By Alicia Butler Pierre

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

Yes, you read that correctly.

Imagine your company is fortunate enough to appear for a few minutes on a national TV show with millions of viewers. You can hardly contain your excitement. All eyes are on you. There’s no turning back.

Your excitement soon turns to horror, however, when you realize your company isn’t ready for this type of attention. Suddenly, a surge in traffic to your company’s website causes it to crash. Team members quit from the stress of performing under pressure. Vendors threaten to sue you for late payments. Customers are angry because their orders are either incorrect or weren’t provided on-time.

What took you years to build has effectively been destroyed overnight.

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

The Paradigm Shift from Not Enough Customers to Too Many

When an organization officially opens its doors for business, marketing-related activities tend to be the primary focus. And it makes sense. After all, if no one knows about your product or service, you won’t be in business long. Those activities can include sales strategies, P.R. and social media campaigns, and digital ads that catalyze advancement from the startup to the growth stage of business.

Eventually, if you have a great product or service that customers want, you’ll see a return on investment for those marketing activities. At this point, as an organization advances from the growth stage to the emerging and scaling stages of business, the need for Operations becomes paramount.

The reason is that this transition is usually accompanied by periods of unmanageable fast-growth – customer demand is greater than what your company can supply. It’s at this point that Operations-related activities like building the right teams, documenting and standardizing processes, and upgrading equipment and digital technologies becomes a higher priority.

If Operations is critical for scaling, why don’t more companies focus on it?

The answer depends. When it comes to Operations, leaders of small businesses fall in one of more of three categories:

• Unaware: They either don’t know about Operations or they’ve never been exposed to it.
• Uninterested: They believe that Operations isn’t “sexy.”
• Undiscovered: When they try to search for information to scale their organizations, they find the lion’s share is reserved for large enterprises or manufacturing companies.

Let’s unpack each of these.

1. Unaware

It’s no surprise that many founders and leaders (business savvy and technical acumen aside), are largely unaware of Operations – what it is and how it applies to their businesses.

With customers and cash being the lifeline of any organization, special attention is given to customer-facing activities that ensure their satisfaction. This is an anchor against which we can define Operations.

As the diagram below illustrates, Marketing represents highly visible activities that customers tend …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron