Growing your Service Operations in 5 Easy Steps

For many service-based teams, managing internal operations will always come second to closing new business and servicing current clients. However, it’s critical to focus on creating streamlined operation workflows to effectively grow. At Accelo, our mission is to help you succeed. Here are 5 essential steps you can take to mature your operations management.

1. Establish a menu of services

First, it's important to establish what services are available to your clients. To get started, build out a well-defined list of services that your business offers to ensure you set realistic expectations with your clients. 

When creating your menu of services, remember to include departments across the spectrum, such as Marketing, Sales, Service, and Accounting. Every team member should be involved in this process. This might seem like a daunting undertaking, but we have compiled a list of recommended questions to help kick things off:

• How much does each of these cost?
• How do you bill and what billing plans do you offer?
• Who fulfills these services?
• What value does this provide to your clients? Expected ROI?
  

2. Create an operational playbook

Based on your menu of services, you then want to map out different processes for your team to build a structured workflow from inbound requests to fully completed work. As your client base and internal team continue to grow, there will be less time for one-on-one training, so establishing these processes early on will help manage, track, and fulfill client work with less stress. 

Check out the following questions to help you and your team establish your own personalized processes and internal operational playbook: 

• What are the different stages of your sales cycle for new clients and those you’ve worked with in the past?
• For this type of project, what are the different stages and deliverables for each one?
• How do you handle ad hoc requests?
• When a piece of work is completed, what is your process to upsell a client to the next best service?
  

3. Implement a tech stack for your ecosystem

For your menu of services and playbook, you want to make sure you have the right tools and platform in place to oversee all these aspects. Without the proper tech stack in place to help streamline your operations, it will be difficult to monitor the increasing amount of client work. 

We recommend prioritizing your tech stack for the following three departments: 

• Marketing 

• Operations/Work

• Accounting/Finance
  

4. Map a recommended day-to-day process for each role

Next, you want to make sure you are providing a customized process for each team member to manage, progress, and record their work. This type of guidance is key to ensure that each team member is aware of their role and what is expected of them on a daily basis. 

While this should be executed across the entire organization, we recommend prioritizing these three roles:

• Executives

• Managers

• Individual Contributors

5. Continuous improvement

By this time, you have focused a lot of your efforts on establishing these processes, but the work doesn't stop there. Often times, clients budget their money and time toward the implementation of tools and mapping out processes upfront, but they tend to not budget for ongoing improvements. 

To ensure progress continues, we recommend creating three key roles that focus on refining the processes as time goes on: 

• Executive Sponsor

• Business Manager

• Internal System Administrator

Before you can even consider growing your service operations, it's vital to begin the process by doing a quick audit of your Service Operations based on the recommendations above. At Accelo, our team is both looking to help you with our Operations platform and through our Success Services. If this sounds like something you're interested in, sign up for a trial today. 

If you're interested in learning more about Accelo and how I use it in my day-to-day, watch this video here: