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Business Operations Philosophy

Also see Business Operations Systems

Run your business intentionally

It's common that the way the business runs is mostly determined by how it used to be run, rather than by determining an intentional best path forward. This is something I love to fix. Please read to see if what I've done any my approces resonate.

• Best Practices: Best practices exist for a reason. Stick with what's been proven to work unless there is a very compelling reason to do otherwise. There are endless processes in a business that are the way they are, because that's how people have been doing it. But often when the process was initially created, it was done without all of the things listed here.  

• Process Review: Any process needs review and improvements. It's vital that people are specifically encouraged to take pot shots at a process. Based on that feedback, we decide if the process should be adjusted. If a process has not had this type of review, it will either not survive or it will not benefit the company.

• Consensus: Management is often worried about the inefficiency of getting consensus. If 20 people have a meeting in try to make a bunch of decisions, that will be inefficient, expensive, frustrating, and inevitably problematic. The key is to have several tiny meetings first with the key decision makers. Once the big puzzles have been solved, email everybody and encourage people to give feedback. Only after that, should there be a large meeting to officially get consensus. And that meeting will inevitably result in the process changing a bit, which is fine, but by the time the big meeting is happening, it's down to fine tuning.
• Iterate / keep a process alive: Even a wonderful process can die on the vine. Every process needs a defined way to stay alive, to iterate, and to improve.
• Meetings: Many processes need meetings. But there should be as few meetings as possible, with as few people as possible. Meetings can be incredibly expensive, both in salary cost and frustration. Careful attention to the Return On Investment for meetings is critical. If a person is at a meeting, and does not directly participate in the conversations, then consider if that person should consider coming to the meeting.
• Documentation: If a process is not accurately documented, then it will eventually fall apart. A process needs to be designed to continue even as the people at a company change.
• Boiling the ocean: There are immense benefits from having the correct processes in place and implementing them correctly. But each one takes time. There is no magical way to get them done without putting in the work. I'm specifically skilled at implementing them in a way that sticks, that benefits the company, and where it's done efficiently. For most teams, changes like this would take years and things might not get done in an ideal way. But this is what I do. I can and will implement processes quickly and with a high level of quality.
• The Tech: I absolutely love at Atlassian products and I can quickly crank out Kanban boards, dashboards, and confluence pages with a wide array of embedded JQL queries. I love designing Jira workflows. I adore confluence, despite its problems, and have many proven methods to get it to sing. I believe I created the world's best spreadsheet vacation calendar with Google sheets. I've done in-depth integrations with google Slides and Google Sheets in order to make management high-level presentations that are updated directly from low level spreadsheet data. I once made a fully functional Google sheets Gantt chart just for fun. I have more experience with the Google Workspace tools, but I can also make the Microsoft tools to do whatever we need.
• Make things intentional! Too often, things are done in a particular way for historical reasons. It's how it's been done in the past, so that's how it continues. This should be avoided. It's very worth taking the time to makde things intentional. A company should take the time to instilling "healthy habbits" and put solid and ideal processes in place.
• Extreme visibility and clarity: For the various processes, it should be easy to see exactly what the process is, who is doing it, and the current status. There should be live dashboards that make the details clear as day both at a high and low level.
• It's made of people: If you just treat the people as "resources", they won't have true loyalty to the company or the projects they're working on. I love making a real connection with the people I'm working with and helping them however I can, while making sure we achieve our goals.
• Critical feedback: When implementing or refining a system, one of the main things I'm specifically encouraging and seeking out is feedback on what should change. Where are the holes? How is the process problematic? Where can things improve? Getting this type of feedback is absolutely essential for a system to be robust.
• Be data driven: I help make it so that a company has more relevant data and has more ways of adjusting things intelligently based on that data.
• This feels like my calling: I LOVE putting systems in place! This is one of my favorate things to do. Analyze what's needed and fix, replace, or implement a new system.

Contact Julian

Get in touch and chat about your company or project.

Julian Cash     415.738.9385     julian@HireThisGeek.com or see the contact page.