Owner dependency is the structural condition where critical decisions cannot move without the founder, even after tasks have been delegated. It persists because owners transfer work but retain decision rights. The fix is a decision census: inventory every decision routed through the owner, classify it by reversibility, and transfer the rights with guardrails.
The Bottleneck Nobody Delegates
A familiar pattern shows up in growing companies between one million and fifty million in revenue. The owner has hired managers, documented workflows, and delegated entire departments. Yet every discount over a threshold, every exception to policy, and every unusual customer request still lands on the same desk. The org chart says the company has seven leaders. The approval flow says it has one.
That gap has a name. Owner dependency is not a workload problem, and it is not a talent problem. It is a decision architecture problem: the work moved, but the authority to decide never did. Diagnose it as structure, not as personality.
The distinction matters because decision rights fail in two different ways. Ambiguous decision rights break execution between teams, where nobody is sure who decides. Retained decision rights break scaling at the top, where everybody is sure: the owner decides. The fix below addresses the second failure.
How Dependency Survives Delegation
The standard advice is to delegate more and document better. Most owners in this position have already done both. The dependency survives because delegation, as commonly practiced, transfers tasks while silently retaining decision rights. A manager can run the process but cannot approve the exception. So every nonstandard case, which is to say every case that matters, routes upward.
The anti-pattern compounds itself. Because the owner answers quickly, asking the owner is always the safest and fastest move for the team. Each fast answer rewards the next escalation. In practice, the organization is not learning to decide. It is learning to consult. Teams trained this way are not weak. They are responding rationally to the structure they were given.
This is why the condition coexists with capable people and well-written standard operating procedures. SOPs cover the standard ninety percent of cases. Ownership of the remaining ten percent, the exceptions, is the actual product the business sells at scale. If exceptions belong exclusively to the owner, the company has a ceiling, and the ceiling is one person’s calendar.
The Three Faces of Owner Dependency
Owner dependency presents in three distinct patterns, and most companies carry at least two of them at once.
Approval dependency is the most visible. Spending, pricing, and hiring decisions wait in the owner’s queue because formal authority never moved. It is also the easiest pattern to fix, because authority can be reassigned on paper in an afternoon once the guardrails exist.
Expertise dependency hides deeper. The founder is the only person who knows why the price book looks the way it does, which customers tolerate delays, and where the margins actually live. Growing teams describe this as running a company out of one person’s head. The fix is not documentation for its own sake. It is converting private judgment into decision rules that others can apply without supervision.
Relationship dependency unwinds slowest. Key customers, lenders, and vendors expect the owner personally, and every renewal that requires the founder’s presence is a liability disguised as a strength. Transition plans for these relationships belong in the census alongside internal decisions.
Why Growth Makes Dependency Worse
Owner dependency is stable in a small company. Ten people generate few exceptions, and one decisive founder handles them without visible strain. Growth breaks that equilibrium. Exception volume scales with headcount, customer count, and product variety, while the owner’s capacity stays fixed. Operations feel messier every quarter because the same decision architecture is carrying more load, not because the team got worse.
This is why dependency rarely announces itself as a crisis. It accumulates as longer response times, slower quotes, and a calendar that fills earlier each month. By the time the owner feels trapped, the structure has usually been failing quietly for a year. The census makes that decay measurable before it becomes existential.
Diagnose Before You Restructure
The instinct is to reorganize, hire a senior operator, or write more process. Do not start there. Start with measurement, because the dependency is rarely where the owner believes it is.
Run a decision census for ten business days. Every time a decision routes through the owner, log three things: what was decided, why it could not be decided elsewhere, and whether the decision was reversible. No process changes during the census. The log is the diagnosis. Owners who run this exercise typically expect a handful of entries and count dozens per week. The volume is the point: each entry is a transaction the business cannot complete in the owner’s absence.
A useful secondary signal is the absence test. If a two week disconnection from the business feels impossible, the census will show why in concrete entries rather than vague anxiety. Measure first. Therefore, restructure second.
The Org Chart Is Not the Decision Chart
Most growing companies maintain two structures. The official org chart shows departments, titles, and reporting lines. The functional decision chart shows where choices actually resolve. In owner dependent companies the two diverge sharply: the org chart distributes responsibility while the decision chart converges on one node.
The divergence is testable. Take any recent nonstandard decision and trace its path through the company. If the path ended at the owner regardless of where it started, the reporting structure is cosmetic. Titles describe accountability for outcomes, but decision rights determine who can act. A company scales on the second, not the first. Aligning the two charts is the structural definition of operational maturity.
The Decision Census Framework
The census data feeds a four step fix.
Step one: inventory. Consolidate the log into decision categories: pricing exceptions, hiring approvals, vendor commitments, customer escalations, spend authorizations. Most companies discover five to eight categories absorb nearly all owner involvement.
Step two: classify by reversibility. Decision science distinguishes two types. Reversible decisions are two way doors: a wrong call can be corrected cheaply. Irreversible decisions are one way doors: a wrong call is expensive or permanent. The census usually reveals an uncomfortable ratio, with the large majority of owner-routed decisions being reversible. Reversible decisions never justify a founder bottleneck.
Step three: transfer rights with guardrails. For each reversible category, assign the decision right to a named role rather than a person. Attach a guardrail to every transfer: a dollar threshold, a defined escalation trigger, and a review cadence. The guardrail is what makes the transfer durable. Authority without boundaries gets revoked after the first mistake. Authority with boundaries survives mistakes, because the cost of error was priced in from the start.
Step four: verify by absence. The test of the new architecture is not a quiet week while the owner watches. It is a planned absence with escalation rules in place and a count of what still broke through. Each breakthrough is the next census entry. The system compounds: every cycle moves another category out of the owner’s queue. Build, refine, repeat.
Not sure where the census would land in your company? A structured outside review surfaces the decision categories an owner cannot see from inside the queue. Schedule a consultation to scope a decision census.
Structure Protects People, Not Just Throughput
The case for fixing owner dependency is usually framed as freedom for the founder or enterprise value for an eventual exit. Both are real. Key person risk is one of the first discounts applied in any acquisition conversation. But the deeper cost is carried by the team.
Managers who cannot decide do not develop judgment, and they know it. The most capable people in approval-dependent companies leave first, because consultation theater is unbearable to someone ready to own outcomes. Transferring decision rights is therefore not generosity. It is how an organization invests in its own human capital, and how disciplined process protects people from chaos. A business that cannot run without its owner is also, quietly, a business its best employees cannot grow inside.
What Changes in Practice
Engagement data from mid-market fractional COO operating work shows a consistent pattern once decision rights move. In one services company near twenty five million in revenue, the census logged thirty one recurring decision types routed through the founder. Within one quarter, guardrailed transfers cut that number to six, all genuinely irreversible. Quote turnaround dropped from days to hours because pricing exceptions no longer waited for one calendar.
A second pattern appears in absence tests across engagements: the first planned absence typically produces fewer than half the escalations owners predict, because guardrails absorb the routine exceptions before they travel upward.
The second order effect shows up later and matters more. Exception volume itself declines, because teams holding decision rights start fixing the upstream causes of exceptions instead of escalating them. Decision latency falls without anyone optimizing for speed. The organization gets faster as a side effect of getting structurally sound.
