Ep 2 How to bring more operational excellence into your seven figure business

Hello, hello, hello. Welcome to this week’s [00:01:00] episode of the Audacious Empire’s podcast. Today, I want to talk to you about operational excellence and how you can bring more operational excellence into your business. So, this might be a term you’re not fully familiar with. Let me explain it. Operational excellence is when the day to day functions of your business happen without friction.

It’s operational excellence that creates a business that is like a well oiled machine. So that term you’ve probably heard. Operational excellence underpins the well oiled machine. So what does that look like? It is a concept where you are connecting every business resource that you have with your impact goals.[00:02:00] 

What are you here for? Why are you here? How does each piece in your business get us closer to making that impact? It’s connecting everything back to your big, big goal. Because without that, you end up very disjointed. And then you lose efficiency, productivity, it costs more money, and you’ve got people that just really aren’t that happy.

You always have a better work environment when people understand where they fit and how what they’re doing impacts everybody else. And so operational excellence is about pulling that all together and seeing that big picture. So today, I’m going to tell you how you can bring more operational excellence into your business.

[00:03:00] And I’m going to go through five different cogs. Now, there are more than this, but I’m hoping this gives you enough of an overview that you think can take some pieces, get some quick wins and go and start building your well oiled machine. The first thing that I want to talk about before we jump into the cogs is reviewing.

If you’re looking for operational excellence, the first thing that you have to do is take a bird’s eye view. You have to look at your business as a machine. From a high level, pretend that you’re an engineer. Put your engineer cap on and have a look. What are the cogs that you have in place?

How is every cog turning? Is there enough oil? Are the right things happening in the right sequence? Is there any friction? And then, what you’re going to do is start to tinker a little bit. So with our [00:04:00] different cogs, we’re going to look a little bit deeper, and then we’re going to go, right, maybe it is this piece of friction, and maybe it’s this that’s causing it.

What if I change something? And then you’re going to look at the impact that that has when you change it. Once you’ve kind of got the lay of the land, we want to review our cogs.

The five cogs that we’re going to look at in this episode are the People cogs, the Process cogs, the Tech cogs, the Sales and Marketing cogs, and the Completion cogs.

The first one, the People cogs, which is always my favourite because I am a people come first, peopler. What is the People COG? It is your team. And so we need to get your team sorted. What we’re wanting to see is do you have the right people in the right place to get the outcome that you’re looking for?

So have you got the right ingredients for the [00:05:00] outcome cake you’re trying to bake? Because if you’re trying to make a recipe that requires you know, four of a certain person, one of another and 17 of a senior, of senior people, and you don’t have that right mix, your cake ain’t gonna come out good. So it’s really important to look at the different team members that you have, if they’re in the right role, and if there are things missing, or do you have excess?

Sometimes we can have excess people, and it doesn’t necessarily mean we need to get rid of people, it means that we can shift people over to different roles where there is a need to get everything to happen smoother. And so what we’re wanting to look at when we’re looking at our people is the roles and responsibilities.

Are they really clear? Crystal clear? Does everybody know what they’re doing, what they’re here for, and what they’re responsible [00:06:00] for? So that when there’s a big win, yeah, they get the credit. And if something falls over, hey, they’re responsible for fixing it. We want people that are taking ownership of their roles, and we want them to be confident in the decisions that they need to make on a day to day basis.

And to have that level of ownership. Over everything that they do, the result will be better work. That’s just reality. So we need these roles to be really clear. We don’t want confusion because that’s where friction gets created, including like people friction between people. Whereas if roles and responsibilities are clear, that doesn’t happen.

And then the final thing that you want to look at with your people cogs is your structure. So where do the people sit within the organisation and what’s the reporting structure? What’s the communication structure? Who reports to who? How are [00:07:00] people meant to communicate? What are those lines? It’s really, really important because it means that when someone is stuck, they know exactly who to go to.

They know they know how many layers of communication there are to go above them, above them, above them. They can see, it helps them see how their job impacts the business as a whole. Because they can see their one spot versus all the things surrounding them. And that only comes with structure.

The other thing is having really open communication channels. And that is so that we can free up. As many resources as possible to help navigate any problems. So if somebody is empowered in their role, they’re going to do the best that they can to foresee any problems that are going to happen.

