How To Turn Your Business Vision Into Reality

Speaker 1: Welcome to the Process Breakdown Podcast, where we talk about streamlining and scaling operations of your company, getting rid of bottlenecks, and giving your employees all the information they need to be successful at their jobs. Now, let’s get started with the show.

John Corcoran: John Corcoran here, host of the Process Breakdown Podcast, where we talk about streamlining and scaling operations of your company, getting rid of bottlenecks, and giving your staff everything they need to be successful at their job. Past guests include David Allen of Getting Things Done, and Michael Gerber of the E-Myth, and many more. And in this episode, we’re going to be talking about how small to midsize companies can streamline and scale operations with the benefits of a larger company by working with a fractional COO. And my guest is we helping us through that topic in a moment.

John Corcoran: But first, before we get into that, this episode is brought to you by SweetProcess. Have you ever had team members ask you the same question over and over again, and it’s the 10th time you spent explaining it? Well, there’s a better way. And there’s a solution. SweetProcess is a software that makes it drop dead easy to train and onboard new staff and save time with existing staff.

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John Corcoran: All right. So we have with us, Jeff Heyer-Jones, and Jeff really glad to have you here today. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about what you do through your business and how you help companies?

Jeff Heyer-Jones: Thanks, John, for having me today. Yeah, a little bit about I own SparkEvolve, which is a consulting firm and our business, we have two arms. So one is what I would call our classic consulting where a client has a particular need or problem that they’re trying to solve. We’ll go in, help them frame the problem and solve it and then move on to the next opportunity. The second kind of arm of our business is our fractional COO, or chief operating officer. These are typically clients that have ongoing arrangements with us to help lead, and grow, and expand the operational footprint of their business.

John Corcoran: Okay, great. So give me a picture of the types of challenges or problems that companies or entities, associations, government agencies, when they come to you, what sorts of challenges do they have when they come to you?

Jeff Heyer-Jones: Yeah, on our consulting kind of classic consulting side of our business, oftentimes it’s things related to strategy and how to operationalize that strategy. So oftentimes business owners are the entity, the person kind of sitting at the top of the entity have a vision for their organization, and where they need help is turning that vision into reality. So what are some of the big rocks in order to move the organization closer to that?

Jeff Heyer-Jones: We’ll come in oftentimes and help them through kind of what are those big rocks and the things that sometimes when you’re internal, it’s just hard to see. You’re too close. You can’t see kind of the bigger pictures, and folks oftentimes can get hung up in some of the smaller things that feel really big, but might not be the right things to move the strategy forward.

John Corcoran: Okay, cool. So in the preview of what we were going to talk about here, I mentioned both streamlining and scaling. So let’s focus on that first piece streamlining, which means I imagine eliminating, removing some of the obstacles, some of the barriers, which I imagine can be a tough conversation sometimes with your clients when you’re saying you need to stop doing these things that you’re doing. So explain to us what that looks like, and how those conversations go when you have to tell a client, you need to stop doing these things that you’ve been doing.

Jeff Heyer-Jones: Yeah. It’s always an interesting discussion to have with someone, especially when you think of a business owner that has been very successful up to that point, doing the work in their business a certain way. Oftentimes, we’ll start as kind of with what’s happening external. So what are client’s needs and what do clients expect from the client. And if you can kind of pin down that becomes a little bit easier when you back into that discussion of where there might be things that just don’t make sense or extra steps that have kind of built their way into clients’ processes over the years.

Jeff Heyer-Jones: How I like to frame them up often is once we understand the customer’s needs, if you get the business owner thinking about, if your customer knew that you did these six things that we’re recommending that you stopped doing, because it costs you hours and hours and hours every day in manpower, would they be happy that they are paying for you to do that? If they knew that these were all the kind of administrative duplicative …

Jeff Heyer-Jones: A good example is oftentimes moving data from one system to another manually touching data multiple times, right? Creates a couple opportunities, one from a client or customer perspective. The more times you touch the same data, the more opportunities for error, and two, my bet would be if a client got to kind of peer through the window and see that you were doing all these manual things in order to give them the ultimate service or product, there’s costs associated with that.