Owner dependency ends the same way it began: gradually, through accumulated structure. A business that runs without its owner is not ownerless. It is a system that finally separates what only the founder can do from what the founder merely got used to doing. Every decision right the owner releases teaches the organization how to think, and an organization that thinks is the only asset that compounds on its own.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I know if my business is owner dependent? Run a ten day decision census. Log every decision that routes through the owner and why. Dozens of weekly entries, most of them reversible, confirm structural dependency. A simpler signal: if a two week disconnection feels impossible, the dependency is already material.
What is the difference between delegating tasks and transferring decision rights? Task delegation moves the work while approval authority stays with the owner. Decision rights transfer moves the authority itself, bounded by guardrails such as dollar thresholds and escalation triggers. Companies that delegate tasks without rights create consultation loops rather than autonomy.
Which decisions should never be transferred away from the owner? Irreversible, high-cost commitments: major capital allocation, equity and debt decisions, key executive hires, and strategic positioning. The census typically shows these are a small minority of what actually routes through the owner today.
How long does it take to fix owner dependency? The census takes ten business days. The first guardrailed transfers can happen within a month. Durable change, verified by planned absences, typically compounds over two to three quarters as each cycle moves more categories out of the owner’s queue.
Can a fractional COO fix owner dependency? Yes, and the engagement model fits the problem. A fractional COO runs the decision census, designs the guardrails, and transfers decision rights without adding a permanent executive salary. The owner keeps irreversible decisions while the operating structure absorbs everything else.
Does owner dependency reduce business valuation? Yes. Acquirers price key person risk directly, through discounts, longer earnouts, or walked deals. A business that demonstrably runs through documented decision rights commands stronger multiples because the asset being purchased is the system, not the founder.
Ready to find out what only you can actually do? The decision census separates the work that needs a founder from the work that needs a system. Schedule a consultation to start the inventory.
Force multipliers in operations management are strategies and tools that amplify team productivity without proportional resource increases. These include automation, process standardization, strategic outsourcing, and skill development programs. Organizations implementing force multipliers report… Operations leaders apply force multipliers operations to eliminate bottleneck layers that suppress throughput without proportionally scaling headcount.
Operations Strategy Brief
Force Multipliers in Operations Management: Achieving Disproportionate Output from the Same Resources
Technology & Automation, Process Optimization & Standardization, Human Capital Empowerment, and Supply Chain Optimization, each domain independently lifts output-to-input ratio, but layered together they compound disproportionately.
RPA as the Entry-Point Multiplier
Automating reconciliation-class tasks (data entry, invoicing, report generation) can cut task time by 80% while reducing errors, freeing human capacity for strategic work rather than adding headcount.
Cross-Training Eliminates Bottlenecks Before They Form
Multi-role capability across employees creates operational elasticity, the brief details how pairing cross-training with employee decision-making authority removes the two most common throughput constraints in mid-market operations.
Lean + Six Sigma + BPR: Sequence Matters
Lean eliminates waste, Six Sigma reduces variability, BPR redesigns from the ground up. The document maps when each applies, incremental refinement vs. full-process redesign, and why SOPs must anchor every improvement to prevent regression.
Source: Force Multipliers in Operations Management, KamyarShah.com · World Consulting Group
Force multipliers in operations management are strategies and tools that amplify team productivity without proportional resource increases. These include automation, process standardization, strategic outsourcing, and skill development programs. Organizations implementing force multipliers report significant efficiency gains while reducing operational costs. The following strategies demonstrate how companies maximize output through intelligent resource allocation. When margins compress as volume grows, an operational efficiency consultant restores the throughput that informal systems can no longer sustain.
Fractional executives are senior leaders who work part-time across multiple companies, delivering strategic expertise without full-time costs. Businesses adopt this model to access C-suite talent, reduce overhead, and scale operations flexibly. Growth trends show increasing adoption among startups… Companies accessing fractional executives impact at a fractional level gain senior expertise at 30 to 50 percent of full-time cost.
Fractional Executive Trends
The Data Behind Fractional Leadership Adoption
67% Growth Rate (2022–2023)
Fractional executive engagements surged 67% year-over-year, signaling a structural shift, not a passing trend, in how companies access C-suite talent.
63% Sales Increase / 56% Pipeline Growth
Companies using fractional executives reported a 63% increase in sales and 56% growth in sales pipeline, concrete revenue impact, not just advisory overhead.
23% of U.S. Businesses Expected to Adopt by 2025
Nearly one in four U.S. businesses are projected to use fractional hiring, driven by startups and mid-market firms ($5M–$100M) seeking experienced leadership without full-time cost commitments.
Finance Leads Adoption by Industry
Finance is the most common industry for fractional executive roles, with remote work expansion (10% adoption baseline) accelerating demand across all sectors.
Source: kamyarshah.com, Fractional Executives: Impact, Growth Trends, and Strategic Business Adoption Kamyar Shah · 25+ years · 650+ companies · $700/hour Fractional COO
Fractional executives are senior leaders who work part-time across multiple companies, delivering strategic expertise without full-time costs. Businesses adopt this model to access C-suite talent, reduce overhead, and scale operations flexibly. Growth trends show increasing adoption among startups and mid-market firms seeking experienced guidance. Learn how fractional leadership transforms organizational strategy and performance.
Advanced operations management terminology encompasses supply chain optimization, resource allocation, cost control, and production efficiency metrics. Organizations that master these concepts achieve significant competitive advantages through streamlined processes and enhanced operational… Operators applying operation management terms report measurable improvement in execution consistency and strategic throughput across the organization.
Operations Terminology Series
Operation Management Terms, Part II: Key Frameworks Every Leader Should Deploy
Value Stream Mapping & Process Flow Diagrams
These complementary tools map the full lifecycle of a business process from initiation to completion, exposing hidden bottlenecks and non-value-adding steps that erode margins.
Lean Management + Six Sigma
Lean principles minimize waste. Six Sigma reduces variation. Combined, they form a dual methodology for systematic inefficiency elimination across supply chain, resource allocation, and production.
Total Quality Management (TQM)
TQM embeds continuous improvement and customer satisfaction into every operational activity, not as a project, but as an organization-wide operating standard enforced through control charts and standardization.
Kaizen (Continuous Improvement)
Incremental improvements compounding over time, not sweeping overhauls, drive sustainable operational performance gains and long-term organizational resilience.
Source: kamyarshah.com, Kamyar Shah | Fractional COO | 650+ companies | 25+ years
Advanced operations management terminology encompasses supply chain optimization, resource allocation, cost control, and production efficiency metrics. Organizations that master these concepts achieve significant competitive advantages through streamlined processes and enhanced operational performance. Understanding terms like lean manufacturing, just-in-time inventory, and total quality management enables leaders to identify inefficiencies and reduce waste systematically. Implementation of these advanced concepts directly translates to improved profitability and organizational resilience. The subsequent sections explore specific frameworks for deploying these strategies effectively.
Operations management fundamentals form the backbone of organizational efficiency and competitive advantage. Key terms including supply chain management, lean production, quality control, and process optimization directly impact business performance and cost structure. Understanding these… Operators applying operation management terms report measurable improvement in execution consistency and strategic throughput across the organization.
OPERATIONS GLOSSARY
10 Operations Management Terms Every Leader Must Know
Value Stream Mapping + Lean Manufacturing
Two complementary frameworks: value stream mapping visually analyzes material and information flow, while lean manufacturing systematically eliminates waste, together they form the foundation of process optimization.
