How can you tell if your business ops are due for an overhaul?
Today I’m talking to Andrea Dunathan, a professional peer, business guru and one of my walking buddies. Andrea is the Principal Consultant and Owner of Dunathan Consulting. She’s a seasoned business operations consultant who helps businesses find and fix problems in their operations.
We recently did a LinkedIn Live interview together, and you’re about to hear it. We talk about how to notice these problems early and some practical tips to prevent overload. We’ll also discuss remote work, keeping your team happy, and knowing when it’s time to get outside help with operational strategy.
If you’re passionate about improving your business operations, you’re in the right place. Stay tuned for insights, tips, and strategies that will help you stay ahead of the curve.
You can learn more about Andrea at dunathanconsulting.com.
Mastering Operational Efficiency: Tips from Business Consultant Andrea Dunathan
Laura:
My goal today is to empower you with valuable insights that you can use to enhance your leadership and your operational efficiency. And to that end, I’m excited to introduce my guest today, Andrea Dunathan….
Andrea is a business operations consultant with more than two decades of experience helping businesses update their operational processes and systems to handle more customers more smoothly. And she’s worked with lots of local businesses and global corporations and NGO’s, primarily in the areas of professional services, property services, supply chain and scientific research.
Andrea specializes in helping businesses that have outgrown their current way of operating and are looking at updating their operations to support continued growth. Her work typically results in the capacity to serve more customers with less stress and a higher profit margin. Clients also find that operational improvements give them and their staff more time to focus on the most high value added work. They tend to appreciate her deep understanding of diverse business cultures and her ability to turn challenges into opportunities. So, Andrea, thank you for being here today.
Andrea:
I am so excited to. We always have great conversations. Looking forward to having one now!
Laura:
Yes, we do! So, Andrea, let’s dive right in.
What inspired you to focus on business operations?
Andrea:
So, you know, I started my business about 20 years ago and at the time I had been working as a county budget analyst. Sounds really boring, but actually it’s interesting. It was a job as an internal consultant, helping ten completely different county departments figure out how to do more. With Wesley, funding was always getting cut and the community need was always growing.
So, in that job, and in every job I’ve had prior to that job, I was always looking for ways to be more efficient, do more with less, make money, stretch further, make things go more smoothly. And so, you know, when I decided to leave and go out on my own, it was really a natural thing to go to operations consulting because that’s what I’d been doing in a stealthy way for years.
Laura:
I like “in a stealthy way.” Operations is all about stealth, isn’t it?
Andrea:
Yeah. No one should notice operations, right. It should just be smooth, right?
Laura:
Well, yeah. I don’t know if they should or shouldn’t, but they certainly don’t until something’s going wrong and then everyone notices.
Andrea:
Isn’t that the truth?
What are some indicators that you typically see that a business actually needs to improve their internal operations?
Andrea:
You’ll see the owner and the staff starting to spend a ton of time doing what they call putting out fires, like crisis management. There’s all kinds of things popping up. It’s like whack-a-mole.
Instead of focusing on their best work, their most value-added work, they’re just trying to take care of problems. That’s a sign. You’ll also see the owner and sometimes the staff having what they think of as more customers than they almost want. You know, it’s like, don’t be like, I’m so crazy busy. It’s a good problem to have, but oh, my gosh, we just keep getting more orders, more customers, and they’re feeling overwhelmed.
I don’t know if you remember, there’s an I love Lucy replay of Lucy and Ethel in a chocolate factory. And it goes faster and faster and faster. And the process that used to work for them of wrapping each chocolate the way they always did it, suddenly doesn’t work. When you accelerate, right. It becomes much more difficult and your processes go out the window and everyone’s doing everything ad hoc and it becomes very chaotic and messy. And so when you start seeing that, that’s a good sign. And then you see it in the numbers, like, you see shrinking profit margins, that type of thing, because of that lack of efficiency as the business grows.
What red flag might an owner or an ops exec see that signals they need to do something different?
Andrea:
Well, I will say hopefully you noticed before then, because the process of change is hard. And, you know, I know we might touch on this later, but change is really hard. And while you’re making changes to bring operations up to the next level, you’re also having to run the business. Right. And so if you wait till is, you know, absolutely chaotic and crazy and you’re on your last legs and you don’t know what else to do, and then you try to make changes on top of keeping it going, it’s going to be rough. So, if you can start noticing these stressors early in the game, it’s a much better outcome. You have a little bandwidth to start making change before you get to the crazy point.