And they know their limits. They know[00:08:00]  when they’ve reached the point of they’ve tried too many things that’s not working. They don’t know what to do. If you have a really clear structure and they know who they can communicate with and go sideways or up to say, Hey, this is what I’ve tried.

I don’t know what to do. And get that support. You’ll find that all these problems get resolved a lot faster. And When it is that clear pathway, there’s less confusion and there’s less worry. People get less stressed about, who am I going to speak to? And what are they going to think? And maybe this is something I should have worked out.

Whereas if it is a group effort and those communication lines are clear, things happen a lot quicker, which is exactly what you want happening.

So the next cog is the process cog. All right. So what are the things that are happening regularly? In your business, what is the day to day stuff? The marketing, the [00:09:00] customer support, the planning, the admin, what are all these things? Because that’s what makes up the process cog. And we want to look at if those processes are accurate, if they are continuously being improved, if they are easy to implement and if they’re effective.

Like, is it the most effective way to do something? And so, to do that, you need to have functional SOPs. And I say functional because, you can write an SOP, and it can be this beautiful 100 page long document, but it can make no sense. Or it can be too much detail and too hard to navigate, and it effectively becomes useless.

So what we want is actual functional SOPs, and we want to start with our core [00:10:00] processes. Because I know that a lot of people shy away from SOPs because it’s boring. Like, really, can’t we just go for the next shiny thing? Can’t we just go for the next goal? Can’t we just, play with the new marketing tool?

Like, why do we want to invest our time and money in SOPs? And so that’s why I’m saying you need to do it for your core processes. Because if you have the core functionality of your business documented properly in a way that is consumable and actionable, then you’re giving your business continuity.

And that means that if somebody is sick or away or gets hit by a bus, which none of us ever want to happen, but it does happen. Chloe got hit by a bus on the way to work one day. Was not good. But. Having functional SOPs gives your business the ability to continue without any one person. And so let me tell you a little bit of a [00:11:00] story.

We had a client who was working with Chloe quite closely and she was doing all of the operations and overseeing all the projects. And Chloe was going away for a little while. So we’re getting closer and we’re getting closer to when Chloe was going to go away. And the client said to her, so what’s going to happen when you’re gone?

And Chloe said, what do you mean? And they said, well, I don’t know, like, is there going to be a gap? And Chloe said, no, Leanne is here. She’ll do it. And I wasn’t an unfamiliar. Piece in this project. Like I was in there with her too. And then they’ve said, Oh, but like, is she capable? And I found it hilarious.

I found [00:12:00] it so funny because I taught Chloe all of our operations. And so just, we have general rhythms that we follow. So I’m like, she’s following my blueprint with her tweaks. and in this situation, I was just, I just found it really funny. Anyway, so she said to the client, no, it’ll be fine. Leanne is more than capable.

Like she’s already totally across everything. And so then the client was like, ah, okay, cool. No worries. But how is it possible for somebody to be fully across everything? And. The way that we’re able to navigate that is with SOPs. It is a a system that we create. So then no matter which client we are working on, we know where to go looking for something.

And we know how to hand over really well. But we wouldn’t be able to do that [00:13:00] if we didn’t have the functional SOP foundation. And then when there is Chloe needs to go away, everything would have stopped. And that’s just not a good business plan. We also need to have a continuous improvement mindset when it comes to process.

So what I mean by this is we never want to document a process so that it is for one certain person. We want to document SOPs in a way that looks at the business as a whole. And so it is the, this is what this role impacts. Doing this process will have this flow on effect.

It’s giving it context in the system and that changes how you do a task. So if you have the right context, you know when you can change something. Or you know if you do this slightly differently, it’s going to have this impact. So we don’t want to do that.[00:14:00] But we also want people to be improving their documenting of processes as they’re going.

So when you’re doing this, if the process is wrong, fix it. Otherwise, this ends up being a really big overhead to go back and document and document and re document. Because we all know that really, as soon as an SOP, that 100 page document is created, it’s out of date. Things move too quickly. So we want a way to make it really simple for people to be able to keep that data up to date.

And then we want to look at automation. Have we automated our processes? And it doesn’t have to be a whole process. It can be a piece of a process. and have we done it right? Or have we removed too much human? Because sometimes we do that. We can automate pretty much anything, guys. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to get the outcome that you want.

Because if you take too much human away, you lose sales. You lose [00:15:00] connection. People feel like they’re talking to robots and that’s not fun. Or one glitch in the system and the whole thing comes crashing down. So we want to get that balance right too. So you want to be looking at your automation side.

