The Battle for a Small Business’ Attention

“Your company is a viral moment away from a possible shutdown.”

Yes, you read that right.

Imagine if your company is lucky enough to be on a national television show with millions of viewers for a few minutes. You can barely contain your excitement. All eyes are on you. There is no going back.

However, your excitement quickly turns to horror when you find that your company isn’t ready for that kind of attention. Suddenly, a surge in traffic to your company’s website crashes. Team members end the stress of performing under pressure. Sellers threaten to sue you for late payment. Customers are upset because their orders are either wrong or not delivered on time.

What you’ve built up for years was effectively destroyed overnight.

How can a successful organization good enough to get a coveted spot on a TV show succumb so quickly? The answer lies in Marketing vs. Operations.

The paradigm shift from too few customers to too many

When an organization officially opens its doors to business, marketing-related activities are usually in the foreground. And it makes sense. Because if nobody knows about your product or service, you won’t be in business for long. These activities can include sales strategies, PR and social media campaigns, as well as digital ads that catalyze progress from startup to growth phase of the company.

When you have a great product or service that customers want, you will eventually get a return on investment on those marketing activities. At this point, as a company moves from the growth phase into the emerging and scaling business phases, the need for operations becomes paramount.

The reason is that this transition is usually accompanied by periods of unmanageable rapid growth – customer demand is greater than what your company can deliver. At this point, operations-related activities such as building the right teams, documenting and standardizing processes, and upgrading equipment and digital technologies become a higher priority.

If operations is critical to scale, why aren’t more companies focusing on it?

The answer depends on it. When it comes to operations, small business executives fall into one of three categories:

• Unaware: They either don’t know anything about operations or they have never faced it.
• Uninterested: They believe that operations is not “sexy”.
• Undetected: When they look for information to scale their organizations, they find that the lion’s share is reserved for large corporations or manufacturing companies.

Let’s unwrap each of these.

1. Not aware

It’s no surprise that many founders and executives (apart from commercial and technical acumen) are largely unaware of business management – what it is and how it applies to their business.

Since customers and cash are the lifeline of every company, special attention is paid to customer-oriented activities that ensure their satisfaction. This is an anchor against which we can define operations.

As the following diagram illustrates, marketing represents highly visible activities that customers typically interact with directly. It contains some sort of promise or guarantee to customers who buy your product or service.

Conversely, operations is like marketing’s secret cousin. It represents the activities that ensure that customer orders are executed on time, within budget, and within specifications.

As the heartbeat of an organization, day-to-day operations are not necessarily seen by your customers, but they certainly experience the result.

Operations teams work behind the scenes to make sure a company can deliver on its promises.

A frustrated customer in charge of operations once said to me after talking to a sales manager: “You sell the dream while we deal with the nightmare!” It’s a humorous take on the historical divide between marketing and operations teams.

This is why the Revenue Operations movement is so important – it breaks these silos to foster transparency while working towards shared goals of customer satisfaction and profitability.

2. Disinterested

Founders and CEOs are known as strategic visionaries. The thought of getting bogged down in details is not necessarily their forte or interest. This is one of the reasons Operations can take a back seat to the more visible marketing initiatives.

But there’s another culprit – small business event planners. Attend a small business seminar, webinar, or conference and your chances of seeing a business topic included are slim. This omission creates a knowledge gap among small business executives and leads to disinterest.

Through face-to-face interviews and informal surveys, I’ve learned that a shockingly high percentage of these event planners think, “Operations are boring.” Many have also said to me: “Nobody cares.” And maybe the most egregious gasp, “Surgery just isn’t sexy.” This way of thinking is dangerous and harms those seeking resources to scale to the next level.

Consider these US Small Business Administration statistics:

I have argued many times that more firms could close out of sole proprietorship if they had a better understanding of operations. This means creating jobs that have an overall positive impact on local communities and the economy.

I also believe that more companies can avoid mistakes when they have a solid operating foundation. Yes, there are many reasons why a company fails. But the reasons they fail within the first five years versus years five to ten can vary widely.

There are companies that fail not because of a lack of customers or poor cash flow, but because they have too many customers.

3. Undetected

When small business leaders proactively seek resources to scale, they often find that those resources were not written or formulated with them in mind. And if they’re lucky enough to find resources for small businesses, it’s usually those who sell material goods.

Where can service-minded businesses get guidance on how to scale without fail?

Learning frameworks like Lean and Six Sigma can be intimidating and sometimes too “corporate” for the needs of a small business. Fortunately, there is a growing faction within the operations community that is actively working to make this information accessible to small businesses.

Learn more about small business operations in HubSpot’s RevOps & Operations Community

Dr. Jeffrey K. Liker is one of them, and he made sure to be more comprehensive in the second edition of his critically acclaimed book. The Toyota way.

Listen to my interview with Dr. Liker to learn more:

Ignore Operations At Your Own Risk: Warning Stories

Kyle Jepson, Senior Inbound Sales Professor at HubSpot, put it best: “Operational failures are dramatic and visible. Operational success is invisible. ”

He’s right. There is no shortage of examples of companies that have chosen to their detriment to ignore the care and rigor required to do business sustainably and continue to focus on the outward appearance that has given them great marketing.

One example is Ample Hills Creamery. Once known as “Brooklyn’s Favorite” eatery, this local New York ice cream parlor caught the attention of Disney’s CEO. They soon signed a deal with Disney World, only to lose it a few years later, as they lost money despite a steady stream of customers.

One of their investors, Greg O’Connell, commented, “It was a fairy tale. They kind of lived in a dream world because their marketing was so great.” Their failures resulted in bankruptcy, but other more serious failures result in jail terms.

Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos), Adam Neumann (WeWork), Billy McFarland (Fyre Festival) and Trevor Milton (Nikola) are widely visible examples of executives who, despite warnings, continue to mislead and cheat investors and customers only to find themselves incarcerated or with faced serious allegations.

Examine the back office of any highly successful business and you will find ironclad operations: solid teams supported by standardized, lean and efficient processes and technology. Operation is paired with innovation, and both have flowed into the fabric of companies that are both profitable and sustainable.

It is crucial to achieve this balance with marketing. Marketing expert Andrea D. Smith and I talked about this in an episode of the Business Infrastructure podcast:

Business is complicated. It requires a constant balance of not just marketing and operations, but all aspects of the business. Do not silo or sacrifice one group for the other. Gaining a steady stream of customers is unsuccessful unless you can also guarantee customer satisfaction.

Join the search to change the narrative about back office activity. Operations is accomplished, demanding and intelligent. And that’s very sexy!