Design Your Operations Blueprint | Tory Burch Foundation

You have goals for your business, but do you know what you’ll need to do to accomplish them? We Optimize Work CEO/founder and Lean Six Sigma black belt Dominique Townsend returned to our webinar series to teach our community how to develop an operations blueprint that helps growing businesses accomplish major goals. Her framework, presented through the acronym SMILE, helps founders and business leaders clarify goals and the necessary resources to tackle them within a 12-month period. SMILE stands for:

• See the big picture
• Map your operations
• Identify improvement milestones
• Lay the groundwork
• Execute aligned actions

The SMILE framework applies to both product and service businesses. This step-by-step approach to designing an operations blueprint allows leaders to see clear relationships between each part of a process, the resources they’re using and the larger goals to which they apply.

SMILE also gives founders clarity and an opportunity to recapture the joy of why they first started a company. “I’m a firm believer in being able to enjoy what you do while you’re working,” Townsend said. “Because the more that we are clear in how we operate our business, we empower ourselves to own what aligns best to us and how we operate our business.”

S: SEE THE BIG PICTURE

Townsend’s SMILE starts with “See the big picture”, because setting your sights on a single result, or even a single strategy, can obscure other ways to achieve goals faster or better. See the big picture is less about next steps and more about charting the present. At this step, you account for things like what works, what holds up production and where you fall behind on timelines.  

If you don’t think your business has significant pain points to address now, look at your bigger goals for a 12-month period and see what challenges you might have in achieving them.

Then, reframe one of those pain points so that they describe success, in what Townsend calls “solution-oriented outcome”, since they make an educated guess about the realistic improvement you can make. To illustrate, Townsend uses two fictional examples: a coalition of berry farms (product sales) and e-learning (service sales).

Berry farm pain points: The berry farm struggles to keep up with production and get samples in time, and the founder is the only person who knows the recipe.

Solution-oriented outcome: to improve production of the signature line by 20%.

E-learning service pain points: The company misses deadlines because contractors have to wait a long time to get approval.

Solution-oriented outcome: improve design project turnaround by 25%

Reframing is a key step; Townsend says some pain points are simply opportunities lying in wait.

M: MAP YOUR OPERATIONS

Now that you’ve identified the process that you want to focus on, you need to delve into what currently goes into the process. Write down the resources like apps, materials or vendors, and roles or team members involved in the entire process and organize them in operational buckets. This step can include everything from intake questionnaires to shipping carriers.

Berry farm operational buckets: Production, Suppliers and Vendors, Shipping and Customer Delivery

E-learning operational buckets: Client Onboarding and Curriculum Development, Design Department, E-learning Course Upload

In the case of the berry farm, Townsend saw that Person B had roles in both production and shipping and delivery. She acknowledged that growing businesses do often have people fulfilling multiple roles. Instead of asking, “can they do more?” ask yourself, “would they be more effective if they narrowed their focus?”

Include customer feedback to understand what elements of your system your clients are actually using, especially if you’re a service business. For example, if your clients say they email you instead of filling out the form you provided because the form is hard to use, that could be something you address in the later parts of the SMILE framework so that you find a way to save time and organize information.

Inn her e-learning company example, Townsend pointed out that operating at full capacity in one area might not yield the best productivity for the business overall. If all hands are busy to capacity with what are considered more important tasks, then other critical steps like design review can slow everything down. This part of Townsend’s framework lets founders see each part of a process a careful look so they can see how seemingly minor improvements can be part of a big goal like a 25% increase in turnaround time.

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I: IDENTIFY IMPROVEMENT MILESTONES

Narrow your focus in this third step by choosing one operational bucket and then indicate three milestones that can ladder into your solution-oriented outcome. Choose a doable timeline for hitting these milestones. She recommended owners set three milestones per solution-oriented outcome.

Berry Farm Production bucket: Uses three employees, baking equipment, recipe cards and request receipts

Steps to improve: Streamline ingredient sourcing locations, reorganize production space layout for efficiency, design operational procedure document. Timeline: 6 months.

E-learning Company Client Onboarding and Curriculum Development bucket:  Uses two people, client management software, calendar scheduling tool, two separate forms, 4-hour onboarding call

 Steps to improve: establish a project tracking tool to improve visibility of design needs, refine client onboarding process, develop a standard course catalog Timeline: 90 days

Think creatively about how you use all parts of your business. For example, could your tech and product team create a feature that allows customer to move faster through the funnel?

If you’re a solopreneur, don’t worry. Townsend recommends you think of yourself as wearing separate hats, and not a mingled to-do list. The idea is not to burden yourself with an endless series of tasks, but to really understand how the parts of the process function together. Give each role its own itinerary.

L: LAY THE GROUNDWORK

This part of the framework asks you to consider how you support reaching each of the milestones identified in the previous step. This generally means assigning three supporting actions to each milestone.

Berry farm milestone: design operational procedure document with visuals

Supporting actions:

• Write out current approach and capture opportunities for improvement
• Clarify procedure with visuals
• Train key players on the process, have them shadow, offboard

E-learning milestone: refine the client onboarding process

Supporting actions:

• Develop a pre-homework packet to be completely before onboarding call
• Implement a template for project status report for better visibility on progress
• Evaluate previous client feedback for client onboarding refinement
• Define max open projects number

 Once you’ve identified the actions, you should then choose which resources to assign to them. That will include both team members and technology. Townsend warns not to just invest in a technology solution until you put your knowledge to work to design a process that really works for you and your team. You’ll create the process after you’ve listed the actions.  

E: EXECUTE ALIGNED ACTIONS

Now, it’s time to look forward. You’ll take the immediate steps you’ve planned for success and plan for potential challenges. Give you and your team checkpoints for how often you’ll reevaluate your systems. It’s also essential to formalize those systems, so that as your business grows, new team members can get up to speed quickly. Additionally, formalized processes will give you something to work from should you want to create or tweak your blueprint using another round of SMILE. Your array of assets, obstacles, and their connections will grow with your business strategy. As Townsend reminded our community, “When your operations are not clarified, it opens you up to distraction, comparison and working beyond your capacity.”