Six Sigma: 67% Defect Reduction
A data-driven methodology that reduces variation and improves quality, achieving measurable defect reduction that directly impacts cost structure and competitive advantage.
Inventory Management: 67% Cost Reduction
Effective inventory management minimizes holding costs while ensuring product availability, a direct lever on profitability that most mid-market companies underoptimize.
Queueing Theory: Wait Time Optimization
Analyzes waiting lines to improve service efficiency, an often-overlooked discipline that bridges capacity planning with customer satisfaction in service operations.
Source: kamyarshah.com, Operation Management Terms: Part I | Kamyar Shah, Fractional COO · 650+ companies · 25+ years
Operations management fundamentals form the backbone of organizational efficiency and competitive advantage. Key terms including supply chain management, lean production, quality control, and process optimization directly impact business performance and cost structure. Understanding these foundational concepts enables managers to identify bottlenecks, reduce waste, and streamline workflows across departments. Organizations that master these essential principles achieve measurable improvements in productivity and profitability. The strategic application of these operational concepts drives sustainable growth and market competitiveness for forward-thinking enterprises.
A Project Management Office is a centralized department that standardizes project management practices across an organization. Starting a PMO requires defining its scope, securing executive sponsorship, establishing governance frameworks, and selecting qualified staff. Success depends on clearly… Operators applying pmo getting report measurable improvement in execution consistency and strategic throughput.
PMO Implementation Guide
Getting Your Project Management Office Started: Key Decisions & Data
PMI’s Three PMO Structures Drive Everything
Supportive (low control, consultative), Controlling (moderate compliance & standards), or Directive (PMO runs projects directly). Your choice determines stakeholder impact and change management intensity across the organization.
Measurable Impact: Budget, Time & Risk
PMO-managed projects show 75% stay on budget, 40% time savings through better planning, and 50% risk reduction via proactive management, while 85% of projects achieve strategic alignment with organizational goals.
Senior Sponsorship Is Non-Negotiable
A senior leader who endorses the PMO but doesn’t follow its governance standards will actively undermine the entire effort. Sponsorship must be behavioral, not just verbal, peers and teams watch what leadership actually does.
Four Critical First Stakeholders
Executive sponsor, senior leadership team (educated on purpose & structure), project managers (retrained on new practices), and a dedicated PMO point person whose primary responsibility is implementation, not a side assignment.
Source: kamyarshah.com, PMO: Getting Your Project Management Office Started | Kamyar Shah, Fractional COO
A Project Management Office is a centralized department that standardizes project management practices across an organization. Starting a PMO requires defining its scope, securing executive sponsorship, establishing governance frameworks, and selecting qualified staff. Success depends on clearly communicating the PMO value to stakeholders and aligning processes with business objectives. The following sections outline specific steps to launch your PMO effectively.
An emerging trend over the past 10-20 years (certainly in the information technology areas of….. A company) is to implement project management (PMO) office to help companies deliver on strategic plans. Project management has been around for centuries in various forms. As a discipline, it gained in importance in 1968 when the Project Management Institute (PMI) was formed to provide guidelines and insights on proper project management. PMOs have become more commonplace in large companies as the need to formalize practices is necessary to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of project management.
The goal of this article is to discuss PMO: Getting Your Project Management Office Started. Insights will be reviewed that will help you prepare your organization for the implementation of your project management office.the operational infrastructure growing companies needthe strategic clarity that scales execution
Types of Project Management Office (PMO) Structure
The Project Management Institute (PMI) outlines three different PMO structures typically found in organizations in their book the PMBOK Guide: A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge: Sixth Edition.
Early on in your PMO efforts, you will want to decide the type of structure you want for your PMO: This is wheremanagement consulting supportturns analysis into action.
Supportive: In this structure, the PMOs role is to provide consultative services to internal project managers and departments. The PMO will provide templates, best practices, access to information, and lessons learned from other projects. The control wielded by the PMO on projects is low.
Controlling: This PMO structure provides support to internal project managers and departments. While requiring a level of compliance that results in the PMO exercising moderate control of projects to support some level of consistency and standards.
Directive: In some instances, you will want your PMO directly controlling projects. This level of structure results in working to all projects have the highest level of project management expertise available within the organization. However, it does result in departments losing some level of the direct control of projects and can result in the highest level of change management
Your decision on the structure will have varying effects on various stakeholders throughout the organization.
Project Management Office First Steps
The following stakeholders should be considered at the beginning of your efforts:
Senior Leader Sponsorship: It is critical that your most senior leader understands and is supportive of a PMO structure. Your PMO will involve change management that other leaders in the organization will be looking to the most senior leader to support and emulate in their practices. A senior leader who says they want a PMO to help streamline and standardize efforts, but who does not follow the governance standards, will undermine the efforts of your PMO
Senior Leadership Team Commitment: Your most senior leaders will carry the message of the value of the PMO in their day-to-day interactions with their senior leader peers and their team members. Early on in the implementation, it is recommended that senior leaders be educated on the PMO, its purpose, and how it will function. This will be a time to answer the questions about the structure and changes that may be necessary to operate within a PMO structure.
Project Managers: Anyone serving in the capacity of a project manager will need to be fully trained on any changes that the PMO structure will bring to their work practices.
Point Person: Regardless of the structure of PMO you choose (supportive, controlling, or directive) you will want to have one person who has responsibility for the PMO implementation. It is recommended that the PMO be the primary responsibility of the individual. Depending on the size of your organization and the structure you choose this person may have other roles supporting them with the PMO. It is recommended that this person be a certified Project Management Professional (PMP®) to help work to the various practices outlined by the Project Management Institute (PMI®)
Project Members: Any project is made up of various subject matter experts. Each of these individuals will be impacted by the implementation of a PMO. It is important to consider the types of communication, training, and support that these individuals may need as you implement your PMO.
Human Resources: Human resources will be critical in helping to hire a point-person for running the PMO. There are specific skills and competencies that human resources will want to work to any point person meets (such as great communications, strong business acumen, and project management skills: are just a few). Human resources will also be involved in the assessment of existing personnel to identify any skill gaps. May need to be addressed through training or coaching to bring the collective understanding of project management to the entire organization.
Training Department: The training department should be engaged to develop any required training programs or materials that are necessary to raise the project management skill and competency levels of key individuals. Vary programs may be necessary depending on the need to train individuals on project management skills, a team member on project team collaboration skills. And training for project sponsors on their roles in projects.
Communications Department: Since there is so much change-management that occurs with the implementation of a PMO you will want to engage with your internal experts on communication. Having these individuals involved from the beginning will help you in developing an effective communication plan.
Systems Support
A critical component of a successful project management office (PMO) structure is a Project Portfolio Management (PPM) platform which also contains the capability to manage projects. PPM platforms come in a variety of sizes and styles and can range from ~$100,000 to over $1,000,000 per year. Understanding the needs of your project managers and other stakeholders will help you select the right system that meets your needs at an optimal cost. It is recommended that a formalized request for proposal (RFP) be conducted which includes the following considerations for the platform.
Platform Features and Functionality
User Experience: Evaluate the simplicity for the users and does it have a web-based interface.
Configuration/Flexibility: Is the interface configurable to meet the user’s needs and what are the product rules that must be adhered to.
Data Management: All projects will involve the need for comments, attached documents, links, etc. This may be in addition to being able to import and export information. Support that the PPM meets your needs
Document Management and Collaboration: Various projects entail the need to review materials related to the project. Does the system allow you to comment, edit, revise, etc. these documents.
