The Layers of Your Operations

In the last blog post, I talked about how your operations create your client experience, and our belief that the more you understand your operations, the better you can manage them. 

Here, I want to introduce a framework that will bring that understanding, along with a tool we’ve developed (that you can download free of charge!) to empower you to apply it to your business. 

The Layers of Your Operations

The Layers of Your Operations is a simple, powerfully effective framework for cutting through the fog that business owners inevitably find themselves in while building it as they fly.

Every business starts with a vision, which leads to a strategy for bringing the vision to life. 

In order to bring the strategy to life, you have to implement it, and the implementation is managed to ensure it aligns with the vision and strategy it supports. 

A Deeper Understanding of the Layers 

Each of the four layers lives within every other department in your company. Which means that while operations is technically seen as its own department–it’s actually more like the glue that holds everything together. 

We think of the company’s operations as similar to the human body’s fascia. 

When you map the framework across all the departments in a business, you get something that looks like this:

In the middle of every department is the same vision, and beyond that, there are clearly delineated operational layers and boundaries across departments. 

How the Layers Take Shape In Your Organization

As the business owner, you alone sit in the middle, holding the vision. You then also likely operate in multiple layers, across multiple departments. 

Switching back and forth between all of these departments and layers all day long is one of the biggest causes of burnout that we see in our work. You inevitably have to do this in the early days as the owner of the business, but it can quickly become such an ingrained habit that it becomes your norm, long after you’ve hired a team. 

Speaking of your team–you also have to work toward moving your employees and contractors away from working across departments and in multiple layers. It’s not always possible when you have a small team, but as you grow, centralizing their work into 1-2 layers of a single department is the goal. 

I know it can be hard to conceptualize how to implement this when you’re already drowning in multiple layers across departments, but thankfully, we developed a tool you can use! 

Making This Actionable 

With the help of our free Delegation Planner tool, you can easily document what everyone in your business is responsible for, which departments and layers they’re operating across, whether they’re a good fit for their responsibilities, and so much more.

People and processes are two of the most important aspects of your operations, and our Delegation Planner will help you get organized around both of those things so that you can make clearer decisions about roles, hiring, and which processes you should prioritize when you’re ready to start documenting them. 

And if you need help working through the Delegation Planner or integrating it into your operations, book a Discovery Call and let’s chat about it!