The COO and Operational Balance: Solopreneur Insights, Vol. 8
Your business is the sum of its parts. Who's managing them all? Acting as your own Chief Operating Officer (COO) gives you the perspective you need to build a functional business that keeps you profitable and sane.
Here’s a secret about succeeding as a Solopreneur providing professional services: Everything gets easier when you land high-quality clients who provide you steady work. A lot goes into landing clients like this, but one thing is for sure: You won’t keep them without a functional Operational System.
These clients are professionals. They have no interest in working with people who operate like amateurs.
This means you’ll need to act as your own COO who manages the day-to-day operations of the business. The role isn’t as complicated as the enterprise-level COOs, but the principles are the same: optimize every cog in your machine so it runs smoothly.
What does that look like for us Solopreneurs? I spent years figuring out that it’s actually quite simple. After all, a smart COO breaks down everything to its simplest elements to gain clarity. Then, they can leverage what makes the biggest impact.
When acting as your own COO, your entire focus is balancing two key business functions:
Work flowing in
Work flowing out
You must learn to match the steady stream of work flowing in from your pipeline with the high-quality work flowing out to your clients. The two are intertwined, and must be managed to stay in balance. With little margin for fluff, we Solopreneurs can’t afford to get this wrong.
As your own COO, you detach from any one business category and broadly connect them all - keeping yourself going in the right direction. You destroy assumptions and reactions, focusing only on the raw performance data.
Avoiding the single-biggest cause of Solopreneur misery
Working efficiently means creating a project pipeline that steadily works its way toward you as you complete your current tasks. If this pipeline is empty, you’ll finish your current tasks, only to find out you have no more work to do. You then spend all your time scrambling to get more projects. Once you land another project, get slammed with production work.
So, what do you do? You guessed it: you start neglecting the pipeline again.
This creates the dreaded Feast and Famine cycle that plagues so many Solopreneurs and small businesses. You want no part of this.
So, how do you keep the work flowing your way?
The key to keeping your pipeline flowing is consistently engaging in the activities that generate leads. This means effective marketing and sales. If you haven’t yet read my articles on each, click the links to check them out. The items below make a lot more sense if you know which systems they’re referencing.
The COO will oversee the execution of all of these activities, measure their impact, and study the data to make adjustments.
Your exact tactics might vary, depending on your skill, industry, and strategies you laid out in your CEO sessions. Broadly, they’ll look something like this:
Assure your website is up to date with the latest work, fresh client stories, case studies, and testimonials. Remember: high-quality clients will always look for your website as a means of validating you.
Review social media performance for these key items: promoting updated work, posting relevant topics for the target audience, sharing customer wins and project milestones, and engaging target prospects. Assure all efforts are aligned with other promotional activities.
Evaluate all leads and target prospects. Assure they align with core business requirements like scope, timeframe, and budget and that they fit the description of an ideal client. Don’t overlook this. A bad client can derail your operations across the board. Avoid them.
Review and adapt any marketing or sales strategies based on prospect feedback, market research, or any other data that provides insight into what prospective customers need. Feed that data back into the marketing and sales strategies.
Keeping these items on target will dramatically increase your odds of having a line of prospects out the door. Eventually, it also means landing large clients who will keep you busy all the time. This is a priority for any Solopreneur building leverage.
Nevertheless, whether you have large clients with recurring work or a steady line of new customers, you still have to get all that work done. This is where the second phase of the COO’s role kicks in: Work flowing out.
Shipping your projects
Landing the new clients and projects creates a wonderful sense of relief. But, it’s no time to rest. The real work hasn’t even started! Your sole focus is to complete quality work as efficiently as possible. Great work done on time keeps clients happy. Happy clients send more work.
Here’s what helps you make that happen:
Production System
Most of your time in the COO role will be spent evaluating your Production System (again, check out my article if you haven’t yet). You evaluate each project for its time, profitability, final scope, customer interactions, and opportunities to improve. You then use that data to adjust your Production System accordingly.
Time Management
My primary tool for time management is block scheduling. It’s a simple method for leveraging your maximum energy and building out a visual representation of the physical time you have available. I HIGHLY recommend using this method. You’ll never wonder where your time went again. The COO role reviews the schedules each week to make sure time allocations are realistic and if they need adjusted.
Technologies
Routinely assess the software and technologies that you use to deliver your products, communicate with clients, market, and sell. Again, you measure the performance of each tool to make sure they are contributing to your desired outcome. With new technologies coming out each day, it’s important to stay on top of the trends and make the most out of these tools.
Team
As a Solopreneur, you’re often the entire team. Remember, though, the hallmark of Solopreneurship is leverage. As COO, you’re analyzing opportunities within your projects or your business operations to bring in subcontractors. Start with the most basic tasks that require the least management or free up the most time. Then leverage your systems to make it easier for your teams to execute their work accurately. This plays a pivotal role in your ability to scale your business.
If you’ve followed this series since the beginning, you should understand just how powerful the COO role is for your business. It provides you the opportunity to zoom out and assess how all of your business functions are working together. For me, this is one of the most enjoyable activities in my business. I love the feeling of detachment and the ability to see my activities for what they are. I then make the small adjustments that improve my business. As a Solopreneur, that means improving my life.
Here’s my breakdown for acting as COO in my business:
Yearly: 3 days
I set aside one hour bi-weekly to review the data that I collect throughout my business activities. I feed that data into the respective business role that then executes any improvements or modifications.
– Torrey
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