User Administration: You will need one to several administrators that are familiar with the overall system and it is important that the PPM is intuitive. And resources exist to support the admins (whether in the platform or as a support group outside of the platform).
Displays and Reporting: Can the system create dashboards that are accessible by different user types and can dashboards be created to individual’s needs. It is also critical that the PPM provides overall views of project health for executive-level views.
Communication and Collaboration: Any PPM should provide the means for seamless social communication within the platform and either a project-specific or general. Project Evaluation and Portfolio Management
Issue/Risk Analysis and Management: A key management area for projects in Risk Identification. The PPM should have the ability to identify risks, outline preventative/corrective actions, and allow for tracking of progress against the risk mitigation
Project Evaluation: A key reason for having a PMO is the ability to evaluate various projects against your strategic plan and ultimately make choices on which projects to work on. Does the PPM give you the ability to do this?
Project Valuation: The PPM should have the ability to capture the value of the project (financial and otherwise).
Prioritization and Portfolio Optimization: Many PMOs use a “Greenlight Process” which is a systematic means to evaluate projects and you will want the PPM to manage this process.
Project Planning and Project Management
Project Planning and Management: The user interface should have the ability to show planned versus actual performance, provide roadmaps of projects, allow for Gantt chart views, etc.
Portfolio Management: It is important to be able to group projects into portfolios and the PPM should be able to provide useful functionality to all for this.
Workflow Management: Many projects follow consistent workflows which should be able to be managed in the PPM.
Project Data and Status Reporting: The PPM should allow project managers to capture, compute, and report on costs, hours, resource consumptions, etc. as it relates to the project.
Financial Management and Budgeting: Your finance department will want to work to the PPM is able to provide them with the reporting they may need for financial updates. In some cases, a PPM may even be able to interface with your financial systems.
Project Close-Out and Knowledge Management: Does the PPM support the verification of project deliverables and acceptance criteria and capturing of lessons learned.
Resource Management and Demand Planning
Resource Assignment, Scheduling, and Management: Some PMOs will want to integrate their PPM with the time management of people resources and other assets/resources necessary for a successful project. If you choose a person to work on a project do you have the ability to see….. Their availability (as it relates to other projects they may be working on or their day-to-day job commitments)? A common efficiency issue for projects is the bandwidth and availability of the people resources. •Demand Management: Your PPM should allow for an approval process that allows for approvers to understand the overall impact of the project commitments (people, hours, resources, etc.). And how this inter-relate to your strategic goals so that data-based decisions can be made on project actions •Time Tracking: In some cases, you may even want the ability to track real-time work efforts against specific projects. For this capability, you would want to make sure that the PPM has the capability for individual users to capture their time in the system.
Other Steps
Additional steps will be critical to the implementation of your PMO
Governance Plan: One of the key components of your PMO will be the governance process you put in place as they relate to project initiation. Project approval, resource approvals, communications expectations, etc. It will be important that the governance components you decide on are agreed to by key stakeholders.
Communications Plan: The implementation of a PMO requires numerous changes to an organization. To work to everyone is aware of the vision, purpose, and plans for your PMO you will want to partner with your communications department on the PMO implementation plan. This allows for a clear understanding by the impacted stakeholders and will work to questions are posed by those who will be engaged with the activities of the PMO.
Training: It is critical that the PPM you choose is properly trained in with the various stakeholders within the organization. This training plan for your PPM will likely involve various user types that will need to be taken into consideration and be properly budgeted for.
Books:
Project Management can be quite formalized and the implementation of a PMO adds additional structure to your overall project efforts. The following resources can provide helpful insights to project management for those team members who will be most closely involved in the implementation of your PMO.
Sprint: Solve Big Problems and Test New ideas in Just Five Days by Jake Knapp
PMP PMBOK: Project Management Professional Study Guide by Ralph Cybulski
Simple PMP: Exam Guide Updated for the PMBOK Guide Sixth Edition by Phil Martin
PMBOK Guide: A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge: Sixth Edition by PMI
You will find that the implementation of a Project Management Office (PMO) will prove to be one of the most effective means for to improve the execution of your projects. And initiatives in reaching your company’s strategic goals.
Customer experience extends beyond satisfaction scores to encompass loyalty, advocacy, and emotional connection. Satisfied customers may still leave for competitors, while those with exceptional experiences become brand advocates. True customer experience focuses on creating memorable interactions… Operators applying customer experience report measurable improvement in execution consistency and strategic throughput.
Customer Experience Strategy
It’s Not Just About Satisfaction, Why Happy Customers Still Leave
90% Say Experience > Price
90% of customers say experience is more important than price when choosing a brand, yet most companies still optimize for satisfaction scores instead of end-to-end experience across every touchpoint.
The Satisfaction-Loyalty Gap
While 67% repurchase after a positive experience, only 65% remain loyal long-term. Satisfied customers may still leave for competitors, but 85% will recommend you after an exceptional experience, turning CX into your acquisition engine.
Every Department Owns CX, Not Just Sales
Researchers, Designers, HR, Operations, Finance, Safety, Sales, and Marketing all influence customer experience. HR’s role is especially overlooked: a satisfied, engaged workforce leads directly to better products and higher CX scores.
The Hidden Touchpoints That Destroy Trust
Finance (pricing fairness, collections), Safety (product risk prevention), and Operations (invisible processes whose absence customers notice immediately), 72% of customers trust brands more when these behind-the-scenes functions deliver seamlessly.
Source: kamyarshah.com, Customer Experience: It is Not Just About Satisfaction
Customer experience extends beyond satisfaction scores to encompass loyalty, advocacy, and emotional connection. Satisfied customers may still leave for competitors, while those with exceptional experiences become brand advocates. True customer experience focuses on creating memorable interactions, solving problems effectively, and building lasting relationships. Learn how to shift from satisfaction metrics to experience-driven strategies.
Customer Experience has grown beyond a customer’s satisfaction with your product or service. The best companies view Customer Experience as the end experience that a customer has with the company throughout the various touchpoints.
The goal of this article is to discuss Customer Experience: It Is Not Just About Satisfaction. The following are some areas that should be considered when addressing the various touchpoints that a customer has with your companycoaching engagementsfractional CMO
Customer Experience: Everyone in your organization plays a role
Many people in an organization believe that if they do not interact directly with the customer that they do not affect the customer experience. This is not true and can be dangerous to your company’s success.
Areas of Influence
When thinking about Customer Experience be sure to include the following:
Researchers: Are your researchers who work on new product discovery or service creation focused on the needs of the customer. And what the customer wants or is trying to solve for. It is easy to get excited about what organizations think people want (and this can work: think iPhone). Though just as often the next section will want to be in-tune with what the customers need.
Designers: When it comes to the actual design of a product or service have organizations done…. The proper research. With the customers to work to what companies have designed actually meets their needs. The landscape is littered with products that seemed “nifty” but that did not fully meet the needs of their customers and ultimately did not survive long-term (think Blackberry).
Human Resources: Does your human resources department fully understand the skills and competencies needed by individuals in the various departments that need to be present to have a customer-focused mindset. The company with the greatest engineers will not be able to compete with the company with great engineers who also possess a customer-focused mindset to build products that fully meet the customer’s needs. In addition, the Human Resources department is typically on-point for monitoring employee satisfaction and engagement. Countless studies have shown that a satisfied and engaged workforce ultimately leads to the best products and services which leads to the highest levels of positive customer experience.