The ultimate red flag is, you know, your customers start leaving because things are so chaotic or so.
I hate using the word chaotic, but they’re so stressed, right. That things start falling through the cracks and your customers notice that they’re not getting the thing they ordered or the service is being delivered a little sloppily, or the customer service isn’t good, and you start seeing customers drop off and you don’t want to wait to that point because then you have less revenue, more stress, like that’s a bad time to make change, right?
Laura:
Yeah, I guess what’s coming up as I’m listening to you is the image of someone who waits until the car is actually smoking to do something about it, as opposed to the need for regular maintenance, regular oil package, regular maintenance, really checking in to know what’s working, what isn’t, and sort of having that 17 point checklist to not let it get to the point where customers are flooding out the door and there’s chocolates stuffed in your hat.
Andrea:
Yeah, exactly. And you’ll see the staff. You know, I think if the leadership listens to the staff, the staff will notice it first. The staff are the ones who get more stressed, you know, because more is coming down the pike. And so just keeping in touch with your employees, I think, is a really good idea.
Can you discuss a little bit about the role of leaders and leadership in operational transformations?
Andrea:
You know, I think being a leader in an organization is tough. And I think being a leader at a time of transition, when you’re trying to take your business to the next level is even more tough. It’s tough because someone’s got to make tough decisions every day, hold the staff accountable, set clear expectations, guide them, make decisions about the direction of the company, so forth and so on, really balance staff needs, customer needs, and the business needs, and that’s tricky.
So you’re doing that as a routine thing, and then you go to make changes in the organization, and now you’re having to step up, even personally as a leader in your personal leadership style. Things are going to change, too. So you’re helping bring everybody else through change, which is a challenge because people don’t love change generally. Right. It’s tough. The transition is tough. So you’re trying to bring people through that and you’re also trying to get yourself to the next level, on a personal level.
This is where I think you and I have such great conversations because coaching and consulting kind of go hand in hand in a situation like this. I’ll see times when the problem is really in the business operation, I can really help. And then I’ll see times when there’s also an issue on the sort of personal growth side or leadership growth side of, hey, we’re going to step up to a new level. I have to have different responsibilities. I have to delegate more. I have to be in a new world. And it’s uncomfortable. Right. This change is uncomfortable. And that’s where I think a coach can really benefit people. And actually, I’ll refer people to coaches. I can help on the business side, but I can’t help on the coaching side. So that’s where I turn to people like you.
Laura:
Yeah, I think that’s, that’s such a valuable, that’s actually one of the things I like about being on LinkedIn and sort of networking groups like where we’ve met, that there are different skills needed and different resources needed for, for different problems.
I think of coaching as more of a long term partnership. Doesn’t have to be super long term, but more of a collaborative partnership as opposed to a consultant like you, is going to show up and give direct advice and structured plans.
And it’s helpful to look at it like, what do you have in your resource box? What do you have in your toolbox? Who can you reach to to help handle this situation so that you’re not going for the wrong person for the wrong challenge? Someone comes to me and says, I need help with my HR processes. Oh, my goodness.
Andrea:
There are people. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I’m glad you brought this up. Because I feel like coaches and consultants, people confuse them. People will sometimes call me a business coach, and I understand that term, but I think as someone like you is truly coaching a person through the challenges of change and growth. And that’s not something I do on a personal level, but it’s something I see as so valuable because I’ve had a lot of clients, a lot of business owners who, they’re up for the challenge of change, but they’re not sure how right. They come to me because they get to a point in the growth of their business where they’re no longer sure what to do. They’ve grown their business successfully to a point. It’s going really well. They’re profitable, they have staff, things are going well, and now they need to take less next level, and they are not sure how. And so I can give them the mechanics of how, but you can give them the mindset of how, like the mental attitude to take the perspective, to have the recognizing their own strengths.
I think a lot of times owners feel like they don’t have what it takes to get to the next level and understand that they have strengths they’re not even acknowledging too long as a resource. So I so agree with you, and I think it’s so great to, you know, I have a big network of other experts in specific areas, whether it’s coaching or HR consulting or legal or whatever, because you do need, you don’t need all of them all the time. But when you need a specialty, you really need the specialty. Right. Because you can’t just muddle through, or you can, but it will take time. Right. It’s going to be really time consuming and difficult and not necessarily fun.
Laura:
So, yeah, knowing when to engage and where to engage is key. That’s part of the joy and the challenge of being in that position of responsibility.
What are your favorite or best ways of measuring success after making changes in business operations?
