4 Steps to Set Up Your Business Operations from Scratch

Feeling overwhelmed by the chaos of your business operations? Thinking about streamlining your processes and achieving more with less effort?
Then this article is for you!
In this article, we'll cover everything you need to know to kickstart the operations of any business.

Breaking Down Operations

Let's start with the basics and work our way down to specific solutions.

Operations are various processes (accent on processes) and activities that a company carries out to deliver its products or services to customers and to achieve its goals. In other words, it is everything you do to serve the customers and get money in.

Taking operation's simplest definition, everything you do can be divided into 2 categories of work:

1. Work within processes. Usually is tight to specific recurring deliverables of medium-to-high volume. For example, website designs or refund processing.
2. Work outside of processes. Usually are random and/or recurring tasks. For example, generating XX reports, or purchasing XX products.

This means that every time you come up with a new task it goes:

• either to a specific process (pipeline)
• or somewhere

This somewhere is exactly where we are going to begin because every start-up (and sadly sometimes even medium-size companies) does not have a clear understanding of the processes they will be executing. As a result, they start as chaotic organizations whose main goal is to bring in sales and go past the proof of concept.

There is nothing bad in it, of course. This is how the majority of businesses start. If we do not generate cash, or know how to do it, what do we need the processes for, right?

The important part here is to identify this very moment when you are right past the proof of concept and it is time to build a solid foundation.

And I have an amazing trick for business owners to auto-identify that very moment.

Setting Up for Success

First, we need to set some things up before you go out there and try selling your products and services.

We will set up 2 things (aka pipelines):

1. That somewhere place (Daily Operations pipeline) I was talking about above to keep random and recurring tasks
2. Ideas Hub (Backlog) - a place to keep and process all your ideas or non-urgent important tasks.

This is literally a 30-mins setup that will allow you to structure whatever you are going to do next.
Note, you can use it for business as well as for personal life.

Now, what this enables is you (and your team) working within specific tasks processing structure following specific tasks processing rules (I'll show you how to set up both pipelines below).

Second, we need to WAIT.
Now that you and your team process all the tasks through those 2 pipelines, it is just a matter of time when tasks they work on:

• can be clustered into groups (separated into processes)
• are not perfectly fitting into the existing pipelines

These are the two indicators for building out your operations - creating a solid process-oriented foundation.

Practical Work

Easy.
Step 1. Get yourself a project management tool. There is a variety to chose from, like monday.com, airtable, ClickUp, SmartSuite, etc.

Step 2. Set up your Daily Operations pipeline.

Here is the simplest structure for the same:

To Do ➝ In Progress ➝ In Review ➝ Completed/Canceled

You can add the Blocked status/stage there to slightly increase the complexity.
Everything you do eventually goes through these stages. That's why this one-fits-all solution is awesome to kickstart your operations.

Step 3. Set up your Ideas Hub pipeline.

This will be your tasks/ideas repository.
Here is a simple structure to follow:

New ➝ Building ➝ In Review ➝ Ready To Go

As you may guess, tasks/ideas with the status Ready to Go are broken down into smaller chunks of work and can be moved to Daily Operations for execution.

Step 4. Get everyone on board.

In order for your operations to be successful, it's important to get everyone on your team on board and following the same processes. Provide training and support to ensure that everyone understands the pipelines and processes, and hold them accountable for following them. This will help ensure that everyone is working efficiently and effectively towards the same goals.

Conclusion

In conclusion, streamlining your business operations can be a game-changer for your company. By breaking down your operations into specific processes, setting up pipelines to manage tasks, and continuously refining and improving, you can achieve more with less effort and take your business to the next level.

Start today and see the results for yourself!