Operations: There are numerous roles on the operational side of the business that may never interact with the customer directly. It takes a focused effort to work to these employees understand the critical role they play in creating products or services that delight the customer. Many of these will go unnoticed by the customer, but their absence would certainly be noticed.
Finance: Here organizations include all of the various functions typically found in finance (accounting, payables, planning, reporting, compliance, etc.). Fair pricing, purchasing terms, collections processes, and transparency will all influence a customer’s opinion on their experience with your company.
Safety: This area can often be overlooked. While mostly preventive in nature, working to your safety department is involved in all aspects of product. And service design will work to customers do not encounter issues that may harm them or put them at risk. Would certainly result in a poor experience with your company.
Sales: Traditionally the closest employees to the customer are those that work within sales. The individuals in sales typically have the greatest understanding of the wants. And needs of the customer as well as direct feedback from the customers on recent interactions with the company’s products or services. It is critical that their insight is communicated to other departments in a manner. Raises the collective awareness of the company as to the most critical areas of need that must be addressed to improve the customer’s experience.
Marketing: Marketing helps to control the brand image which ultimately factors into a customer’s overall experience and feelings towards the brand.
IT: Here organizations consider Information Technology (IT) to include externally-facing and internally facing efforts that involve technology (computers, systems, phones, etc.). IT is often overlooked when it comes to customer experience. However, think about the customer’s interaction with you on the internet, over the phone, or with in-store technology like registers and kiosks. It is often at these points that the customers run into issues dealing with your company in a seamless manner.
Feedback Points
A variety of methods exist to get a complete view of how your customers view their experience. Each of these should be considered as you build your plans for improving your Customer Experience positioning.
Net Promoter Score® NPS®: The NPS® measurement has become a widely used measure and is based on the work of Fred Reichheld from Bain & Company. His research led to the creation of Net Promoter Score® question which can essentially be stated as “How likely are you to recommend “company name to friends or colleagues”. This type of question is typically presented to a customer shortly after a purchase a product or service from a company. The intent is to get an overall sense of the customer’s happiness with your company based on their most recent interaction. Typically the question requests a ranking from 0 to 10 from the customer (with 0 being not likely to 10 being very likely to recommend). Responses of 0-6 are considered detractors, 7-8 are passive, and 9-10 are promoters. It is customary to serve up a follow-up question to the respondent. Solicits additional insights (in verbatim format) of what could have been done differently by the company to have improved the rating. Great reading for all leaders is “The Ultimate Question 2.0: How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer-Driven World” by Fred Reichheld.
Customer Effort Score: The CES is intended to measure the amount of effort a customer must spend to get an issue resolved. Typically a question is posed to customers after they have worked with a department in your company to resolve. And issue (an example is a survey that you take after calling a customer service line). The CES can also be used to survey customers after they have purchased from you to find out their perceptions of how easy it was to do business with you. This can oftentimes identify for you points of Friction that may exist in your business model that is displeasing to customers. “Friction: The Untapped Force That Can Be Your Most Powerful Advantage” by Roger Dooley will you’re your leaders thinking internally about various ways in. Your products perform or services are experienced that may be inefficient and frustrating for your customers.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): Is a tool used for understanding the forces that shape competition within an industry. It can be useful in guiding strategy adjustments to suit the competitive environment. Porter’s Five Forces was developed by Harvard Business Scholl professor Michael Porter. The five areas that are reviewed by companies to analyze an industry’s attractiveness are:
Rivalry Amount Competitors: Do competitors “play nice” or is it cutthroat
The threat of New Entrants: What barriers exist to keep out new competitors or what should you be working on to make it hard to do business in your space
The threat of Substitutes: A substitute is not always as a similar-looking business model. Taxi companies did not anticipate that customers would be so eager to try Uber, Lyft, and other ride-sharing platforms
Bargaining Power of Customers/Consumers: Access to information has given customers and consumers new use in dealing with you, how do you use this in your strategic decisions
Bargaining Power of Suppliers: How do you strategically approach your relationships with suppliers
CRM Notes: Your sales personnel and customer support personnel are continually collecting feedback from customers in their regular interactions. It is important to capture these insights in your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. This will ultimately provide you with data that can be mined for patterns and issues that are common amongst your customers.
Social Media Monitoring: No company is immune to the impact of negative or positive social media. And signs are that this will continue to be a critical area that should be closely monitored. Depending upon your business you may be impacted by Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Reddit (and others are continually emerging). Social Media is not just about what is being said about your company, it can also be about what is being researched about your company. Some social media sites are used by your customers in researching your products or services (and thus they will have experience from their engagement).
Customer Experience Skills
A person’s tendencies to be customer service oriented often are learned at a very young age. When looking to build the customer experience culture in your company the following should be considered:
Leadership Commitment: It is absolutely essential that the commitment to improving the customer experience be championed by the leader in your organization. This commitment should be well communicated and understood throughout the organization.
Customer Experience Strategy: It is critical that a formal strategy is developed regarding your Customer Experience plans. A Road-Map should be developed that outlines vision, objectives, and tactics for developing a company culture centered on improving the Customer Experience.
Improving the organization’s knowledge: There are a variety of ways to improve to the knowledge of your organization including formal training, a regular blog reviewing (such as jeannebliss.com/blog, samhorn.com/blog, blogs.oracle.com/author/blake-morgan, rogerdolley.com/blog), listening. And sharing podcast from notable experts on customer experience and reading books such as:
Winning Her Business: How to Transform the Customer Experience for the World’s Most Powerful Consumers by Bridget Brennan
Excellence Wins: A Non-Nonsense Guide to Becoming the Best in a World of Compromise by Horst Schulze
Why Customers Leave (and How to Win Them Back): 24 Reasons People are Leaving You for Competitors by David Arvin
Friction: The Untapped Force That Can Be Your Most Powerful Advantage by Roger Dooley
The Customer of the Future: 10 Guiding Principles for Winning Tomorrow’s Business by Blake Morgan
The Convenience Revolution: How to Deliver a Customer Service Experience That Disrupts Competition and Creates Fierce Loyalty
The Customer Centricity Playbook: Implement a Winning Strategy Drive by Customer Lifetime Value by Peter Fader
Would you Do That to Your Mother: The “Make Mom Proud” Standard for How to Treat Your Customer by Jeanne Bliss
The Ultimate Question 2.0: How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer-Driven World by Fred Reichheld
The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
The Starbucks Experience: 5 Principles for Turning Ordinary into Extraordinary by Joseph Mitchelli
Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers by Jay Baer
Talk Triggers: The Complete Guide to Creating Customers with Word-of-Mouth by Jay Baer
Story Driven: You don’t need to compete when your know who you are by Bernadette Jiwa
It’s All About CEX!: The Essential Guide to Customer and Employee Experience by Jason S. Bradshay
Be The Guests: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service by Theodore Kinni
The Experience Economy by Joseph Pine
Nincompoopery: Why Your Customers Hate You: and How to Fix It by John Brandt
More is More: How the Best Companies Go Farther and Work Harder to Create Knock-Your-Socks-Off Customer Experiences by Blake Morgan
The Relationship Economy: Building Stronger Customer Connections in the Digital Age by John R Dijulius III
Chief Customer Officer 2.0: How to Build Your Customer-Driven Growth Engine by Jeanne Bliss
Amaze Every Customer Every Time: 52 Tools for Delivering the Most Amazing Customer Service on the Planet by Shep Hyken
Making customers happy and providing them the best customer experience possible results in rewards beyond their immediate satisfaction. Having the best customer experience will help to solidify loyalty from your customer base that helps you improve and grow your business.