Andrea:
That’s a great question. I’m glad you asked it. From the beginning as I’m preparing a proposal for exactly what we’re going to do. I like to set expectations. The first thing I do with a client, we’re partnering in this. I say, what are your goals? Let’s talk about your goals for the engagement. What looks like success at the other end of this. And I do that because I want to know what are we aiming for? And it’s helpful for the client also, I think, to verbalize, because they’re coming from a place of stress and they just want the stress to go away, but they need to be able to envision that future. Like what future are we working towards?
So it’s really helpful to set those goals up front, have that conversation upfront. And then if we want to set metrics that we’re measuring as we go, we can. I certainly do. I look at like both leaders and staff being able to spend more time on the value added work and less time on the busy work or the prices management, that type of thing. Increasing your net profit margin is like, you can really look at the profit margins and they will shift because we’re going to do things more efficiently.
There’s going to be maybe some initial outlay in terms of training or new systems or new processes or things like that, and then it’s going to settle into a higher profit margin situation, which is nice and you can tell the environment is calmer. That’s kind of hard to measure with a metric, but you’ll see that there’s more capacity to handle more customers without stressing out the operation.
We can come up with specific metrics around that that depend on the industry and you’ll see the staff, like, one thing I love is you see the staff a lot more engaged and they tend to step up because instead of being dragged down by chaos or stress or whatever, they know what they’re supposed to be doing. They have the tools and information they need to do the job and they can focus on the value added work. And so now they’re happy. Most people want to be productive.
Generally, staff want to be productive. Mostly you have people trying to be really productive and being blocked from that. So if you can free them up to be productive, they’re going to be more engaged, they’re going to bring you new ideas. The company is going to benefit, you know, so again, you can put metrics on those things as well.
Laura:
Yeah, I hear it as I’m listening to you. It’s like really setting those people up to be productive and to have success. Like if you, if you’ve set up the system so that it’s easy for people to know what they’re supposed to do and they have the resources to do it and they feel supported in doing it, yes. That is what people, that is what people want out of work.
Andrea:
Yeah. Yeah. So why not make a better workplace, right? And then, you know, on the very practical numbers side, you’re making more profit. Right. You’re serving more customers more profitably so you have more money to, yeah, go to, you know, go to the south of France and relax. But you also have more money to invest in the business, right? Like, you can then, you know, maybe somebody needs some more professional development. You can, you know, give people a professional development allowance. You can buy that new system that people have wanted, whatever, you can invest in the business so it becomes a virtuous cycle, you know, over time.
Laura:
When you come to somebody who is experiencing those problems, they’ve got, you know, Lucy and Ethel shoving the chocolates in their hats, but they’re like, yeah, but it’s expensive. Or, yeah, but we don’t have to budget right now, you know there’s always something to spend money on.
What advice do you give to someone who is experiencing operational problems but has budget constraints?
Andrea:
It’s almost like doing repairs on a house. So go with me here. You know, you can defer maintenance on your house forever. Right. And then the roof will cave in, you know, if you really leave it extreme. So do you do it yourself? Do you repaint the living room yourself? Do you retile the bathroom yourself? Do you like, how far do you go before you call in an expert? Right. There’s a lot of stuff you can do on your own or with inexpensive help, your neighbor’s kids will come and paint the living room. Right. Like, you can get help from business peer groups, from, you know, some of your employees can pitch in. Like, there’s all kinds of ways to get some help. But there comes a point where investing in an expert is worth it because it’ll get done, right. It’ll get done quickly.
If you think you don’t have the money right now, are you going to have more money later if the trends keep continuing the way they are?
If you are growing rapidly, time is not on your side. You’re getting more and more customers.
Your marketing is really working. You’re getting more customers. Great. That should be yielding more money. But if you can’t handle the customers, you’re not getting the money in the bank, right. You’re having dissatisfied customers, you’re losing customers. So, you know, investing to be able to then reap that profit, there’s just a point where it’s worth it. And I’m the last one to pressure people to, you know, hurry up and hire me now. Maybe I’m not the right resource, you know, maybe I am. So let’s have that conversation. And if it feels like I’m not the right match right now because of budget or because I’m not the right expertise, I’m going to refer you to somebody else, right. And I think you would do the same thing. Like if someone comes to you, their role is in operations. They’re not at a level in the organization where it makes sense to have you coach them. You know, a lot of other coaches, you’re going to refer them to somebody else. Right. So if they have some very specialized need, I’m going to refer them out to somebody else.
