Ep 63: Ops Management: The Game Changer for Streamlining Your Business with Natalie Gingrich

May 2

The Operations Roles you Need in Your Business

I'm so excited to have a friend of mine, Natalie Gingrich, on for this interview. If you don't know Natalie, you need to because she's an absolute expert when it comes to operations in your business. She's the founder of The Ops Authority where she certifies and mentors women who leverage their natural skill set of operations and administration.

She also has 15 years of corporate operations experience and was the chief of staff for a Fortune 150 CEO. She didn't just one day wake up, say she was going to do operations because she liked organizing things in her home. She has the background and she has leveraged that to be able to create systems and processes and training for people who have that natural gifting who want to become operators in businesses.

Favorite Community

What is your favorite community you have ever been a part of and what did you love about it?

I have always been a part of various communities, so I believe I can answer this question for every stage of my life. However, when you asked me about the community that I liked the most, it immediately reminded me of a specific time in my life.

It was when I left my corporate job and was exploring new possibilities for myself. I did not have a solid plan, and this was very unlike my usual self who is structured and risk-averse. I was in a massive search mode, and that's when I stumbled upon a Facebook community that changed me.

Before this, my idea of community was limited to my family, friends, church, and neighborhood. However, this community was different. I made deep connections that have lasted almost nine years and still serve me to this day. I have even hired some of the people from this community for our company, and they have been serving us for many years.

Looking back, I realize that what made this community special was the curation, depth, and intentionality. It was not just about the people or happenstance; it was a carefully crafted community that had a significant impact on my life. So when I think about communities, this experience is the first thing that comes to mind.

Operations Role

So talk about what the operations role is for you and what they're doing within a company.

If you're one of those people who thinks, "Oh, I've got a project manager, they're in my Asana, or my Trello, or my whatever it is. So organized, like we've got ops handled," that is a very myopic view of operations. Through this podcast, I hope you will learn a little bit more about what holistic operations are and how they are absolutely essential. I'm not just saying that from a marketing perspective, but from my personal experience.

I have been behind dozens and dozens of 7, 8, and 9 figure businesses, and I have been able to put operations in place that allowed them to grow and ultimately, even allowed CEOs to step out of a lot of the parts of the business that they just don't love doing. Holistic operations is what I want to focus on, as opposed to specific project management, like what we were describing a second ago.

That is a specific part of operations, but holistically, you need to have a holistic arm or you'll end up paying too many people to do fragmented roles. Ultimately, you're looking for an operations manager, a director of operations, or maybe even a COO in due time inside of your business, because those people start to look and connect the operational dots.

Operations is a combination of five areas, and while there are actually more than these five, for businesses of our scale, these five areas are the most important. I'm looking at operational strategy, human resources, financials, data, and analytics.

Human resources has about 13 different tentacles, and if you're relying on a project manager to do operations in your business, they are not looking at all of those 13 areas of human resources as you grow in your business. People are the backbone to scale inside of your company, so human resources takes up a large piece of that project management.

When you're feeling comfortable that you have checked the box of operations because you have a project manager, you're not wrong for that because project management is the most fundamental skill that you're going to have inside of your high-level operator. It's a requirement. You cannot be an operator without being a project manager or having those skills.

The other two disciplines are financial aspect as well as data and analytics. A holistic operational component inside of your company is going to look at all five of those pieces and not just one specific area. Depending on the different types of business models that are out there or your product, there's another part of operations that I omitted from that descriptor, which is inventory, storage, logistics, and fulfillment for physical product businesses.

By and large, operational strategy, human resources, project management, data, and finance are what a high-level operator can do inside of your company to truly be a strategic partner to you as the founder, the leader, the visionary of what it is that you're excited to do in this world.

When to Bring in an Operations Managers

When do you feel like a business owner needs to be thinking about bringing in that operations manager?

I see a lot of times when we have a really lean team, as you have described, that other person becomes a catch-all. It becomes the person who takes over the task that you don't want to do or that doesn't fire you up. Naturally, you want to delegate those tasks, and so this person's role becomes all over the place. With time, you want to start putting some structure inside of that role, and this is what I help companies to do as well.

Let's say we're thinking about a community manager here. Maybe 70% of their time is dedicated and focused on the community aspect, program management, engagement, and experience piece, and then 30% is dedicated to operational aspects such as project management, data, HR, and finance.