Operations management consultant is a professional who optimizes business processes, reduces costs, and improves efficiency across an organization. These consultants analyze workflows, identify bottlenecks, and implement systems that streamline production and service delivery. They work with… Operations leaders apply operations management to eliminate bottleneck layers that suppress throughput without proportionally scaling headcount.
Operations Strategy
Why Operations Management Is the Highest-ROI Function in Your Business
~50% of All Jobs Are in Operations
According to the Ramanujan College of Management, roughly half of all jobs worldwide sit within operations, making it the single largest concentration of human capital and budget in most organizations.
Operations = One of Only Three Core Functions
Operations sits alongside finance and marketing as one of the three most significant business functions. Without it, there is literally nothing to sell, every other department becomes irrelevant.
Minor Savings × Massive Scope = Major Impact
Operations typically holds the highest budget and the majority of organizational assets. Even small efficiency gains compound dramatically when multiplied across production, logistics, personnel, and quality assurance.
Four Pillars: Production, Metrics, QA, Personnel
Effective operations management requires coordinating production processes, KPI measurement rooted in scientific management principles, quality assurance for brand consistency, and personnel oversight, each a source of hidden inefficiency.
Operations management consultant is a professional who optimizes business processes, reduces costs, and improves efficiency across an organization. These consultants analyze workflows, identify bottlenecks, and implement systems that streamline production and service delivery. They work with leadership to align operations with strategic goals. The following sections detail how consultants drive measurable improvements.
Why Dedicated Operations Management Is Essential
Operations management is an element of every business, whether it is one person or 100,000 people. However, not every organization, especially small and/or growing ones, put sufficient effort and resources into managing their operations. Resources dedicated to this essential facet of running a business can generate substantial returns in terms of efficiency and productivity.
What Is Operations Management?
Operations management is the aspect of management concerned with the oversight, planning, and control of processes related to day-to-day operations and producing goods and services. In essence, operations managementis running the parts of your business that generate value for your customers. This makes it worth taking a close look at how you can improve this part of your organization.operational executive services learn about fractional marketing leadership
Exactly what is involved in managing operations depends on the business. However, it is always focused on producing goods and/or services, particularly when a scientific and thoughtful approach is taken to efficiency and effectiveness.
Production Processes: The main part of overseeing operations is managing the production process. This is planning how the company will create goods or services, how logistics will support production, how resources will be allocated and other similar management processes.
Metrics and Measurement: Operations management as organizations know it today is rooted in scientific management during the industrial revolution. Planning, tracking and analyzing metrics and key performance indicators is an essential element. This aspect helps managers identify where their processes and people are inefficient and/or ineffective.
Quality Assurance: An important element of measurement of operations is quality assurance. This is working to products and services delivered to customers meet reasonable expectations and are consistent with the brand’s image. This is a particularly difficult area for growing companies.
Personnel Management: This is the oversight of the people who work in the company’s day-to-day operations. Efficiently organizing people, supporting effective communication and managing organizational knowledge all play roles in operations management.
These are just some of the elements of operations management. Of course, as every company does different things and provides value in unique ways, each organization’s operations has its own unique elements and priorities.
Why Is Operations Management Important?
In many organizations, operations are one of the three most significant functions, the other two being finance and marketing. Basically, a company needs to sell itself, fund itself and create value for its customers. One may even argue that without the operations department, all other activities of the business are irrelevant because there would be nothing to sell.
However, the importance of operations management goes beyond this. These are some of the reasons why this area of management should be prioritized:
Producing goods and services is a costly but necessary aspect of running a business. On many teams, it is the department with the highest budget.
According to the Ramanujan College of Management, around half of all jobs around the world are in operations. This means a substantial number of any company’s human resources are dedicated to producing goods and services.
In all organizations, inefficiencies and waste naturally occur. Unchecked, these can have a dramatic impact on profitability.
In short, the operations of a company represents a major investment. This department often holds or utilizes the majority of assets owned by the organization. The complexity and breadth of operations mean that there are many ways productivity can be hindered.
This is precisely why operations management is such an important function. It presents opportunities to increase efficiency and effectiveness in the most substantial division of the organization. Even minor cost savings can have major impacts when multiplied by the scope of operations.
the operations team is concerned with quality assurance and customer satisfaction. Therefore, it presents opportunities to increase revenues and enhance marketing efforts by delivering greater value to customers.
All organizations should have at least some resources dedicated to operations management to help support the highest profitability possible. This doesn’t need to be a large team. It can be a single individual, even part-time. However, company operations is important enough to deserve a serious focus.
Who Is Involved in Operations Management?
In medium-to-large organizations, operations are often overseen by a chief operating officer or similar top-level executive. Often, this individual is seen as the second-in-command to the chief executive officer. This relationship reflects the importance of operations management.
The chief operating officer may be charged with a variety of duties. These can include process improvement, overseeing important projects, enhancing communication and other such functions. In many organizations, the chief operating officer handles a combination of all the elements of operations.
Many organizations also have various managers that oversee specific elements of the business’ operations. These can include production, supply chain, purchasing, quality assurance, facilities, and materials managers. Each of these roles helps to work to inputs are effectively and efficiently converted into outputs for sale.
Operations research is also an important element. It is a more theory-focused function than the other managers. These team members measure results and use that data to help identify the most optimal application of resources. Typically, only medium and large businesses employ dedicated operations, research analysts. However, this type of work should be a concern even for small teams.
there may be various supervisors involved in production and other operations functions. Exactly who and how many people are involved in operations management depends on the size of the company and how complex its day-to-day operations are. In a small company, there may be a single operations manager. In large companies, there may be hundreds or even thousands.
Not all operations managers need to be full-time members of the company’s team. Many organizations use consultants to enhance their operations. This can be in a managerial role, acting as a part-time chief operating officer or operations manager. It can also be in a process improvement role, helping to identify inefficiencies and create innovative solutions to address them.
How Can You Improve Operations Management?
Often the simplest and most significant step any organization can take to improve operations management is to hire personnel who are dedicated to it. This can be a full-time manager or an outside consultant. Simply having people who are focused on this aspect of your business will quickly result in identifying and addressing inefficiencies.
Another way that operations can be improved is to simplify the processes that produce the company’s goods and services. The more complex production processes are, the more likely there are to be faults. Ideally, production should only be as complicated as it has to be in order to create high-quality goods and services.
As you evaluate your processes, you may learn that you don’t have the clearly defined practices you thought you did. Many growing businesses, especially those that are still small, find that as they have grown, their production is less predictable than ideal. This is the result of shifting from individual knowledge driving production to organization knowledge driving it.
Creating and codifying predictable and consistent production practices is an essential step to improving operations. After all, if you are inconsistent, no amount of process improvement will help because the processes are different depending on who you talk to.
Implementing better measurement is another helpful approach to increasing efficiency and improving profitability. If you are already collecting metrics on operations, try auditing those performance indicators. Determine what important data is being left out. Similarly, identify what information you are collecting that is not helpful. Use this insight to improve your measurement systems.