Or like, I talked to a guy yesterday, tell me if I’m going on and on here, but this is a great example. He’s a guy who’s starting his own business in a field that he has been working in for ten years. So he’s an expert in that industry. He wants to start his own business. He’s done a lot of the groundwork, but he really would like a mentor. And so we talked for a while. And in terms of starting his business, maybe investing in my time as a regular strategy call is not appropriate at this time. So I referred him to score. If anybody does not know, SCORE.org is such a great link. They’re free mentors who are retired executives from your own industry. Actually, for everybody, I think it’s a great idea and they can really help you grow your business. So maybe you start there and if that’s not enough and you need someone who’s really going to focus.
A client I’m working with right now, we have a limited time to make some serious process changes. A SCORE mentor is not going to be good in that situation. You meet for an hour once every two weeks. That’s not going to create the change in your company that you need. Right. I’m going to come in, I’m going to focus on, I have a plan. We’re going to get this done and then you’re going to reap the benefit two months from now. Like, you’re going to really see in that particular case, it might take longer or shorter with somebody else, but in that particular case, what they need is me. So that makes sense. For a piece of that project. They needed an HR consultant, actually. They asked, could I do it? And I was like, nope, that’s, you know, when we get into compensation levels. Not me, definitely. It’s tricky. And you need someone really good who knows what they’re doing. So that’s a very long answer to question. But I think you gotta, you know, you just gotta make a judgment call. Am I holding myself back? I don’t know if you see that in your coaching.
People inadvertently hold themselves back from success because they think they have to do everything themselves, right?
Laura:
Oh, certainly! And you get burnout, and then you get frustrated employees, and then you get, you know, those sorts of results where you haven’t really created a system that’s sustainable and you haven’t created a team that feels like it can stand on its own. It’s not uncommon.
Andrea:
I remember you’ve got a podcast episode that talks about being the “drip pan,” like the oven as the operations executive versus running it. Like you’re just catching all the things that fall through the cracks or falling on you and you feel good because you’re constantly rescuing the organization.
Laura:
It’s very satisfying, there’s a lot of purpose in it.
Andrea:
Yeah. And you can check the box. You can see the evidence that you did something useful like, to me, one of the leadership challenges is as you get higher in the leadership chain, you have less tangible things to point to as “I got this work done today.”
Laura:
Well, you’re not supposed to. The higher up you go, the more you need to be getting things done because you’ve led other people and encouraged their strengths and their passions and now they’re getting it done, so that you can be focusing on those bigger things, which is, you know, when you, when you talk to those people who are considering, should they invest in any sort of a resource? If it’s coaching, if it’s consulting, if it’s therapy, or hiring some sort of business partner? For me, often the question that I’ll ask is, “What’s the risk if you don’t?” And if the risk is low, if you can just keep sliding along and shoving the chocolates in your pocket and that’s fine, then great. Do that. I mean, there’s plenty of ways to go for it. There’s not necessarily one right way. And if you can do that, boy, that’s really going to be a detriment to the business or that’s really going to cause something that, that breaks it down on the side of the road. Or, or has this missed an opportunity that as industry is changing, I should be focusing out here and I’m focusing on this stuff. If you can see that there’s going to really be a risk or a cost to that, I think that’s when the opportunity to remember the importance of investing and changing and growing.
Andrea:
Yeah, I couldn’t say it better myself. I see a lot of people hit that wall and, yeah, I really do refer people to coaches for that exact reason.
How do you make sure that the solutions you recommend and help executives implement are sustainable for the long haul and flexible enough to adapt to changing times?
Andrea:
As we all know now, some things are completely unpredictable, right? Like you can’t plan ahead for a pandemic because it was unfortunate, you know, like, that’s a whole thing. So your typical business doesn’t have a contingency plan for that or didn’t for 2020. So, but when I look at what you can plan for, you can, and this is, people don’t love hearing this, right? But you can plan in terms of operations. You can plan, if you’re rapidly growing for the next couple of years, you can’t prepare your business now operations wise, like how you do business every day for what your business will look like in five or ten years, because you’re going to need different processes and different systems and different staff structures and different whatever. If you’re steadily growing to handle that additional number of customers, at that point, what you can do is say, okay, for the growth we’re planning in the next year or two, let’s put in some systems and processes and just operations that will take you from the number of customers you have today to the number of customers you predict to have in a couple of years. Right. So you can cover that next phase.
