A Simple 6-Item Scorecard to Rate Your Company’s Operations Pillar

I want to let you in on a business coaching secret – simple scorecards not only give you meaningful feedback, but more importantly, they automatically focus your attention on those fewer, better things that make a difference in your business.

How does this impact you as you scale your company?  Simple, in order to scale your business you need a rock-solid base in all the five core pillars of your company:  Sales/Marketing; Operations; HR; Executive Leadership; and Finance.

One way to do that is to have a clear structure to help you evaluate how you’re doing in each pillar, and to guide you to incrementally improve pillar by pillar as you grow.

In this article I’m focusing on your Operations Pillar (I’ve addressed the other 4 pillars of your company in other articles.)

Here is a simple scorecard that you can use each quarterly to make sure you’re continuously improving your “Operations Pillar”.

Each quarter, rate your company on a scale of 1-10 (with 10 being best) on each of the following six aspects of your Operations Pillar:

1. General Administrative Function: How well does your company handle the basic administrative function?  Are you highly efficient here, handling a large volume of business with a small admin staff?  Or do things slip between the cracks and cause regular admin fires that you have to put out?  On a scale from 1-10 how strong is your Operations Pillar in this area?

2. Performance of Client Work or fulfillment of Client Orders: From your perspective, how well do you think your company does at producing and fulfilling on your core product or service offering?  This is your internal, behind the scenes score of how well you do on meeting all your client promises in a timely fashion.  On a scale from 1-10 how strong is your Operations Pillar in this area?          

3. Client’s Rating of Your Company’s Performance: If you were to ask your clients to rate how well you performed on your service or how well your product performed, how would they rate you?  On a scale from 1-10 how strong is your Operations Pillar in this area?                                                

4. Cost Controls for Operation of Your Business: How well do you do to control costs in the production and fulfillment of your core service or product offerings? This includes purchasing, production, quality control, fulfillment, etc.  On a scale from 1-10 how strong is your Operations Pillar in this area?         

5. Managing Your Core Business Infrastructure: Consider your company infrastructure, from physical plant to online assets like your websites and databases, how well does your company do at managing your business infrastructure?  On a scale from 1-10 how strong is your Operations Pillar in this area?

6. Scalability of your core product or service: Are you severely limited with respect to the volume of business you can handle?  Is your core product or service scalable?  Could it be more scalable?  Or is it severely limited in how much business you can handle?   On a scale from 1-10 how strong is your Operations Pillar in this area?

Now that you’ve rated your company’s Operations Pillar on these 6 key sub-functions, what key insights jumped out at you?

Which ONE sub-function would most benefit your company to focus on improving over the next 90 days.

Then ask yourself, what three simple steps could you take this quarter to improve your score in this one sub-function by 1-2 points or more.

By breaking things down into bite sized chunks and doing this each quarter you’ll be amazed at the compounded growth your business will enjoy over the next few years.

Also, to help you grow your business and get your life back, we just put the finishing touches on a powerful free toolkit which includes 21 in-depth video trainings on how to intelligently scale your company.  To access this free toolkit click here.  Enjoy.