Addressing small issues can often lead to significant improvements. Seemingly minor issues may be having major effects on your operations by causing bottlenecks and other such broader issues. Better yet, those small problems are often relatively easy to fix.
Finally, try to reduce movement as much as possible. Try to avoid resources and people needing to jump from place to place or function to function during the production process. The more complex the path of inputs through your operations, the more likely you are to have inefficiencies and errors.
What Are the Keys to Effective Operations Management?
The operations division can be the source of significant business success when managed well. The size, complexity, and impact of operations mean that even modest improvements can have dramatic results. Of course, planning to improve is significantly easier than actually doing so. Following these keys to success will help to turn intent into impact:
Manage Risk Without Avoiding It: Risk management is an element of operations. It is important to develop robust policies and practices that can withstand some unexpected events. However, innovation in operations is also important. Being completely risk-averse will often lead to falling behind and may even prevent the robust operations you seek. Balance is essential.
Understand Industry Trends: As your industry changes and the needs of your market evolve, your operations management team needs to be abreast of these trends. You don’t need to chase every fad, but at least understanding what is currently happening will help you make the right choices for your business.
Accept and Learn From Mistakes: Getting things right with operations means making some changes. Sometimes these changes will prove to be missteps. Mistakes happen and should not only be tolerated but actively accepted and used as learning opportunities. Letting yourself and your operations management team make mistakes is sometimes a pathway to success.
Use Technology: Many organizations’ operations are hindered by outdated technology. While constantly changing systems is far from optimal, it can be helpful to have a flexible strategy that can allow your team to embrace new tools. Getting in the habit of being thoughtful about whether changes and upgrades could help is beneficial.
Integrate With Organizational Goals: Operations and organization goals should complement each other. If your operations aren’t supporting the greater strategy, it is an issue. Similarly, if your strategic goals are at odds with the realities of your operations, you will struggle to achieve them.
Stay Adaptable: One of the most challenging aspects of operations management is keeping things adaptable. It can take serious expertise and effort to devise operating policies and practices that can stay flexible. However, the benefits of that adaptability are worth the time and effort necessary to foster it.
Keeping Questioning: There is no answer for operational success that will be the right choice forever. Always question the assumptions that drive your business’ operations. For example, evaluating your purchasing, you may realize you are overpaying for the materials for your production process. An outside perspective can be invaluable for this.
Following these keys to success will help to work to your operations are managed efficiently and effectively both now and in the future. As with other areas of business leadership, operations management is as much about the management team’s traits as it is policy.
Operations managers who push for more while being realistic with their goals are always looking for ways to be better. And who support and empower their people will tend to succeed.. managers who emphasize consistency and quality tend to fit operations well.
What Options Do Small Businesses Have?
There is a lot that businesses can do to improve their operations and increase their profitability. However, achieving these results often requires dedicated personnel and resources. For small businesses, having even a single dedicated operations manager may be difficult.
Similarly, growing organizations may need an outside perspective to help them to fine-tune their operations as they expand. These challenges can be difficult to navigate. The answer in many cases is a business consultant.
A fractional operations manager or chief operating officer can help provide that necessary oversight without the investment and commitment of a full-time team member.. a consultant can provide an outside perspective. Getting help with improving your operations management does not require hiring a full team of managers. Sometimes an outside solution is the best option.
In Episode 6, Kamyar Shah breaks down the operational mistakes that stall growth in $2M to $20M companies, explaining why most throughput problems trace back to how decisions are routed rather than how processes are designed, and what operations leaders can do about it without adding headcount.
Kamyar Shah joined the show to talk about what actually breaks inside a company when revenue starts outrunning infrastructure. The conversation covers his diagnostic approach when he enters a new fractional COO engagement, the three operational failure modes he encounters most often in mid-market companies, and why he argues that the first move is never a process redesign.
What This Episode Covers
Kamyar opens by drawing a distinction that most operators miss: the difference between a process bottleneck and a decision-routing bottleneck. Process bottlenecks show up in workflow diagrams and are easy to see. Decision-routing bottlenecks are invisible until they have already suppressed throughput for months. His argument is that the majority of operational slowdowns in founder-led companies fall into the second category, which means that standard process improvement tools do not reach the root cause.
The episode goes into depth on three failure modes Kamyar sees repeatedly. The first is what he calls authority compression: as a company grows, more decisions get routed to the same two or three senior people, creating a structural ceiling on execution speed. The second is operating system debt, where a company scales its sales motion without scaling its delivery infrastructure to match, building invisible liability that surfaces during the next growth push. The third is transition fragility, where critical operational knowledge lives inside people rather than inside systems, creating dependence that makes any org change high-risk.
He also covers the mechanics of a fractional COO engagement: how scope gets defined in the first 30 days, what a realistic 90-day operational milestone looks like for a company at the $5M to $15M range, and why he measures progress on decision latency rather than process compliance.
Transcript Excerpt
Host: When you walk into a company for the first time as a fractional COO, what are you actually looking for in the first two weeks?
Kamyar Shah: The first thing I want to know is where decisions wait. Not how fast people work, not how efficient the process steps are. I want to know which decisions are sitting in an inbox right now because there is no clear authority for them. In most companies at the $5M to $15M mark, you have somewhere between four and eight decisions that are chronically deferred. They are not hard decisions. They just have no designated owner. And every week they sit there, they block three or four other things downstream. That is the operational debt that nobody can see on a spreadsheet.
Host: So the first move is mapping authority, not redesigning processes?
Kamyar Shah: Always. Redesigning processes when you have an authority gap is like optimizing a pipeline that has the wrong valve positions. You can make the pipes smoother but the flow problem does not go away. Once you map where authority is missing or duplicated, you often find that the process itself is fine. The company just does not know who is allowed to say yes.
For hands-on support, explore operations consulting tailored for mid-market operators.
Episode 6 sits at the intersection of operational theory and the specific failure modes that appear repeatedly in companies moving from the early-growth phase into scale. The central argument is that throughput problems in $2M to $20M companies are almost never caused by a lack of process documentation, insufficient headcount, or underinvestment in technology. They are caused by the way decisions are routed. When the path from a question to an answer requires senior involvement that could be avoided, the organization pays for that routing in speed, focus cost, and organizational dependency on a small number of people who become permanent bottlenecks.
The episode unpacks this through three specific operational mistakes that appear consistently across companies in this revenue range: decision authority gaps, informal coordination overhead, and the accountability diffusion that happens when metrics exist but are not owned at the execution level.
Decision Authority Gaps
Decision authority gaps occur when an organization has grown to the point where the founder or senior leadership team cannot be in every decision, but has not yet built the authority framework that would allow decisions to flow without them. The symptom is familiar: things move quickly when the right person is in the room and stop moving when they are not. Meetings end with “let me check on that” rather than a decision. Approvals that should take hours take days because the person with authority is unavailable or managing competing priorities.
The fix is not to move faster or be more available. The fix is to map which decisions can be made at lower levels if the decision criteria are explicit, and then make those criteria explicit. Most decisions that require senior involvement can be delegated if the person doing the delegation takes the time to articulate the boundaries within which someone else can act. The time investment in building that framework is typically recovered within the first few weeks of the new routing pattern being operational.