It’s like stair steps. I write about this all the time. It’s like stair steps. So you want to get to the next stair step. You, you’ve got, like you want to hop up onto the next step and then you want to operate smoothly. And then at some point you’re going to stub your toe on the next stair step and you’re going to have to hop up again. And so those hops are these transitions, you know, going up a level, literally. It’s just that stair step is not, you know, it’s not infinite. I’m not saying this very eloquently, but I had a customer once, and then we decided not to work together because she was starting out. She had a half time employee and she was going to hire another halftime employee. So she’s pretty small, but, you know, doing well. And she wanted to put things in place that didn’t make sense for a company her size, but she wanted to put them in place one time for the rest of her company’s life. So she was trying to put things in place for a company that, with 50 employees and it’s not worth it, right? Like when you have two employees, it is not worth it to have all the structure you need in a 50 employee company. It doesn’t fit you right now. You have to just, it’s like a kid, like buying new clothes when the kid grows. You can’t buy clothes five size too large. I mean, you could, but your kid will be like it doesn’t make sense. So this is, I’m kind of going off on tangents. Let me bring it back to if you want to come up with a sustainable solution, right. It needs to be flexible. It needs to fit the next year or two. It needs to not be bureaucratic or rigid. So there’s this, don’t bite off more than you can chew a thing that have just wandered.
And then the other piece of it is really looking at the culture of the organization and the people in the organization and thinking about what will be easily adopted and functional. So I look at best practices a lot and then I look at how do we, that best practice to really be used in this organization by these people? Because even if those people turn over, the, the culture of the company is pretty solid, right. And so it has to work within the culture of the company or it won’t be adapting. It has to be flexible enough. Like I think of it, somebody once said to me, oh, you’re setting up guardrails so people are free to operate within the guardrails. They can pick them, they can make some decisions. They have some autonomy. Right. It’s flexible, but there are guardrails to keep them safe. So we’ve got the edges of the process so that people know where they can operate with their own intelligence and decision making and all that. You know, the process is not rigid, it’s not constraining them. They have some choice and they, they can use their independent thinking to serve the customer well. I don’t know if that was very coherent. I feel like I’m all over the place.
Laura:
It made sense to me. And you are all over the place in the work that you do. I can’t remember if I read in the introduction just how many continents you’ve worked on, how many countries you’ve worked with.
Andrea:
Well, I’ve worked with NGO’s. Right. So they’ll like one big, for a long time is offices in 50 countries around the world. So, you know, I was talking to people in those offices.
Are there any guardrails that are particularly universal or have become more common since COVID?
Andrea:
I think of universal problems. I’m trying to think of universal solutions. I think remote staffing like this has been a constant thing, but people working from home has, you know, the pluses and minuses, pros and cons. And that’s been very stressful for a lot of organizations. And I think I’ve been having some very interesting conversations with a lot of different experts about how to engage people and have people feel like they’re learning from each other effectively. They’re have a common culture. They’re part of an organization or a group. They’re part of the team. When people are sitting all over the place, they’re sitting in their living rooms, typing away, you know, for a lot of jobs now, a lot of jobs are in the front lines, and they are if you’re in retail, you are in the store. Or hospitality, etcetera. But even then, I think there’s a lot of stress because of everything that’s happened. So I think that’s the one of the biggest business challenges of our time, along with cash flow and, you know, stuff like that.
In terms of a universal solution, I don’t think there’s a universal solution to that. But I think paying attention to your people is maybe a universal good starting point. If you are productive and happy, everything else is going to flow. Well, if you people are, as you said, if they’re somehow blocked from being productive and happy, it’s time to ask why? And is it because this remote or hybrid workforce thing is stressing them out? Is it the expectations aren’t clear? Is it their systems are outdated, their proses no longer work because we’re in a new era. You know, they don’t have the information they need to do the jobs. Their skill sets are not aligned with the responsibilities of their role. Right. Like, there’s so many things, but it starts from there. And your staff often can tell you what their perspective, what’s going on, and it can be really educational. I don’t know if that answered your question.
Laura:
I think it did. Starting with paying attention to your people.
Andrea:
Yeah.
Laura:
This Live session started a year ago, I think, on a walk out at the Henson trail. We were like, wouldn’t it be cool if we did an interview like this? And I love seeing things come to fruition, and I love getting to, getting to chat with you. Thank you for doing this with me.
Andrea:
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I love talking to you about this stuff. And, you know, I think we both really get into talking about this stuff. We both love…
Laura:
We’re kind of operations geeks.
Andrea:
Yeah, we are!
