What to Do When Your Business Doesn’t Feel Like it Fit

How often do you feel like you don’t know how all the pieces of your business fit together?

How often do you feel like something is “off” – your business not running quite right but you can’t put your finger on what’s not working or how to fix it?

How often do you feel like you don’t know if you have the right processes, the right tech, or even the right team members because nothing seems to be gelling?

If you’re nodding along here, then the key you’re missing is mastery over your ops – that understanding of how your business operates to get the results you want.

This might not make sense but, stick with me because you probably built your ops based on recommendations from your coach and friends, courses you’ve taken, and what you see other business owners are doing.

Using all the different copycat moves, recommendations, and approaches got you to this point where you could move forward, but now you have…

Processes that kind of work…but aren’t totally clear, focused, or working to help you reach your goals.
Tech that kind of does the job…but doesn’t work in every situation, scenario, or part of your business.
Team members that are kind of help you…but can’t help you with bigger, more complex work.

So, you have built bits and pieces of your ops foundation that kind of work, but aren’t aligned with your scaling goals – no wonder something feels off.

Everything is working…but not in alignment with each other and not in alignment with your scaling goals.

How do you fix this?

By mastering your operations because it’s incredibly difficult to scale your business if you don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish or if what you’re doing (or planning to do) will help you accomplish it.

Ops Mastery Step #1 The big picture

As the leader and CEO of your business, it’s natural for you to be up close and personal with your business.

You can see the nitty gritty (probably because you’re doing it) but to master your ops so you can confidently lead and scale your business, it starts with taking a step back so you can see your whole business.

Look at your business as a complete machine and how the work flows through it.

Think about:

How does marketing flow into sales?
How does onboarding flow into your client work and then to completion?
Is this how I want to work?

It’s this knowledge about how work flows through the business that will tell you not only what you need to build, strengthen, or remove altogether, but also what to focus on to make a difference in your business.

When you make decisions based on how clients and work flowed through your business, you don’t waste precious time, energy, or resources on projects that sound great but won’t actually have an impact on your growth.

One of my clients finally saw how their work flowed from marketing to sales and was able to cut expensive and time-consuming funnel projects off of their to-do list because the projects didn’t support the way work and clients flowed in their business.

Ops Mastery Step #2 The details that matter

Mastering your ops so you can scale is all about drilling down into the layers of your business. The first layer was understanding the high-level workflows so that you make decisions about what big projects and tasks would be impactful to your business.

This second layer is all about honing in on the details that matter so you can strengthen and streamline your foundation.

To be clear, it’s not about mastering every single tiny detail, dot, or line in the business.

I’m talking about understanding the details that matter – the ones that make a difference – to your process.

So when you’re looking at your processes ask yourself:

Why are you taking certain steps or actions?
Do you need to do them?
If you don’t do them, will it hurt or improve your process?

In this step, you’re looking for the specific steps and actions that actually matter to your processes – the ones that you can’t skip without changing the results or the experiences that your process provides.

When you know the key steps, you can cut out extra steps that don’t add to the experience, and you can focus on steps that do matter and make sure that they are working and create the best results and experiences for you.

When I worked with a client to redesign their onboarding process, they were able to cut 3 steps that didn’t actually do anything for them or their clients and were able to redirect their team to build out templates that would improve the client experience.

Ops Mastery Phase #3 Delegation

Ops mastery is not just something you do for yourself as the leader of the business.

When we’re talking about mastery, the ultimate goal is delegation: Where you can delegate the doing because you know what the results are supposed to be and the key steps that will get you there.

Because it’s hard to outsource and get great results if you can’t communicate what your operations should do and it’s even harder to manage whoever you outsource to if you don’t know what the critical steps are to get there.

The fact is: When you, the leader and CEO of your business, don’t have the key knowledge about how your business runs and what is important to get your results, you’re putting all your faith in your team and service providers to build the right systems, the right tech, and the right automations for you without direct guidance on what’s critical and important to your business.

This is where the lack of trust in your team comes from.

This is where the uncertainty around whether you’re doing things “right” comes from.

This is where the confusion around the tech that you pick comes from.

When you don’t know at a base level how your business operates, it’s really hard to be confident and trust your systems, tech, and team.

You don’t NEED to build your ops or even write a single SOP yourself, but you need to know them well enough to communicate them to a VA, OBM, strategist, consultant, or other team member and hold them accountable to producing what you do want and need.

And this is why mastery of your ops is critical to scaling.

When you have mastery of your ops, you can make decisions about the right people, the right projects, and the right investments without second guessing yourself because you’ll know for certain whether or not what their offering is aligned with what you need.

You’ll have certainty that your business is operating the right way to get you the results that you want.

You can walk through these steps and develop your ops mastery on your own or you can have an Ops expert at your side, helping you cut through the noise and develop mastery at lightning speed.

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