Jeff Heyer-Jones: So oftentimes, having those discussions with owners and really putting them in terms of what the customer’s willing to pay for. And then from my business perspective, if you can eliminate some of that and streamline some of that work, that means you could serve more customers or clients with the same number of staff. So I’ve learned throughout my career a lot of times, it’s how you set these things up and how you talk about them, not just from the customer perspective, but also the benefits to the business.

John Corcoran: How do you do a cost-benefit analysis? Let’s say you come to a client or a client comes to you and you look at their operations and they have three different pieces of software, which requires, as you said, manual data transfer between these three different pieces. And you say to them, “Look, it would make much more sense to have just one piece of software.” Maybe it’s a new one that can do all three different things, but then they have to learn it. They have to get up to speed. Their team has to do that.

John Corcoran: So there’s costs involved in that. And I imagine the friction amongst the business owners saying, “Oh, wait, hold on. That’s a lot of work. It’s going to take a lot of time.” So how do you one, do that cost-benefit analysis and explain to them that it might take more time in the short term, but it’s going to benefit you in the long term?

Jeff Heyer-Jones: Yeah, that’s a great, great question. So often for me, I like to start really getting clear on what the current process is. To your point, I’ve seen businesses that I call it the shiny diamond syndrome. It’s easy to get a sales pitch on something new that’s coming out and it looks like it fits a need for your business. So you get it and fast forward a number of years, you have five or six different technologies that you’re copying and pasting and doing multiple things wet. A lot of that is understanding first the process, secondly, what are the capabilities that the business needs to perform that work?

Jeff Heyer-Jones: Before you think about even addressing, hey, we need to get rid of these three technologies and replace them with one. So instead of six you’re down to four, if my math is right, as I do that quickly. A lot of it is really getting aligned on a capabilities and what’s needed. And then how do you streamline kind of the process? There’s a number of things you can do with process. And I’m a big believer that you start with the process and then you find technology that’ll further enable your process beyond what you could do just by eliminating.

Jeff Heyer-Jones: In any business process, there’s things that don’t add value to the customer, but might need to be done. Whether that’s due to regulations compliance, a lot of times regulatory are the best examples of things in that bucket. So once you can kind go through and show here’s the before, how many interaction points and how long this particular process takes, then you can start to lay over here are the capabilities that you need. And before we think about even going out and buying something new, what are the capabilities of the tools that you’re currently using? And really understanding from the user perspective, what’s working well for them, what’s not working so well for them in those current tools.

Jeff Heyer-Jones: Because a big part of any tool change or process change, quite frankly, is the people side of that change, that business owners often neglect to look at it. It’s a little easy to rip out one technology and put a new, or just add a new tool end, right? It’s something else when people have to use it and change the way that they’re used to working and adopt to these new ways of doing things.

Jeff Heyer-Jones: So as you kind of go through and almost stage-gate each one of these, I think once you get to the point where the client kind of sees how they’re operating today, how long some of these things are taking and how many pieces of work can go through each one of these processes. And then you show them the after that, hey, we can streamline these aspects of the process. We could cut your technology in half because I found clients sometimes are paying for things. They just never turn them on in their software, but they went out and bought something new. Right.

Jeff Heyer-Jones: But it’s like, okay, you’ve got technology A that you’re doing part of the work in. You’re taking that into Google sheets to put it into another piece of technology. But the first one actually does the next two steps. You just haven’t turned it on, haven’t activated it. Sometimes it’s just an add-on for another X amount per month per license, you get access to all of this. And then it gets into looking at the hard costs on what’s the cost of those technologies? What are they paying? Is it cheaper to consolidate on one?

Jeff Heyer-Jones: Sometimes consolidating into one isn’t the right answer either. If the tool is really good at A, B and C, but D it can do, but it doesn’t meet the needs or the capabilities that the business needs, you might have to find something else and figure out how to integrate them. So it’s always a balancing act because it’s not just the hard dollars that you can see, it’s these what I like to call soft dollars, the time and resource effort that it takes to run some of these processes.

Jeff Heyer-Jones: And oftentimes it’s putting that in perspective of dollars and cents for business owners. They don’t always see kind of, I call them these hidden factories of inefficiency, right? You just see the end product, a new order comes in, a product gets put out, but you don’t see how many hours in time is behind the scenes kind of making all that sausage for that end product or service.

