What Is Operational Health? 5 Things To Check In Your Business

All business owners understand the importance of their business’s financial health. What most don’t realize is that there is a related metric that can be the underlying cause of your financial health improving or deteriorating – your business’s operational health.

Just like you meet with a financial advisor to discuss your business’s financial health, Upwell Strategies exists to be your business systems consultant. Because improving your operational health is all about streamlining processes and strategizing about how your operations can give you the best productivity (and profitability). 

 Checking your business's operational health means identifying areas where you need to streamline your business processes to increase efficiency. There are five areas to check your operational health is in tip-top shape so you can increase profit and scale with ease.

Checking your operational foundations (and how to recognize warning signs)

If this was a physical check-up, your operational foundations might be the brain. While it takes a neurologist to understand all the details of the inner workings of the brain, it is easy to tell when something is going wrong, because, well, the brain affects everything. 

In the same way, your operational foundations are the processes that intake information and turn it into something useful to your business. 

Whether it’s your business’s process for project management, delegation, or tactical growth, your operational foundations are the most basic building blocks of your business. 

To learn more about whether you are having issues with your business’s operational foundations, you can take our free Systems Stress Test, a quick and easy quiz to determine where your operational systems are under stress or underperforming. 

Updating your daily processes to be streamlined, and even automated, can change the needs of your business. 

We’ve seen plenty of examples of automating invoice processing, client onboarding, or report generation helping business owners and their teams to reclaim 10-20 hours per week of manual labor. 

• We worked with a healthcare professional who was able to cut down her paperwork time by 30% through automating client onboarding.
• We helped a coach set up automatic invoice processing that gave her back 4 whole working days in her month!
• One creative agency needed our help to tighten up the time they could finalize deliverables to clients, and they went from projects lingering for months to being finished in five weeks tops.
  

Automating these business processes gives your business a competitive edge against competitors who are being weighed down by inefficient systems. 

If your referral game has been lacking, this could fix it

The next step in your check up is the client experience. It can be hard to determine the health of your own client experience, because you are so used to being on the other side. But when clients are unhappy with their experience, they’ll certainly let you know. The issue? By that point, it’s often too late to avoid the problems and instead your only option is to rectify mistakes. 

The ultimate goal is for your team to be working in harmony with your clients, onboarding them smoothly, and having clear hand-off points so no details are dropped. 

Do any of these weak points in the client experience sound familiar to your business? 

• Slow response times due to disorganized systems
• Clients needing to repeat information (no centralized client data)
• Inconsistent service quality across team members
• Delayed deliverables from internal bottlenecks
• Confusing onboarding or offboarding processes

Like a weak immune system, disorganized client processes make it more difficult to fight off potential problems before they grow into something bigger. 

By improving any of the client experience processes that are under stress, you will protect yourself and your business against unpleasant interactions plus increase referrals and repeat business because people are raving about their experience with you. 

If you need help in determining whether your client experience is fully up to par, you can take the Systems Stress Test quiz to discover exactly where you might have weaknesses and where you might need a boost to stay healthy. 

Team Capacity

Knowing your team’s actual bandwidth is essential as a business leader. Capacity planning allows you to ensure that your entire team remains energized and working at a sustainable pace, instead of burning out in a flash.

Warning signs that your team is over-capacity:

• Constant overtime
• Rushed work
• Declining quality
• Burnout

What’s even worse, is when your team feels exhausted AND unaccomplished. You see the people who are constantly working 45+ hour weeks, coming to calls exhausted, but it doesn’t seem to change the bottom line. That’s usually because they are spending time and energy on tasks that could be automated, or at least easier, with the right systems. 

What if we told you that you could decrease your team’s burnout without decreasing capacity?

It’s all about cutting out the extraneous tasks that are draining their energy and focus without giving you any return on investment. Just like an underactive thyroid would cause fatigue, so does bad capacity planning. 

As operations strategists, we approach capacity analysis from a lens of how to give your team the most energy back and your business the most revenue. 

And we don’t want to look at just your capacity now, we want to think about the future demands on your business, as you pursue your growth goals. 

Here’s a quick way to check whether or not your team has capacity for growth: Can your team handle a 20% increase in volume, if it happened tomorrow?

You would be ecstatic to see that growth for your business, but would it lead to burn out? 

If you aren’t sure, you can take our Systems Stress Test for free tools to help you plan for the future of your business.

Technology Integration

An easy way to help your business get ahead is through streamlining your technology integration. Businesses with disconnected tools and duplicate data entry are burning through time that could be used on more productive measures. 

In our experience, we’ve also seen that poor integration creates information silos, causing bottlenecks to form (be they people, or specific tools). 

More often than not, in these cases multiple team members end up doing duplicate work, because no one realizes where things are stored or status of certain projects. When your project management tool doesn’t speak with your CRM or your email, things end up floating in a void. This is the opposite of the streamlined technology processes. 

On the other hand, when integration between platforms is streamlined, the information can flow automatically from one part of the business to another, circulating everything you need to know, without you even having to think about it. 

The last thing you want is to have to manually process information that should be flowing through your systems automatically. The reason you have tech is to make your life easier, but that isn’t always the case. If you’re copying and pasting data between systems regularly, that’s a red flag that your systems are not working for you. 

When each platform is working in a silo, things can get out of wack, pretty easily. That’s why we recommend a cohesive tech stack that works together seamlessly, taking the burden off your shoulders. 

Examples that we have seen of integration wins are clients who we have worked with to create a cohesive system between their CRM, email system, and project management. In other words, a lead comes in, then a ticket is autopopulated in their project management system, and the client onboarding process begins in a simple and easy to follow process. 

If you want to learn more about the status of your tech integration, you can take our Systems Stress Test to see the status of your technology integration and options to streamline it!

Growth percentiles - Scalability

Last but not least, to know your business’s operational health, you need to look at your potential for growth in the future. Having a business that is operating well today is great, but your goal probably isn’t to stay the exact same in perpetuity. 

If demand for your business suddenly doubled in size, how would your current systems handle the growth?

If they are already stressed to the point of breaking, you probably know that they won’t be able to handle the growth that you would love to see. 

Warning signs of scalability issues include: 

• Every new client/project requires custom workarounds
• Quality drops when volume increases
• You can't take vacation without everything falling apart
• Training new team members takes months instead of weeks
• Profit margins shrink as you grow (inefficiency tax)

With business process automations, you can be freed up to have the room to grow 2X your current size and beyond as you prepare to scale proactively, rather than reactively. 

How prepared is your business now? You can test your current scalability by taking the Systems Stress Test to determine where your operations might have cracks that need to be patched before growth.

A healthy business is built on strong systems and operations. As you improve your operational health, your business has capacity to grow and increase your potential. We’d love to see you fulfill your dreams, and more with healthy operations that keep your business strong for years to come.