I hope you’re having a beautiful October weekend. We’re in Halloween mode around our house, which means Paw Patrol costumes arrived in the mail this week and we took a trip to the pumpkin patch with my eldest son’s preschool on Friday. I love fall in the Pacific Northwest and am trying to make time to enjoy it as much as possible.
In this week’s newsletter I’m back with the last email in my series of responses on how to think like an operator as your company enters the early stages of scale. These three newsletters have been in response to a series of questions sent by a reader and coaching client.
Letter from a Founder
Here was the original letter in full, with the questions I’m answering this week in bold.
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Hey B,
Here are my questions for you (specific to Operations):
- How did you know if your role as a COO was either A FIT / NOT A FIT for your skillset and your career arch?
- Related: Was it imperative for you to experience that level of management to get to the place you are today?
- What were some of the of the check engine lights you monitored as a more experienced COO that you would pass along to yourself when you were a newly-embarked COO?
- Did you have any key systems building processes?
- Did you have any key metrics imperative to a COO role in specific that you tracked?
- What are two or three things you observe in the world of Operations that you feel every Director of Operations or COO has to get right in order for their company to succeed?
- How did you know you were done in that role?
These are big, chunky questions. Answer none, one, some, or all. I just took your invitation to bring things into email, so I wanted to make the request.
I could come up with another 12 probably. But 6 felt like a good place to stop.
Have a good week,
An Ops-Focused Partner
This week I’m answering questions four and six (in bold). Question seven I’ll save for another time because to be honest, I’m still processing what all the factors were that made me leave that role.
You can read part one on what it takes to be a COO (questions one and two) and part two on check engine lights and metrics (questions three and five).
How to build systems for scale as an operator
Hey Ops-Focused,
There are two ways of thinking about this:
- Discovering what works
- Fixing what’s broken
Discovering What Works: Building Systems from Scratch
When you’re in discovering what works mode, it’s your job to behave like a scientist.
Before you have any process in your company, you have to figure out what works. Scaling and automating something that hasn’t been proven to work is a great way to waste a lot of money and time. So your job is to find out what works through experimentation, like a scientist.
Any great experiment starts with a hypothesis. If you’re trying to get a growth engine turning, you have to start with whatever you think will work.
For example, when I started my coaching business 18 months ago, I needed a way to acquire new clients. I had a sense that trust is low when entrepreneurs see someone is a coach as their profession. So I needed options for high-signal, high-trust ways to build relationships with potential clients. What are the best ways to do that?
I made a list:
- Direct outreach to people who already know, like, and trust me
- Asking people in my network who know, like, and trust me for high-signal referrals
- Giving workshops at events where my target market is in attendance
- Keynote speaking
- Hosting dinner parties with people in my target market
- Writing, podcasting, and making YouTube videos to communicate my expertise
I wanted it to be true that I could build high trust relationships easily and remotely. The reality was that direct outreach wasn’t very effective, so I moved on to my next idea. At first I struggled to get referrals because people in my network didn’t understand who was a good fit for my work. So I kept going down the list.
Then I gave a workshop at a conference where the people in the room were 1) creator-founders, 2) doing at least $100,000 in revenue, and 3) highly engaged in the topic (scaling their impact through good hiring and culture building practices). Multiple people followed up with me to find out how we could work together. I was on to something.
So I ran a follow up experiment. (We all know about the replication crisis in academic research, right? I wasn’t going to repeat that mistake in my own work.) I gave the same workshop at a second event.
This time I also hosted a dinner party with attendees who matched my ideal customer profile. I got even more new clients.
Then I did it a third time, but this time I added a layer — I followed up with every person I met who I would love to work with in the future. I sent them a highly personalized and genuine voice note telling them why I admire them and how meaningful it would be to work as their coach. This resulted in even more new clients.
My hypothesis as I head into 2025 is that if I give a keynote and workshop at four highly targeted events, one per quarter, my coaching calendar will be more full than I can handle. So we’re building systems to bring this to life. One highly targeted speaking event per quarter, where I host a dinner, and do follow ups accordingly.
All of this came out of an experimentation mindset.
When I started this business, I had no idea what would work to get clients! None! And that’s true of you too. You have hypotheses. And those hypotheses should be tested rigorously until you find something that seems to work.
Then you see if you can repeat it again. Then you build a system around it. Like a scientist.
