Why operations are the heart of any successful small business
A common issue in an expanding business is a sudden growth spike or successful marketing campaign while operations are not ready to deal with it. It seems dreamy at first: orders landing in your email inbox and the numbers keep going up. That’s what you want, right?
Your wish is granted; the challenge now is to deliver. Not just deliver but create a world-class experience. There is no benefit in having lots of orders if you are struggling to deliver them on time.
What if your machine has an issue, your sewing employees are sick, your packing material isn’t delivered on time, the new employee still doesn’t know what they are doing? Then suddenly, it seems like there are too many orders and not enough hours in the day to fulfil them. From the dreamy, you are now living a nightmare where you run around putting out (hypothetical) fires. The disappointed customers are calling day and night and an even bigger challenge lies ahead: you are put in a position where you need to deal with operational issues as well as damage control.
Delivering a world-class experience to your customer is how your business will maintain and increase their lifetime value (LTV), which is the total amount they buy from you for as long as they remain your client. The more customers return and buy again the more revenue you will produce. For this to happen, every step of your operations needs to be on track.
When operations are put under pressure
When you get an order, you will either receive it in your e-commerce shop or invoice it manually, depending on your sales approach and services. Once the order is placed and the invoice paid, your production team will be activated. You might have printing, cutting, sewing, upholstering or any other kind of production. Once it’s ready, your dispatch team will pack the order and send it out.
To deliver a world-class experience, your team needs to ensure that each product has been through quality control and is prepared with a consistent and mainstreamed technique that is representative of your brand. Nothing kills sales faster than inconsistency: the odd mistake here and there; the messy packaging; the wrong item; and worst of all, the faulty product. Customers lose faith far too quickly and the hassle of having to make contact with your company, no matter how good your customer service is, will be frustrating for them.
Your goals are to reduce complexity, mainstream processes, create an employee hierarchy and organise your space to facilitate the most efficient layout for your employees to work and circulate. As your business grows, you constantly need to identify leaders and promote them to supervisory positions when necessary. By building a hierarchy of supervisors and managers, you ensure that the business results remain at a consistently high standard.
Appoint supervisors and specify roles
In a micro business, employees tend to wear many hats. The sewing employee fetches the fabric, cuts it, sews it, and then packs it. It makes sense then, but when your company grows, that model is no longer efficient. If your sewing team increases from two to four people, it is time to name a leader to ensure the technique and quality of the sewing is consistent. As your team grows you can appoint supervisors and so on.
Having each team member concentrating on one task tends to deliver a much better result than multitasking. Yes, you read that right. It’s true – even if your original team members used to do more than one task and it worked for a while, it is not efficient when your business grows. From Plato in ancient Greece and eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith to industrialist Henry Ford in the early 1900s, the theories of division of labour and labour hierarchy have played key roles in the advancement of society, industry and globalisation.
Even though it may seem easier and cheaper to have one employee doing several tasks in several posts than a number of employees covering one task each and only that task, when it comes to deliverability set against salary, it actually works out more expensive due to setup and set-down costs. When many orders arrive and the demand for your product increases, the time employees waste changing tasks or posts will be noticeable as the production capacity will not be at its maximum. I am not suggesting you do time-in-motion studies on your staff (although it is a worthwhile exercise to do on your processes for positioning of tools, etc), but it is important to bear in mind the time your employees spend outside of their core role’s responsibility.
Employees can focus on what they do best
Keeping your employees doing what they do best, which also decreases mistakes, avoids adding tasks to their workload that would be better done by someone with different training. Additionally, there are often many tasks that don’t need a great deal of training and can be done by someone who isn’t costing the business as much in terms of salary.
Imagine a heart surgeon, highly specialised and efficient in what they do, not to mention very highly paid. In the operating theatre, they focus on completing the surgery to the best of their ability. It is the hospital manager’s job to give the surgeon the resources (staff and tools) that will remove any distractions from completing their goal and, of course, secure a positive outcome for the patient. The team around the surgeon may be doing something as simple as passing a scalpel, having supplies ready or wiping the surgeon’s brow. Can you imagine if the surgeon had to pause his progress to rummage in a drawer for a small scalpel blade or a clamp?
Leaders optimise conditions for people to perform their best
You might not put someone’s life at risk if your product is delivered late or faulty (depending on what it is), but repeated mistakes will suck the life out of your company and create issues that can be very costly. It is your job to maximise efficiency and reduce wastage of time, resources, money, etc by letting your team do their work. It might surprise you, but most successful business owners do not manage their processes (which you will already have laid out and approved in your systems); they lead their people and consistently optimise the employees’ environment, which also optimises their performance.