Informal Coordination Overhead
The second mistake is allowing informal coordination to substitute for defined handoffs between functions. In a small company, coordination through hallway conversations, Slack messages, and ad hoc check-ins works because the number of people involved is small enough that everyone can hold the relevant context in their head. As the company grows, this coordination model accumulates overhead that is invisible in any individual interaction but significant in aggregate. The salesperson who needs to chase three people to get a proposal approved, the operations manager who needs to reconstruct what was promised to a customer because the CRM is incomplete, the engineer who is blocked waiting for a product decision that no one realized had been escalated. These are all coordination failures that look like individual inefficiencies but are actually systemic.
The correction is to define handoffs explicitly: what information transfers at each stage of a workflow, who is responsible for that transfer, and what happens when the transfer does not occur within the expected window. This is process design work, and it is unglamorous, but it converts informal coordination into predictable throughput.
Accountability Diffusion
The third mistake is the most common and the most resistant to easy fixes. Accountability diffusion happens when metrics exist at the organizational level but do not connect clearly to individual ownership at the execution level. The company has a revenue target, a customer satisfaction goal, and a delivery time standard. The people responsible for those outcomes can name them. But the connection between daily work decisions and those outcomes is unclear, which means that when performance deviates from plan, the response is collective concern rather than specific accountability.
Functional accountability requires that every metric has one owner, that the owner has visibility into the leading indicators that predict the metric outcome before the period closes, and that the management system creates a regular forum where the owner presents performance against plan and articulates what they are doing about gaps. When those three elements are in place, the organization converts metrics from reporting instruments into management tools. When they are absent, the metrics exist to describe what happened rather than to drive what will happen next.
What Operations Leaders Can Do Without Adding Headcount
The recurring theme in this episode is that the operations problems most companies attribute to insufficient resources are actually structural problems that adding headcount will not solve and may make worse. Hiring more people into a system with decision authority gaps, informal coordination, and diffuse accountability does not improve throughput. It adds coordination complexity to a system that is already struggling with coordination.
The operational interventions that produce the most leverage without headcount are: explicit decision rights frameworks that specify what can be decided at each level without escalation, defined workflow handoffs that replace informal coordination with predictable information transfer, and metric ownership assignments that connect organizational goals to individual accountability. None of these require capital investment. They require analytical clarity about where the current system breaks down and the management discipline to build and maintain the replacements.
For support diagnosing and restructuring the operational systems that limit throughput in your company, explore fractional COO services for companies in the $2M to $100M range.
People problems are interpersonal conflicts arising from miscommunication, unmet expectations, and competing goals in personal or professional relationships. These issues manifest as tension, decreased productivity, and emotional strain among individuals working or living together. Root causes… Operators applying people problems report measurable improvement in execution consistency and strategic throughput across the organization.
People problems are interpersonal conflicts arising from miscommunication, unmet expectations, and competing goals in personal or professional relationships. These issues manifest as tension, decreased productivity, and emotional strain among individuals working or living together. Root causes include poor listening, unclear boundaries, and unaddressed resentment that compounds over time. The article explores practical strategies for identifying and resolving these common dynamics.
People Problems
Not long ago I was speaking to a good friend of mine about micro businesses and some of the inherent and common problems that are not acknowledged. Suffice to say that there are too many to list here but the one that seems to be among the chief issues appears to be “people problems”.fractional COO serviceshow executive coaching accelerates leader effectiveness
Forget about the #PeopleProblems hashtags on social media. Yes, some of those are funny and timely but there is a more urgent nature to that topic.
Let’s approach this a bit more rationally. Let’s define “micro business”. I see a “Micro Business or MB” as a business that has grown to a $1M – $10M revenue. It has a small team of employees or sub-contractors that attend to delivering services and products. It has systems and procedures combined with some elementary quality assurance procedures that enables it to deliver goods and services at a “OK level”.
So what is the problem you ask? The answer is simple: growth and scaling. MB is likely to be agile and adaptive, fast moving and inherently more nimble than its counterparts. Yet those advantages are usually overshadowed by lack of the ability to grow the bottom line via scaling. There are many factors that contribute to lack of scaling ability however the most obvious reason is people and the respective problems with people: i.e. People Problems. People problems are usually and inherently a natural part of managing people.
Large and enterprise businesses have been dealing with it for many years.That is where you see concepts such as Human Resource Management, Human Capital Management, Knowledge Management, wellness programs, etc. Those are ways large businesses have been trying to deal with people and the inherent people problems.
So what about MB? How does a micro business deal with the same issues without the same resources? Well, it doesn’t or if it does it is on a limited scale with debatable results. Are there exceptions? Yes of course there are exceptions. As in anything in business there are those that can and are doing it all successfully. That is where you see those MB’s grow and scale. Yet that is not the norm: it is the exception.
In traditional MB when they hit those revenue bench marks a few things tend to happen: they struggle either internally or externally with adding new clients. And maintain the same quality, taking short cuts to circumvent quality assurance measures in order to keep up with the work load. Make rush judgements in hiring, overworking team members, losing track of customer satisfaction, tuning out or minimizing internal debates, etc. The list is too long to mention here however you get the gist of it. They stop being a coherent team and grow into disorganization and chaos (again there are certainly exceptions).
the evidence suggests of the above as “People Problems” and how they relate to a MB. A MB has products and services, it has systems and procedures as well as a track record of being able to successfully service clients. However, it can’t grow past a certain revenue. So how do you address that? There is no right or wrong answer but rather just preferences.
Some businesses opt to address people problems by hiring contractors so the burden falls on another business entity. Others opt to invest into training and mentorship, yet others bring in short term consultants adhoc to address particular issues. All of those can and will have results however not addressing the fundamental and the underlying cause: inherent human nature. Of course there isn’t a magic bullet to handle it all either. It needs to be understood that most of those people issues are not “one offs” nor “temporary”. Those are persistent because those issues are human.
Here is where I suggest that a Chief Operating Officer is ideal. The issue with having a COO is usually a question of the attitude of the business owner and available resources:Business consulting addresses exactly this kind of structural challenge.
Business Owner: this is the biggest issue. Most small business owners don’t feel as they need someone to attend to their daily operations. I have heard it many times, “It is my business. No one can run it like I can”, “It is insulting that you would suggest that you can run my business … I built it from ground up”.
You get the gist of it. It is a combination of the need to be “in charge” and the pain to have to admit that people management does not come naturally. It doesn’t matter if you are managing dozen or a few hundred people the principals stay the same. Team members have to be managed, inspired, motivated and yes …… encouraged. The need to be “in charge” is equally flawed. It is inherent that the business owner is in charge. The need to be “the boss” and / or “problem solver” only interferes with the actual running of the business. The average working day can be effectively used to generate business. And attend to maintaining clients however there is very little time for the business owner to attend to daily operational matters. Hence doing so interferes with both and results in meager outcome on both fronts.
Resources: MB has inherently limited resources that need to be strategically deployed to the greatest benefit of the organization. Having a full blown COO is usually not an option. Its cost and work load both would not be justifiable. So what is the alternative? A eCOO (e Chief Operating Officer) Or Remote COO which would both address the workload and resource expenditure.
No, the above is not an infomercial for the services. There are many qualifiedCOOs that offer such services. the leader is not that special nor do I suggest that leaders should do a better job than anyone else. I, however, believe that this need has not been articulated nor acknowledged.
Small business owners have been made to believe that an entrepreneur / small business owner has to have a bookkeeper, an accountant, a lawyer yet never an operations person or eCOO that attends to his/ her daily operational and people issues.
If nothing else this piece should serve as thought provoking fodder for all trying to grow a business.