John Corcoran: Right. Right. Or realize how many fewer hours you could use in order to achieve that. Tell me a little bit, so we’ve been focusing mostly on streamlining operations. Let’s shift to talking about scaling operations. How do you approach it for your clients? What are some of the different pieces that they need to be thinking about in terms of preparing to scale?

Jeff Heyer-Jones: A lot of the scaling comes down to a matter of do you have standard processes in place? So when you think about being a small business that maybe it’s one or two people, and will work really well together are really tightly tied, right? Where if you and I are working together in a business, you know what I’m working on, I know what you’re working on, and we’ve got kind of this just natural gel, right. Going in these rhythms that we work.

Jeff Heyer-Jones: When you think about starting to really scale up your business, and you’re going to start adding staff or working on increasing sales, which means that there’s more back office activities that need to happen. That’s when having very efficient processes. I always like to talk to business owners, the three things I like to look at organizationally from an ops perspective is your people, process, and technology. And those three things need to be operating like a well-oiled machine together and not against one another.

Jeff Heyer-Jones: So when I talk about not against one another, if we don’t have good standard processes and KPIs in place on what expectations we have and how much work we should be doing, and the quality level along the way, sometimes the people stuff can start to fall off. If you don’t have good expectations for people, what you expect them to do and how you expect them to kind of do the work and what the SLA, the service level agreements are, that could be a breakdown. If you don’t have good process discipline, and if it’s you, me, and six other people now surfing clients and let’s say it’s putting in doing business development as an example, and how we use our CRM, what type of data we’re putting into our CRM.

Jeff Heyer-Jones: If there’s six different people doing it wildly six different ways, you can imagine the data challenges you could have if you want to do a newsletter to prospects versus clients, if people aren’t selecting the right things. And then around the technology component, it’s what additional things really need to be there to enable the process so that you can have your team focused on the most important things and tasks for your business.

Jeff Heyer-Jones: And oftentimes I see where there’s just neglected talent in organizations. You’ve got people that are manually moving data or things aren’t super streamlined. So you’ve got people instead of making sales or servicing customers, they’re doing a lot of data entry, copy and paste type activities. That’s all needs to be done but there’s better ways to do that. If those three things aren’t working together in concert with one another, it can cause a lot of inefficiencies and challenges with service delivery.

John Corcoran: Right. When you lay it out that way, it makes you realize why it’s so challenging for so many business owners, because a lot of business owners go into business ownership, entrepreneurship, because they’re good at one, or maybe one of those pieces there. They’re really good at people skills, or they’re really good at a particular technology. But when you have to have oversight in all three of those, when you have to master all three of those, that’s a real challenge. So how often when you’re working with clients, do you realize that your big liability is in one of these areas and that’s where you really need to improve, where the business owner needs to improve?

Jeff Heyer-Jones: Yeah. It happens frequently. Or the other one that I see is not even in those three, it’s I got into business because I have a passion for what I’m doing, not all the things I need to do to run the business.

John Corcoran: Yeah. The classic E-Myth type of problem, right? Yeah.

Jeff Heyer-Jones: Yeah. Exactly. Right. Where it’s if I’m … We’ve got a client that’s in healthcare, that’s what their passion is, is healthcare and serving patients, not worried about how their people, process, and technology of the practice is operating, and they gravitate towards the medical stuff and things. So often what happens is business owners get to a certain point, right? When you start out, you might have to wear all those hats. Could be a capital issue, you don’t have enough capital to have the experts to help you with these things. So you’re playing CFO, CLO, CMO all the C-suite staff.

Jeff Heyer-Jones: And then all of a sudden, you get to this point where you’ve got staff, you’ve grown to maybe a high six, low seven figure business, and you want to continue to grow. But a lot of times we’ll see business owners that are overwhelmed, questioning why they’re still owning the business and the business is running them instead of them running the business. And that’s oftentimes when we have clients that come to us with this fractional COO that look, I’m not good at some of this operational stuff. I know we could get more efficiently, but I have no idea how to do it. We don’t like any of it. And it’s taking up a significant amount of my time. And I want to get back to why I was passionate in starting this business in the first place. Usually those are right clients, at that point-

John Corcoran: I can see the excitement in your face, like exact, like polar opposite of why the business owner came to you because it’s sucking their energy. It’s giving you energy. So talk a little bit for me and for any of the listeners, what that’s like to work with a fractional COO, what’s that arrangement like? How frequently do you meet with them? What do you do? How do you help the team or the business owner?