Then we want to look at the tech cogs. 

I love tech cogs because I’m a little bit nerdy that way. And I love tools. So we want to review, what is the technology that we’re using? What’s in our digital ecosystem? And in our group of tools in our tech stack, is there overlap? Are there things that we have that have the capability to do what the others are doing?

So then we’ve got crossover and where there’s crossover, there’s wastage. Or do we. Not have enough tools. So when we work with clients, we’ve got like this big digital ecosystem map. It’s really cool. But it has like all the different tool kind of categories and tool types and we use it to go, okay, what does the client have [00:16:00] now?

And what do we think they need? Because then it’s kind of like we can see the gaps pretty clearly if they have a cluster of this kind of tool, but none of this one. And usually if that tool doesn’t exist, it means there’s inefficiencies for whatever that tool brings. So it gives us that starting point to review.

But it is all about looking at what we do have, what they, what these tools are capable of, what we’re using them for, and if we really need them. And then if there are things where we could benefit from having a different tool, and it might even just be an integration tool. How are we going to connect tool 1 to tool 2? 

Then, we want to look at the ROI. What tools are we paying for and what are they doing for us? Are we getting what we want out of them? Could we scrap some and use a different tool that we already have to do that same thing? [00:17:00] And therefore we’re not doubling up on cost. Or are there capabilities of one of the tools we’re already paying for that we’re just not using?

And we could, and it would benefit us. So we want to be making sure that every resource, whether it’s a person or a technology, is working towards our impact goals. To the best of its ability and capacity. And then the next cog is the sales and marketing cog. Now this has its own cog because there is so much that goes into sales and marketing from an operational perspective.

And I really wanted to talk to you about creating marketing rhythms. So things that happen on a repeatable cycle and applying system thinking to your marketing and your sales. And it’s, one of those things where if you can look at it from a bit of a higher level at the purpose of what you’re trying to achieve, we want to be able to connect with our [00:18:00] audience on a regular basis.

We want to do it in these different forms. And we want to cover, you know, our set branded topics. And then it’s how do we do that as an organisation? Well, we get a long form piece of content. And then from that, we’re going to distribute it in these ways to these channels. And then here is how that gets executed.

So each time we’re coming down a layer, coming down a layer so everybody can see what’s happening from a high level, medium, low, and then you start to create these rhythms, which is all about, okay, this is how we find our content topic. This is what the kind of content we’re doing is. Are you doing podcasts?

Are you doing blogs? Are you doing YouTube videos? What is it that you’re doing? And then what happens once that’s done? What’s the rhythm that happens? Well okay, it gets recorded, then it goes to the editing team, then it gets chopped up by the social person, then the copy [00:19:00] gets approved. What is it? How do we create this rhythm and the time frame so we know we’re always going to deliver what we need delivered on time?

So it can sound complicated, but it’s not. It’s complex because there’s lots of moving pieces, but it really keeps your sales and marketing running smoothly because of the way it’s built. And it’s built to consider every other piece. Well, if I don’t do this by then, that means that The designer won’t get the bits they need to do their job, which is going to make it late.

And if I don’t do this, then if I don’t get the draft to the copywriter, the copywriter isn’t going to be able to write it out properly. And then the social person isn’t going to be able to divide it into how many posts they need. And so it gives really great visibility into how this system works and the flow on effect.

And it puts more accountability on different [00:20:00] people because , they have that clarity that they didn’t have before. So that’s all about how we create brand cohesion. If we can have these systems in place, we’re going to be visible, we’re going to be consistently present, we’re going to create brand stickiness.

Now we also need to consider, when it comes to our sales and marketing cog, connection to create sales. So, how are we connecting with our audience? How are we having conversations? What are we, what are the processes that underpin that? And it doesn’t mean that there has to be You know, an automated process or a rigid process, but something that encourages these conversations.

When someone is talking about one of these five things, send them a DM and ask how they are. If you connect with someone at a networking event and they have these characteristics. Connect with them on LinkedIn and try [00:21:00] and further that conversation. Get to know them more. Like, what are the tactical things you’re doing to build these relationships?

And to stay in tune with what your audience actually wants. The only way to stay in tune with what your audience needs is to talk to them. And then we also need to consider any missed opportunities. So when we’re doing the things that we’re doing, we want to review them and go, Ah, maybe we could do this.

