When a founder reaches out to me their business is usually a victim of its own success. Revenue is flowing and the teams are delivering work, but they’re struggling to deliver services and manage admin effectively.
There’s often software in place already, usually a project management or task tracking tool, and information exists in abundance despite being spread across inboxes, spreadsheets, chat threads and fleeting anecdotes.
The founder is almost always involved in delivery. As the face of the business, they’re the person clients want to speak to. This lends itself well to long-lasting client relationships but can also mean they end up being the one holding the business together.
I should make it clear that none of this is an indicator of a poorly run business. On the contrary, this is simply what happens when service business operations have been left to grow by themselves. In this article, I’m going to take you through the challenges I see service businesses face, time and time again.
The first thing I tend to find is that nobody has a single, reliable view of the work happening across the team. Individuals know what they have to do to move a project forwards, but there’s no shared picture of everything the business has committed to and everyone’s role in it.
This makes capacity planning immensely difficult. The decision to take on new work rests on the founder’s gut feeling and appetite for risk, rather than whether the team can realistically cope. Get it wrong and individuals start to feel overworked and burned out, or you undercook your plans and miss out on billable work.
Without this visibility, it’s also harder to predict demand, take hiring decisions or prioritise business improvement projects. All because you don’t know where you need to be and at what time.
Amongst the foundational set of systems every service business should have, a project management or task tracking tool is usually one of the first in place. The challenge is that the tool was implemented in an effort to solve a particular problem, with little consideration given to how it fits into the broader flow of work. It often hasn’t been configured to support the team in their delivery, nor does it collect useful data that helps understand the client and the project’s success. In fact, delivery processes generally haven’t been thought through enough to configure the tool in the first place!
This results in empty system fields and vague status columns. It becomes laborious to work with and inaccurate in what it presents, so it can quickly fall out of favour. The predictable result is that people work around the tool instead, which reduces visibility even further by creating yet more information silos.
This example considers only one system. In reality, there’s a heap of integrations and automations that still need building to deliver a robust and connected business technology system.
A message on Teams, a tap on the shoulder, a “just one more thing”. When processes are poorly defined, knowledge is passed anecdotally between team members.
A lack of defined processes results in an absence of shared standards and expectations across teams. People doing the same work produce different results and tasks can get lost when changing hands. New hires are slow to onboard and quality or control checks become optional at best.
Documenting processes is one of the most effective things a growing service business can do and it doesn’t need the heavy touch most people imagine it to. Even a lightweight record of the key steps in a process, and who owns them, removes a great deal of confusion. It doesn’t even need to be written!
Many small to medium sized service businesses will have some version of an onboarding process in place for their clients. Rarely do they also define one for their new starters.
In practice it makes sense. When you hire so infrequently, it doesn’t seem worth it to build out an onboarding process. But a good onboarding process pays for itself quickly. It gives new employees the context to deliver great work, faster, in turn acting as a shortcut to billable work and high client satisfaction.
It might be as simple as a slide deck or training video, or it could be as detailed as an operations playbook or structured training course. What matters is that some thought has been given to the employee experience.
The quality of a team’s output is not the only ingredient that goes into a good service. Wrapped around it is strong communication and the ability to empathise with a client’s position, yet many people lack the support they need to perform in these areas.
Common on a project is that a client will get proactive updates and quick replies from one team member, whilst finding radio silence from another. Of course, some people are naturally better suited to handling clients and managing tricky conversations, but so much of a service business’ reputation relies on a good experience, that it’s dangerous to neglect upskilling team members.
Especially if the sole exceptional individual leaves and takes the client relationship with them.
These challenges are not failures of effort, nor are they usually down to something that the founder has done wrong. They form because early-stage service businesses optimise for sales growth rather than efficiency.
In the beginning, the founder does everything by themselves. As the business grows, so does the team, yet the systems in place don’t keep up. Tools get added one by one, each bought to solve a specific problem in that moment of time. Process design is skipped because there is always something more urgent and poor habits start to become embedded.
The difficulty is that problems compound because no one has had a chance to get ahead of them. By this point, the pain is obvious enough to act on yet the availability to solve them is so limited.
If you recognise your business in this, take comfort in the fact that none of these issues are unusual or unsolvable. They just require your attention, yet when you’re so wrapped up in delivery, it’s hard to find the time.
A sensible first step is to review your core operations and identify the areas that need the most improvement. From there you can break down the activities needed to fix each issue and build a plan for tackling them.
For many founders, the most practical route to strong service business operations is a fractional operations manager, who can provide senior operational leadership and the focus to address these challenges, without the commitment of a full-time hire.