Want to scale impact? Operations holds the key
Visionaries need process support, strong processes support JEDI goals, and more wisdom from Multiplier operations head Sara Cruz-Mora
Multiplier experienced rapid growth over the past two years, nearly doubling its staff. The nonprofit accelerator knew the growth in staff and revenue meant its infrastructure would also need to change and grow, and it hired Sara Cruz-Mora about seven months ago to fine-tune core processes and help build a strong operational foundation for continued growth.
As head of operations, Cruz-Mora supports the organization’s core team as well as 50-plus teams in its project portfolio. Her work encompasses building efficient processes to support Multiplier’s core and project teams, creating and implementing standardized business procedures, collecting and analyzing data to uncover long-term capacity trends, leveraging technology to support efficient operations, addressing process inefficiencies, and risk management. P Cubed talked with her about what a robust operations infrastructure looks like and why it’s essential to scaling any social enterprise’s impact.
What do people who aren’t in charge of operations not understand about what you do?
It can be hard for people who aren’t engaged in operations work every day to understand why it’s needed — why we need to standardize core operating procedures and document every step of important processes, and why we need so many clearly defined processes and policies. It can feel like busywork, especially to people who have been doing their job for years without taking all these steps.
Organizations of all sizes need a robust operational foundation of clearly defined and standardized processes and procedures so they’re not reinventing the wheel every time they hire someone, for example, or launch a new service. Proper documentation helps ensure that every person at the organization will have access to information about how to do a job, and that the knowledge lives in a database rather than in a person’s head, so if that person leaves their knowledge isn’t lost. By keeping all this information on file, an organization wastes less of its staff’s time, allowing them to put their energy toward meeting goals and making meaningful change.
But before clearly defining policies and procedures, companies need to invest time to ensure that the processes in place are efficient, support staff efforts, and meet business goals. Process reviews should identify and eliminate points of weakness such as poor quality of service, inefficiencies, bottlenecks, single points of failure, and low productivity.
Many people also don’t understand that having a robust operational foundation helps organizations build a strong, supportive culture that employees want to be part of, often increasing retention and job satisfaction. Efficient processes that help employees do their jobs will make your team feel supported and satisfied day to day. By contrast, broken, inefficient systems eat up time that could be spent elsewhere, causing frustration. One major way operations can support employees is by identifying automation opportunities that eliminate redundant tasks so staff can spend more time leveraging their expertise and making a bigger impact for the organization and mission.
Strong operations is also essential to supporting an organization’s JEDI goals. These structures ensure that all employees have an equitable work environment with access to the same resources and knowledge. Operational excellence means that an organization isn’t accidentally leaving anyone behind and that everyone has the tools they need to excel in and be promoted to leadership roles.
Multiplier works with a lot of visionaries working to solve global challenges. Why do these visionaries need operations help? How do strong processes support acceleration, especially in the social sector?
While visionaries’ wide-angle and innovative thinking is essential to igniting change, we operations experts are essential to creating the foundations and processes that enable change to happen.
There’s a huge gap between a great idea and its implementation. Operations provides the road map for getting there and answers the questions who, what, when, where, why, and how at each step of the way. We think about setting incremental goals, identifying the right tools to help the visionary meet those goals, how to measure success, budgeting, and so much more. Those without operations help risk getting lost on the way from inspiration to success.
Can you share some examples from your own career of operations turnarounds that helped organizations accelerate impact?
When I worked for the Arizona Humane Society, my role was to take on struggling departments and business entities and revive them so the staff could help save more lives and make more money for the mission.
I was tasked with revitalizing our foster program, which was huge — about 4,000 people were taking in animals each year. But we didn’t have a designated department to manage the program. Instead, it was split between five different ones, leading to redundancies and causing our employees and customers lots of frustration. To solve the problem, I took a data-based approach to prove that this program needed its own department. I then launched a customer relationship management system to manage our thousands of contacts, built an employee training program, allocated a dedicated space for the department to exist within our organization, and implemented strong policies and procedures to allow the department to run efficiently. Having this infrastructure in place led the foster program to grow by more than 50% in the first year after we created the department.
My last assignment in that job was to turn around two veterinary clinics and launch a third. The businesses had been losing money for decades, yet there was an enormous opportunity to increase the organization’s impact by serving more low-income pet owners. Once again, the problem was that there were no policies or procedures in place, processes were inefficient, and the software was not adequate to support business management or growth. After I helped them address these issues, the department turned a profit within five months for the first time in years.
Why do people have trouble identifying or overcoming operations challenges? Do you have advice on getting started?
In my experience, people just don’t see that there are problems if they’ve been working with them or have let them fester for a long time. People feel comfortable in what they’ve always done. It feels like less work in the short term to keep using a 10-year-old Excel sheet than to spend time researching optimized alternatives.
If your nonprofit is struggling to achieve impact, it can be helpful to spend some time getting comfortable with asking uncomfortable questions about how you do things and why. If you don’t have clearly defined processes and procedures written down and accessible to everyone who needs them, take the time to do that.
If you’re in a situation where you can tell that something isn’t working but you can’t figure out why, I recommend an exercise called process mapping. It’s the first thing I do with departments or organizations facing this challenge. Gather the team involved and map out everything that department does, step by step. It’s tedious but worthwhile work. As you go, discuss what’s working, what isn’t, and why. This will help you identify roadblocks, single points of failure, bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and redundant processes. In my experience, even reluctant teams begin to see the benefits of investing this time once they see how much easier it is to do their jobs after implementing just a few procedural changes.
When done right, operations is an invisible asset. But the difference between poor or no operations and effective operations is like night and day. And the mind-blowing thing is that if you dedicate the time in the short term, you’ll save more money, experience more growth, and employ a happier staff in the long term.
