Case Study
Meet Marissa
An accomplished Youtuber and new Mom
Creator of Subscribers to Sales®
Marissa and I connected during her hunt for an online business manager. She has grown her business exponentially over the course of 4 years; she was helping freelancers, course, and content creators be able to build and monetize their Youtube channels successfully. She already had a team of people working well under her, but she was going through a massive change in her life; about to head onto maternity leave. Being so central to almost every task in her business, Marissa wanted to ensure that her business could work without so much of her involvement, and be able to take a step back from the day-to-day work she found herself doing.
Marissa had three goals when signing up for Operations Management:
Remove herself from being the ‘doer’ in every aspect of her business
Support in managing initiatives to completion in various departments
Feel comfortable in the progress of her business while she is away for maternity leave.
It was nearly impossible to focus on what I really wanted which was content creation and scaling our membership program.
Using the C.E.O Framework
Clarity
Defining team member responsibilities to avoid overstuffing, and outlining strategic hires to support the growth of the business
Creating a priority list of what is for Marissa to do, and what can be handed to me and the rest of the team.
Standardizing decisions and processes for critical business tasks (refund requests, scheduling emails, pausing the membership, launch support etc.)
Execute
Built a clear maternity leave strategy so she can be offline, and the team had a chain of command for managing
Refined Asana to create interactive launch procedures, project management workflows, and updated SOPs to empower team members to execute without her say so
Offloading mission-critical projects to me to handle, so she can focus on priority tasks
Building in automations to manage more of the client experience so her team can be better utilized elsewhere
Handle a full launch with newly hired support
Optimize
Created team check-in meetings to get insight on what support the team needs, as well as provide feedback
Anticipated potential gaps that can stunt growth based on our strategic objective mapping, and began initiatives to fill in before any problems occur (i.e. responses to potential brand deals during maternity leave, checking in with members not a part of the community, etc.)
Created team benchmarks through the creation of KPIs and regular performance reviews
Still going strong with Operations Management
Within 3 months, we completely revitalized Marissa’s internal operational structure.
Thanks to clear process documentation, we were able to give a long-time employee a more defined role that suited their capabilities well and hire additional support to handle administrative tasks. Marissa was able to take 3 MONTHS off of her business for maternity leave, only popping in for monthly check-ins with Elisabeth and when she was creating videos and wanted to add them to the channel’s schedule.
In her first month of leave, the business had 31% profit!
With strategic objectives mapped for the rest of the year, Marissa is primed to reach her financial goals in the next year,
and do so without spending every waking moment working inside her business. I am honored to have her as such an amazing client and be on this journey with her!
This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship!
My Hair is Big Because It's Full of Secrets!
But I like sharing. Sign up here to get free tips, tricks and advice to step into your big-business CEO pants! And the occasional cat gif.