Business owners 4 x less involved in daily operations

Challenge

Like many tech companies, WeCanFly faced a unique challenge-the significant involvement of the management in the company’s daily operations. This is a common issue in organizations where the initial capital consisted of the know-how of the managers. As the company grows, the daily support provided by the founders not only hinders their focus on strategic issues due to operational time demands but also impedes the team’s work, which must wait until the founders find time for them.

As co-founders, we are still entangled in some projects and are a bottleneck. We are aware of this. We must disentangle the management from the projects.

Additionally, the founders of WeCanFly expected support in verifying business plans and the company’s daily operations:

“We need to bounce our ideas off someone who can look at us from the outside. We want someone to point out our mistakes and shortcomings and take an overarching view of our activities from a ‘bird’s eye view’, focusing on strategy and the order of operations.”

How can the burden of operational activities be lifted from the Founders?

At the start of our collaboration, the founders of WeCanFly were involved in sales at nearly every stage, from when a sales inquiry appeared to signing contracts and even managing projects. While this is reasonable in a company’s profile at the early stages of its existence, it becomes a burden for managers over time. Our solutions have significantly relieved this burden, allowing the founders to focus more on strategic issues.

Tomasz and Maciej supported the team daily, advised, got involved in difficult project situations, and tried to continuously respond to questions from the team. However, this caused their calendars to burst at the seams—the daily grind consumed the time necessary for planning the company’s future.

We found two ways to address this:

1. Hiring a Presales Specialist

From the very beginning of our cooperation, the managers were aware that they needed someone to support them in the early stages of sales:

“I think we are at a point where we could use a presales person. Tomek (co-founder), who gets all the new conversations, is slowly unable to respond to everyone quickly and in real time. The preparation of offers is also starting to take longer.”

– Maciej Czerniak, co-founder of WeCanFly

We guided the founders in preparing the candidate profile and shared our experience on what to look for in resumes and during interviews. This hands-on approach ensured that the right person was hired for the role.

We also developed an onboarding plan for the new presales person and are continuously assisting in developing their skills.

1. Increasing Employee Independence

We shared with Tomasz and Maciej ways to encourage employees to be more independent and helped designate individuals responsible for specific areas of the company’s operations to whom other employees should turn. This has empowered the team and instilled confidence in the founders about their team’s capabilities.

We also recommended that Tomasz and Maciej schedule time in their calendars for deep work – a sacred moment when no one can disturb them.

As is well known, the CEOs’ high workload does not only stem from external forces—the managers simply like to be involved 😉. Therefore, we also found ourselves reminding Tomasz and Maciej when, after freeing up space in their calendars, they wanted to start a marketing project that would again require their solid operational involvement.

Identifying Unique Company Values Through Unique Selling Point Workshops

Hiring and onboarding a presales specialist is not the only sales challenge we supported WeCanFly with. Over time, competitors emerge in every market, some offering lower prices. Suppose customers are unaware of what, besides price, makes the current provider stand out. In that case, they may view the competitor’s offer as “the same but cheaper.”

To mitigate such situations and know how to act when they occur, we conducted Unique Selling Point workshops to identify the company’s differentiators. Together with WeCanFly, we developed unique values for clients – 6 company differentiators that are particularly worth emphasizing in communication with clients. We also indicated how to do this.

Changing the Billing Model

When we began our collaboration, WeCanFly still worked with about half of its clients based on a Fixed Price model. That model sometimes led to misunderstandings: there were instances where one party had a different understanding of the project scope during negotiations, which later led to additional work. We suggested convincing the remaining clients, who were previously unconvinced, to adopt this collaboration model.

Production Time Management

With WeCanFly, we also worked on optimizing production time to reduce downtime between projects, which impacted the company’s revenue.

We suggested:

• Appointing a traffic owner who coordinates information from Project Managers, design and development teams, and management;
• Streamlining communication: proactively informing about released workloads needs for assistance, as well as actively gathering information within the team;
• Estimating resource utilization during a weekly meeting and then verifying plans at the end of the week;
• Improving processes based on the insights gained from the above.

Ongoing Support and Validation of Ideas

We continue collaborating with WeCanFly, supporting the company in its daily challenges and setting development directions. We started the new year, among other things, by establishing OKRs (Objectives Key Results) for the upcoming months and organizing the action plan to determine what should happen first and what can wait until the next quarter.

Results

Despite scaling the company (revenues increased by 40%), the founders’ involvement in its operational activities has decreased; for example, the number of client projects requiring their engagement has reduced fourfold.

As a result of our collaboration, there has been a significant reduction in the number of projects involving the owners. This tangible impact of the changes implemented has made the founders feel the relief from operational burden.

Would you like to achieve similar results in your business? We’d love to have you as a client. Feel free to contact us at [email protected]