How to Balance Ops + Growth
I know you want to grow your business.
And I know you’ve invested in coaches, masterminds, strategists, and programs to make that growth happen.
If you’re like a lot of my clients, that means that ops and scaling fall to the wayside while you focus on growth…
…until something breaks down or frustrates you so much that you’ve had enough and your ops become a priority.
This back and forth can feel like a roller coaster ride.
One that’s full of belly dropping anxiety as you worry about break downs and whether you can handle more growth.
So how do you balance growing your business with building the ops foundation to handle that growth?
Because I get the struggle.
You know on some level that building your ops to scale is important. Necessarily even.
BUTTTTT growth strategies are more exciting. 😎😎
More active. More tangible. And growth means…more to invest in team members and ops outsourcing…
So it kinda makes sense that growth should come first, right?
Here’s the thing…
While growth is fun and growth can allow you to invest in more ops resources…
It’s harder to grow with a scalable ops foundation because you have to work harder to implement the growth strategies.
It’s disruptive to your business when you don’t have the ops foundation to handle the growth that comes in.
So even though it seems more logical to focus on growth first and ops later, prioritizing your ops now will accelerate your growth.
It will make it easier, less stressful, and dare I say Effortless, to grow your business.
So here are the 3 steps that I take with my clients to balance growth and their ops foundations so they grow faster, easier than ever.
#1 Know that your ops foundation DOES require prioritization
This one might seem like a no-brainer, but it bears repeating.
Because even if you know you need to prioritize your ops foundation, you might not KNOW KNOW it.
Knowing but not knowing might look like….
🙈 Banking SOP templates and worksheets, thinking you’ll get to them later.
🙈 Planning on hiring an OBM or other service provider down the road to handle your ops foundation for you.
🙈 Making your ops foundation contingent on signing X number of new clients or hitting Y amount of revenue.
So you know it’s important, you’re planning for it, and you’re punting it down the line again, and again, and again until a critical breakdown of f-up forces it to become a priority (again like so many of my clients 😂😂).
If this is your approach as well, just knowing that there will never be a perfect time for your ops so you have to intentionally make time for it is the first step.
You have hundreds of decisions about where to put your energy and efforts and if you want freedom, flexibility, and growth all at the time, that requires an intentional decision to make your ops foundation something that you and your team are actually working on.
#2 Slow down a little bit to speed up
Once you make the decision to intentionally prioritize your ops foundation, you can build it into your action plans.
This doesn’t mean you have to stop growth.
This doesn’t even mean you have to slow growth down to a crawl.
This means making room for in your ops as an active project you work.
So what is your capacity?
Between your growth initiatives and clients, what is your capacity?
Is it 5 projects? 10 projects? 15 Projects? (*HINT: It’s probably less than you think.)
When you know your capacity, assign 1 project to building out a part (or a part of a part) of your ops foundation.
This looks like…
✅ Finalizing your tech stack (or part of your tech stack like your project and task)
✅ Locking in your onboarding and offboarding process (or the materials, links, and docs you use during onboarding/offboarding)
✅ Revising your team’s roles (or reviewing their workloads in preparation to update their roles)
Take action towards one step that will solidify your ops foundation. It’s not just about big leaps, and in fact, a lot of baby steps that add up over time, is more common than the consistent big leaps.
#3 Focus on your scaling phase
You might have seen me share the 2 key ops priorities you have depending on your phase of scaling a couple weeks ago.
I created the scaling phases to give you a baseline on the biggest priorities in each phase so you can cut out shiny object syndrome and have laser focus steps that will actually move the needle in your business.
To recap…
- Scaling Phase 1: Stabilize
- Clarifying how you want the core functions of your business to operate and cut the excess.
- Preparing to delegate by locking core tech and building good organizational habits.
- Scaling Phase 2: Solidify
- Testing your core processes with your team to fill in the gaps.
- Learning what you need as a manager and reinforce in your process.
- Scaling Phase 3: Scaling
- Drafting SOPs.
- Delegating whole processes and projects.
Identify the phase you’re in and focus your actions on the drivers that will move the needle in your business.
That means if you’re in Phase 1, you haven’t put much thought into your ops outside of knowing you need them to determine how you want your business to operate.
Figure out what the end results you want in each part of your business so you know where you want to start and end your processes and get organized so you can get help doing it.
When you make the decision and take incremental action to build your ops foundation, you can have both.
You can grow AND have the ops foundation to handle that growth at the same time.
And you can do it without major disruption to your business.
Without paying a $20k price tag for someone to build it all for you.
And without shutting down growth.
Get more scaling hacks here.
Check out the latest:
10x Your Business with Total Confidence
How would you celebrate if 20 new leads come in tomorrow? 🎉🎉
And how would you celebrate if you signed on 10, 15, or 20 new clients immediately?
💃 Happy dance like no one is watching and take a day off?
🧖♀️ Book a relaxing spa day?
💎 Buy yourself something pretty and/or sparkly that you’ve had your eye on for a while?
✈️ Book a first-class vacation?
🍾 Or maybe you have something else in mind that’s decadent, luxurious, and wonderful.
When this moment arrives, I hope you will revel in your success, celebrate how far you’ve come, and be more than ready to receive this and more…🥰🥰
But what if…you’re not sure if you can actually receive this level of growth without breaking down?
Your Uncertainty is Leaving Money on the Table
What if you could…
🤔 Build an automatic upsell for your offers?
🤔 Become an affiliate for your favorite coach?
🤔 Package and sell your methodology?
🤔 Consult for startups or corporations?
🤔 Launch the new offer that came to you during lunch last week?
How much more money would make if you actually had the bandwidth and the resources to leverage what you already have in place?
Where to Start Building Your Scalable Ops
Does scaling your business feel overwhelming?
Because building your systems… is overwhelming.
Building all the tech and automations to scale… is overwhelming
Building and managing a team to get you there…is overwhelming.
Because how are you supposed to actually put them into place?
I get it – building all the systems, hiring all the team members, and upgrading all the tech that you need to scale your business is a very big ask, especially when it seems like they need to be all done at once.
But here’s the thing that no one talks about: scaling (even when you have a team of VAs, OBMs, and high-level consultants doing it for you) NEVER happens all at once…
Scaling really happens in phases.
Scaling your business can be so confusing.
But it doesn't have to be!
Take the Business Ops Assessment and in less than 5 minutes I’ll tell you what’s standing in the way of your next $100k and what to do about it. Sound good?