If it's just you and the community manager and you're thinking about what you need next, you can collaborate with this person. They likely have the skills to be able to say, "Okay, what would be helpful here? Do we need a project manager? Do we need a marketer?" There's an infinite number of possibilities for what you need as far as a growth perspective in a really lean place.

I would like you to say, "While a hundred percent of your capacity right now is dedicated to the community piece, let's start to compartmentalize this and define it." But watch out for scope creep in that 30%. We're going to add this piece on, maybe it's data, finance, project management, or HR. There's a bigger piece to this.

When I said data, I wanted to touch on something here. As a community manager, I know that in your program, your community manager serves in that program manager capacity. They are looking at data specific to the program, but there's a whole other data set out there.

Your KPIs are going to be bigger than just your program, which I know is probably the lifeblood of your revenue and profit. We have to look bigger, and that's what the operational leader comes in and looks at. It's the strategic view of how this data can help us to make decisions for the future, not just in the product that the community manager is responsible for.

Time to Hire an Operations Position

When you look at a business that's ready to hire a full-time position in operations, how do I know it's time to take this piece off of the community manager's plate or off of my plate and start handing it to a different person?

By the time you're thinking about it, you're probably already late. Another piece of this is when the leader knows they're outside of their scope or their gifts. A lot of times, it's gotten really uncomfortable. These are the things that the leader doesn't really like to do. But from a dollar perspective, and I don't like to talk in hard dollars, but always looking at profit margins, I like to say that if you have over a 30% profit margin with your existing team, that gives you permission to bring somebody in.

That's a very financial way of looking at it, and sometimes people ask me how much they need to be making beforehand or what kind of revenue they need. It's really hard to say because every business model is different. But absolutely, by the time you're at a seven-figure business with healthy profit margins, a Director of Operations is an absolute yes.

In that structure that you were just describing, these people already have operators in their business, so it's not like they're starting and bringing on this operator as their first hire. They need operational oversight for the entire business. And so when you start to feel like you need that, there's a balance of financially being able to do it, of course. I don't want you to get into a situation. However, in this day and age, we have so many opportunities for fractional support that can be massively impactful and financially tolerable for you.

The other piece is knowing that you're not starting from scratch. Whatever you bring in, you're getting your return on investment. If you already have that program arm in a place that's satisfactory to you or even thriving, you're bringing in this holistic piece, and the return on investment is going to be super fast.

Where you have a slow return on investment is when you're starting something from scratch. Remember bringing in your community manager for the first time? It takes some time. But when you already have that established and you bring in this role, that return just comes so much faster.

Think about yourself and how much time it's taking, how comfortable or uncomfortable it is for you to be the CEO and the COO. Because in the absence of having this role or any other role, you as the CEO and the leader are incurring the expense physically, mentally, and spatially of any role that you don't have inside of your business.

The Role of a Director of Operations

What should I be expecting as a business owner? What should I be looking for? Do I need to have the game plan to come to them to say, here's where I need support in the business, and be able to really identify that for them? Or is a DOO going to come in and help identify that for me?

It will depend on the layer or level at which you're bringing them in, but let's talk specifically about a director of operations. You should never have to train your operator. Your operator may need to get familiar with your existing structure, business model, and be on board with your mission, vision, and values. But you should never have to train them on their specific discipline. They should come in as full leaders and strategic thought partners. That is their function, so there will be some training, of course, not from a specific discipline perspective, but an integration into your company. I can't say that you won't have to spend any time with them because when a DOO comes in, they are expected to be a strategic partner to you.

They will come in and the first thing that we teach our students to do is to create an operational strategy. We have some intellectual property that we call a strategic mapping model where we synthesize everything down into your priorities for the quarter or the month, whatever structure works best for you and the scale of your company. Then they will truly integrate those priorities into the business.

Without this, you'll have a lot of ideas, and become frustrated as a leader because you can't move fast enough. By having this role, they are that consummate project manager that's taking each of those priorities and making sure you have the labor, creating and managing the project, and ensuring task management is occurring. They work with your financial and legal teams to make sure everything is good inside the business.

The next biggest component is the labor piece, which is often avoided, unfortunately. We say that we want people to work with us, yet we get so frustrated that people leave us and the turnover is so high in the freelancer space. I hear these woes all the time. The reality is nobody is spending time inside of companies to develop talent so that they stick around.