Fixing What’s Broken: Repairing Systems for Scale
Once you have systems in place, they sometimes break. Maybe you reach a new stage of scale and what used to work doesn’t work any more. Maybe you have team turn over and something gets dropped as the new person takes over. There are many more ways for a system to break than we can outline here.
When you’re in fixing what’s broken mode, it’s your job to behave like a detective.
The key is to understand the macro skills required to fix the system once it breaks. There are four macro skills here:
- Know what matters enough to spend time on
- Identify problems holding you back
- Find the right solution
- Give the resources necessary to get it solved
Know what matters What matters is dictated by your strategy and goals. You can’t fix everything at once. So you have to down select to the areas that are likely to move you closest to your goals if they’re improved. This is where the concept of roam “biz ops” teams came from. They are like seal teams for establishing and fixing systems for scale.
So what areas of your business need the most attention in order for you to reach your goals?
Identify problems There are always problems in any area of a business. This is why it’s important to choose areas that will move you towards your goals first.
Once you’re in an area of your business, ie marketing, it’s time to dig in. What data is available? What story is it telling? What does your team say is broken? What do your customers and potential customers say is broken?
Based on your own judgment, in what order would you put those problems for the biggest return to the business?
Find the right solution Once you’re staring at all the problems in a given area of your business, you have to figure out what’s causing them in order to solve them. There are fundamentally three types of problems:
- Focus (wrong thing)
- Performance (wrong execution)
- Ability (wrong people)
Solutions become obvious once you find the cause.
If you have a problem of focus, your job as the leader is to get your team’s effort pointed in the right direction. “Stop doing this, start doing this” is often what this looks like. Sometimes that means you have to make hard decisions on things you’re not going to do anymore so things can get fixed.
If you have a problem of performance, your team might need to understand what great execution looks like. You might have to reset the expectation and standard for the team. You might be able to do this yourself or you can hire an outside teacher or consultant to demonstrate what the standard should be.
If you have a problem of ability, which is a matter of your judgment as informed by the data you have on your people’s past execution, then you probably need to let someone go and replace them.
Sometimes — RARELY!! — you can find another seat on the bus for people if they’ve been in a role that doesn’t fit their gifts. But you have to get the right people in the right seats so the system can get fixed.
On occasion, you’ll go through the process of trying to find the root of the problem and you’ll realize the system is still working, but it’s not sufficient to get you to the next stage of scale. So you have to go back into experimentation mode to add layers to the system for the next S-Curve of growth.
—
Do you need to be a scientist or a detective right now?
Here’s the summary of what I want you to take away from my answers to your question, Ops-Focused:
There are two modes for creating systems as an operator:
- Scientist mode — experimenting to find out what works and then turning it into a system that scales
- Detective mode — finding what’s broken and fixing it for the the next stage of scale
Knowing what mode your company needs from you is key. Then it’s your job to make the process clear to your team so they can follow your lead.
As your company grows, you can teach this method of system-building so that you’re not a bottleneck. But when you’re in the early stages of scale, like most of my clients and readers, you’re the one who needs to set the bar on this work.
Good luck!
– B
Things to Ponder in the Week Ahead
Before I sign off for the week, I thought I’d share a couple of quick thoughts that seemed to resonate from this past week.
Pick a Lane, Make an Impact, Let the Rest Go:
You could sit around all day reading news, scrolling social media, and taking in all the pain in the world as a way to feel helpless, hopeless, and sad about the future.
— Barrett Brooks (@BarrettABrooks) October 18, 2024
Or you could turn it all off, embrace that you are just one person, pick a lane, and start or join a company…
The Three Most Important Shifts to Make
The three most important shifts I’ve seen in hundreds of hours of coaching leaders over the past two years:
— Barrett Brooks (@BarrettABrooks) October 18, 2024
1. Low agency —> high agency
2. Repressed emotions —> processed emotions
3. Avoidant/aggressive —> Constructive conflict
Almost everything comes down to these 3 things
I have two more letters in the queue. One is on the topic of burnout (identifying it, acknowledging it, bouncing back from it) and the other is on the topic of recruiting (where to start, how to systematize it).
I’d love to hear from you! I bump the letters that resonate most with me and I think will be most valuable to you to the front of the line. So please do write. I might answer your letter first!
Much love and respect,
Barrett