Why hiring an OBM will keep you stuck
Your business coach and every other mentor and guru have been telling you that you need an OBM so that you can free up your time and take yourself out of your business…You think an OBM is going to solve all your problems and magically run your business and make your cash register ring without you lifting a finger. BUT the pathway to freedom in your biz is not dependent on a single hire. Honestly, I’ve seen more situations where hiring an OBM, an operations director, or an operations manager was a bad investment that didn’t return, that didn’t free up time, and that took more energy to get up and running.
Here are other situations where it’s a bad idea to hire an OBM:
If you don’t even have the foundations of your business built
If you don’t have:
The systems and processes in place
Your core team members who are there to execute in place
Your basic tech and automation already figured out
Then bringing on an OBM or operations manager at that point is a waste of time, energy, and money for you to bring in that hire, onboard them, and train them for a role that they’re not best suited for. In those situations, you need someone who’s going to give you more lift. If you’re going to hire, hire first the people who are going to give you a lift today. Think about who can take things off of your plate, so you can actually move into that CEO role and have a little more spaciousness in your schedule.
When you expect your OBM to build your foundations, manage your launches, and do it all in one shot
If you’re in a place where you have a lot of launches, the business feels really busy, and you’re drowning in your to-dos, you need resources to execute and to get that work done. It might be a bad hire for you to just bring on an OBM, thinking that they’re going to:
Rebuild the foundation of your business for you
Manage your projects and your strategic initiatives
Manage your team
Keep an eye on all of your key performance indicators
That is a lot for a single role to manage especially if you’re very budget-conscious and you don’t want to go over hours. You might be disappointed to find out that you’ve been in a retainer situation for six months or a year without fully built systems because your OBM has been busy keeping your business together.
If you want your OBM to get up and running once hired
If your team is running everything piecemeal, nothing is standardized and you want someone to just come into it and be able to take over and run things immediately, that’s a big ask and leads to sticky situations as your OBM gets up to speed…
Even the best-laid plans will take a lot longer when they need to unravel your business to really understand what your business does.
What are we trying to accomplish?
Where are all the projects?
Where are all the people?
Where is everything at?
These are questions to get the baseline and the lay of the land. This might take between 6-12 weeks before any work can actually happen.
Those are the situations that I see most frequently, where it would be a bad idea to hire an OBM, an operational manager, or any kind of operations director because you haven’t set the foundation for them to be successful.
So I strongly suggest that you focus on building your systems foundation, so every person that you bring on board can be successful, can be a 10, and can get up to speed in half the time.
That’s what I have in my team, and that’s what a lot of my clients also have in their businesses. Because we set up the foundations so that no matter who we hire, whether it is an OBM, fractional CEO, another VA, graphic designer, web designer, junior consultant, or other strategists, they all know exactly how we work.
We collapse the timeline from onboarding and a ramp-up period for them to really be able to take on work on their own, from 3+ months, down to two weeks. So don’t discount your systems and processes and the role that they really have in making your overall team successful.
Ready to hire an OBM after looking at your processes?
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Diane Lam
Diane helps online business owners build their backend foundations and grow their businesses with actual implementation guidance. Follow her on Instagram @dianelam.co