When you bring this person on, they are strategic. They will onboard themselves and get familiar with you, ultimately taking your strategy and creating it into an operational strategy, coming down with your priorities, and making things happen without you or in tandem with you so much faster or even making them possible. They will look at those five areas we talked about earlier: operational strategy, HR, project management, finance, and data, and integrate them into the business.

DOO and Operations Manager Differences

Tell me what is the difference between like a DOO and more like an operations manager, maybe somebody that would be the first hire for a smaller company?

Of course, experience is important, but more than anything else, it's leadership. I believe that leadership at the implementer's level is important too, but the strategic partnership, along with leadership, is a massive differentiator. You'll get more of a technician out of your operations manager. A lot of operations managers will do ops management and implementation, which is helpful if that's the first person you bring in. A lot of times we need those bridge roles. When you bring in the DOO, they're going to need a team. They need at least a person or two underneath them to make sure implementation is taken care of, because your DOO, being a strategic partner, is looking forward. They're still involved in the day-to-day, overseeing and ultimately responsible for the day-to-day execution of your vision. But we can't keep that big gap there. We do that with operations managers. The vision of the company is still being held in the CEO's hands.

When you have that counterpart in the DOO, the every day is taken care of because we're utilizing a team to make that happen, but we're also looking forward. You have to be the right kind of person. That's why we have an application process to come through our program. You really do have to have that leadership, the fortitude, and the communication skills to sit next to you, Shana, and say, "You know what, Shana? You've got a great idea. I can see you're on fire for it. When I look at the profit margin, the size of the team, the economy, it's an enterprising idea. It doesn't fit us right now."

I have been in roles where that wasn't supported. I have been intentionally in lower-level roles and ops manager roles where that's not my job. My role is to come in and say, "Shana's got the idea. Shana hands it over to me. I create the plan. I manage the plan, I make it happen." That's your operations manager, your project manager, and that's absolutely good and necessary inside of a company. But at some point, Shana, you believe that everybody needs a leader. Everybody desires a boss. Everybody needs a leader. Everybody needs a business best friend. That operations director, that director of ops, sits next to you as the counterpart, the yin and the yang, the right and left brain, the visionary, the integrator, whatever you want to call it.

We need that in life. We need a counterpart. And when you think of the business and how much effort you're putting into this, that counterpart is so important for you as you scale. It can't be your first hire. I've seen people try to do that. That is a recipe for disaster because you need people to help that leader to put these pieces into play. You need that strategic partner who is also a leader, who also understands you, who feels deeply about your mission, vision, and shares your values. That's incredibly important. Because if I'm pushing back on you, and it's not just a pushback role, but if I'm dreaming with you, if I'm having real honest conversations, and we don't have that overlap of values, you're not going to receive it well. I'm not going to feel at ease and eager to share my leadership with you, to share my strategic thought with you because there's just that energy that prevents that from happening. You and I would be a great combo because we both share a lot of the same values and we can have open, honest conversations. But the communication, the leadership, and the strategic partnership, that's where you start to see the need and fill the void of not having an operational leader in your company.

Training and Hiring Operation Roles in your Business

Tell people how they can find out more about what you're doing? I know you train directors of operations. Do you also help people find people that have been trained through you?

Yes, so operations in general for small businesses. I would direct you to our podcast, The Ops Authority. Every single week, we talk to leaders who are business owners, as well as a lot of service providers. My focus is on service providers, but as we've talked about today, so many leaders are doing components of operations inside of their business that they're naturally interested in the content we have. The podcast is a great resource, but if you have someone on your team that you're ready to elevate, or if you want to develop someone, then the certification would be a phenomenal place.

We really are looking to build holistic leaders. We get a lot of people who come in with expertise and the ability to be a leader. We're looking for "yes, maybe" people instead of "yes, ma'am" people to kind of piggyback off of. We're looking for a particular skill set, and we also use the Kolbe to qualify our application process. We're taking that and building operational leaders. People come to us with a siloed interpretation of what operations is or what they've been doing. So a lot of times, we get operators who are great project managers, operators who are great program managers, or even some technicians. In the certification piece, we're looking to build operational leaders.

I also have a separate company that's a sister company to this, called The Hiring Authority. That's where we work with business owners to place operational talent. It can be your community manager, your project manager, or pretty much anything outside of marketing. We specialize specifically in the operational area, and it doesn't matter if you're looking for fractional help or a full-time employee; we take care of all of that for you. So those are the various ways that we help companies scale through operations.