ll probably struggle to come up with a nice elevator pitch. Choose the most deliberative employee at the company and pitch to that person. You’ll get your pitch together in no time. Don’t have a deliberative co-worker? Go find some really intelligent person and pitch the business. They’ll call you out on bullshit quickly.
3. Schedule an hour session with each employee on the team
Ask each employee what they do, how they go about their work on a daily basis, what challenges they face, what they would like to achieve in their role. Ask them to explain the stuff they’re working on. Make notes and learn from them.
4. Start visualizing business processes
Fun fact (at least a speculated one): the human brain processes images 60000 times faster than words. Word.
Now that you have all of the knowledge, you need to start visualizing business processes. Draw pictures, create mind maps, Trello the shit out of it — use whatever you’re comfortable with. I personally prefer Trello. If you suck at drawing like me (okay, it’s mainly just laziness), start by simply breaking daily tasks into smaller tasks and number them. This exercise will help you realize where the redundancies are, and you’ll flesh out processes in no time.
5. Categorize processes into daily, weekly, monthly and annual
Once again, Trello is my favourite tool for this, but you can even start with just a white board and some sticky notes.
Here’s an example of the Ops Processes board that myself and Fred Lutz created a while back:
Trello allows you to add team members and a date to specific tasks, which means Trello will remind you of tasks when they’re due. This is fantastic for annual tasks, because let’s face it, you’re going to snooze that calendar reminder and then forget about it completely.
6. Use Kanban for daily tasks
After visualizing your business processes and categorizing them, you’ll probably start feeling a bit overwhelmed. On top of knowing core business operations, chances are, you were appointed to take things off other people’s plates in the company, which means you’ll mostly be very reactive instead of proactive.
Here’s a scenario of a reactive morning:
Your CEO is flying to the USA for a business trip and you must phone the bank to sort out his travel insurance. This must happen ASAP as he’s leaving the country tomorrow. You had your entire morning planned out to finish 5 other important tasks:
- Financial board updates
- Pay salaries
- Finish a government report
- Buy some coffee (this one is super important as no one can work without coffee)
- Pay suppliersBut the travel insurance must be sorted out now. What happens next:
You drop everything and call the bank. This takes ages because:
- the bank is really bad at communicating which numbers should be called, so you get transferred between departments three times,
- the call centre agent is sick and you can hardly hear what he’s saying,
- you get transferred to a new call centre agent and this person doesn’t know what the phonetic alphabet is (you have to spell everything over the phone),
- the call centre agent types in the credit card details wrong and has to phone you back to collect the info again.
This doesn’t sound very proactive, now does it? After this entire experience, your other lined up tasks have also become reactive (since they’re urgent now).
Panic.
The solution to your panic: Kanban.
Our Head of Marketing, Natasha Nel wrote an extensive article on how to use Kanban, Trello and Pomelo for productivity, so do yourself a favor and go check it out here. You won’t regret it, promise.
It’s no secret that well performed admin and operations within a startup is crucial for its existence. A great product with great sales traction will be nowhere without someone taking care of the admin behind the scenes.
But don’t just take my word for it, check out these:
If you’re currently an Operations Manager at a startup — kudos to you! If you’re hoping to join a startup as an Operations Manager, know that this role is challenging but also extremely rewarding. You get to be in the middle of the whole business getting exposure to everything that’s happening.
To keep in the swing of this writing thing, I’ll be posting more articles relating to specific tasks within my job soon-ish. :)
This article’s conclusion most definitely deserves a super shout out to our incredible COO, Fred Lutz. Having this dude stand beside me through this whole journey, calmly advising and guiding, has been a blast. We’re not worthy of his awesomeness. Check out his latest article on how we caught our first film pirate here.