And if we had have done that for the last 50 events that we went to, possibly could have put us here by now. And so it’s constantly that reflection and then improve what you’re doing, or try new things. 

And then the final cog that I want to talk to you about is the completion cog. And you may not have heard about this one.

It is not your typical business department. And that is because I made it up. I have worked with enough visionaries and thought leaders to know [00:22:00] that the completing bit is an issue. . We get really excited about the next thing we can try, the next thing we can do, the next problem we can solve. And a lot of the time what happens is some of the things that we had started to do already get paused.

We’ll come back to it. We’ll come back to it. Can I tell you something? Each time you come back to it, you are losing. efficiency and where that thing got up to. So let’s say you got something to 80 percent complete. When you go back to it, it’s now at 50 percent because of the amount of work you have to do to translate everything from where you were then to where you are now and get back into what the purpose of it was in the first place.

Like you are reworking and reworking and you’re losing that 30 percent just by doing that. Whereas if you had have just spent the extra 20 percent of time to get it to 100 percent [00:23:00] complete, you would be getting the ROI from that activity now. And so sometimes we really have to look at, okay, what is in our work in progress?

What are we actually finishing? What have we started and then gotten out? And what’s that doing for us? So I think that this is really important when you’re looking at operational excellence. It’s, that is crucial. And if, even if you just make this one change, it will get you so much further, so much faster and get you creating the impact that you really want.

So I hope that that helps explains what operational excellence is, how you can start using some of these things to turn your business into a well oiled machine and get more out of the resources that you have. Let me know in the comments. Thanks for listening. Bye!

 [00:24:00] 

E1 Introducing The Audacious Empires Podcast

Leanne Woff: [00:00:00] 

Hello, hello, hello everybody. Welcome to [00:01:00] the Audacious Empires podcast. This is our very first episode and I am so excited. I have wanted to create this podcast for literally years. I think it’s been four or five years that I have wanted to do this specific podcast and up until now it hasn’t been the right time or I’ve been too scared or… I didn’t think that I knew enough. And so I’m so excited to be here and now it is the time. So thank you so much for listening, for lending your ears and your eyes. I appreciate you being here. All right, so why was I so desperate to launch this podcast? Why has it been simmering and simmering and never, I haven’t given up on it, clearly.

The reason being is I wanted to create a place to discuss and encourage more [00:02:00] conversation around what it really takes to run a successful high six, seven figure business on a day to day basis. What’s it really like behind the scenes? What really happens at this level of business? What are those tactical things? 

I wanted to create a space to share the things I’ve learned along my journey supporting oodles of empire builders. The tips and tactics I’ve seen that make a really big impact. And then sometimes the ones that have been epic fails. I want to help you to create a business that operates like a well oiled machine.

So that you can step out of the operation side of your business and slide in to being the CEO. 

Well 

Leanne Woff: Who am I? And am I [00:03:00] qualified to even talk about this? The answer is yes. I am Leanne Woff. I am a mother of six kids. Including two sets of twins, two foster babies, a furry needy Cavoodle, and my team and I have been the cornerstone support behind countless thought leaders, coaches, course creators, and multi brand legends.

We’re OBMs and integrators. We create capacity. We streamline. We systemize. We strategize and we execute with precision. We’ve got the ability to see the big picture, to contribute to it, and then to break it down into actionable steps, which is a rarity. [00:04:00] I’ve seen the highs and the lows, the mountains of joy and the crippling pressure that comes with running a business of this size.

I have first hand insight. Into how to manage lots of moving pieces, actively guiding and course correcting to achieve the result we’re gunning for. The one that is non negotiable, the impact that you want to make, the knowledge that’s not readily shared to bring ease to the execution of the big visions.

I’ve been the person behind the scenes running that show, and I really wanted to share that wealth of experience with you so that your [00:05:00] seven figure empire can feel a little bit easier. So I’ll be on this podcast every week sharing what I believe is crucial to continue growing a business that serves you.

As opposed to you serving it. I want to give you the tools to move you from being the bottleneck in your own business, to the growth catalyst. It’s 100 percent possible. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. So I’ll meet you here every week. Bring your coffee. Bring your tea. Bring your flavoured water. Whatever floats your boat.

And join me for short, sharp episodes bursting with badass business goodness. Thanks so much for joining me on this journey. See you next week.