Jeff Heyer-Jones: Yeah. So great question. I pride myself on with SparkEvolve’s, our agreements are as unique as our clients. It’s hard to give a one size fits all. If I think about a company that maybe doesn’t have a good leadership structure in place where the owner’s playing all of these roles, it might look different than someone that already has a CFO and some components and maybe the owner’s playing the visionary and kind of the integrator. But typically we’ll do at a minimum a half day a month with a client. So there’s always exceptions to that.

John Corcoran: And even just that, I can imagine some of your business owners are like a half day. I can’t imagine. I’ve got all these different balls in the air, things I need to do. So probably even just getting them to agree to that is a challenge.

Jeff Heyer-Jones: Yeah, it is. So oftentimes we’ll start with an assessment, because what we find is business owners, they’re so close to it and dealing with the day-to-day fires that we’ll go in and do kind of an assessment on the business as a whole and where people, process, and technology are kind of at. And then from there, we’ll take that data and insights that we see from meeting with the team, getting an understanding of their technology, seeing kind of high level how work flows through the organization.

Jeff Heyer-Jones: We’ll come up with a roadmap, which is really based on where the owner wants to take the business, the things that we’ve seen, what types of things do we need to focus on? And what’s the top thing we should be working on operationally because you can imagine there can be thousands of things you could be focused on, but trying to get some of that roadmap down. And then what we do is we use that and preferably pre COVID, we would be on site. So if we were onsite for a half day, it wasn’t that we’re with the business owner for a half day or a whole day. Some of our arrangements or even a half day, every week.

Jeff Heyer-Jones: We’ll be there almost like an employee, but we’re not an employee, and we’ll work with the owner and others on the team on the operational things that we’ve put together on the roadmap together on things that we need to be focused on. A lot of that time can be a combination of doing the work, teaching others on the team how to do some of these new things that they might not have needed to do before and then helping to hold the team and even the owner accountable for the direction of the business.

Jeff Heyer-Jones: I joke that it’s kind of the role of trusted advisor, the implementer, the doer to help get all the troops together and moving in the right place, so the business owner can focus on what they’re really good at, and having a great agreement and relationship with that business owner. There’s a lot of different models people use anywhere from hourly rates to fixed fee type agreements. And we do fixed fee arrangements. I find that it’s just better for the business owner for a couple of reasons, one, there’s consistency in the expense on what they’re going to pay for, and two, hourly rates sometimes drive bad behavior on clients on client side.

Jeff Heyer-Jones: If they’re worried about, I don’t want to get a significant bill this month, maybe I shouldn’t call my fractional COO because I’m going to get billed for this, versus just having the conversation when things come up. I’ve seen before where business owners might delay having that conversation, and there’s an opportunity cost to that, that it just doesn’t make sense. So all of our agreements with clients on this are all flat fee based. We’ve done enough of these that we can kind of build in and understand typically what happens outside of those onsite things, on what the needs look like and have open and honest conversations with clients about that.

John Corcoran: Great, Jeff Heyer-Jones, SparkEvolve is the name of the business. Remind everyone or let everyone know where they can go to learn more about you and the work that you do, Jeff.

Jeff Heyer-Jones: Yeah. You can look me up on LinkedIn. If you want to connect with me, my LinkedIn profile is under Jeffrey Heyer-Jones, H-E-Y-E-R hyphen J-O-N-E-S. And you can check out SparkEvolve on the web at www.sparkevolve.com.

John Corcoran: All right, Jeff. Thanks so much.

Jeff Heyer-Jones: Thanks so much, John.

Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to the Process Breakdown Podcast. Before you go, quick question. Do you want a tool that makes it easy to document processes, procedures, and/or policies for your company so that your employees have all the information they need to be successful at their job? If yes, sign up for a free 14-day trial of SweetProcess. No credit card is required to sign up. Go to sweetprocess.com, sweet like candy and process like process.com. Go now to sweetprocess.com and sign up for your risk-free 14-day trial.

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