How to think about operations during the epidemic?

It has been 2 months since I stopped publishing, and some readers asked me what I have been doing recently. In fact, apart from being busy with work, I have been mainly relaxing myself recently. A senior once said: If you always feel that you made some mistakes last year, it means you have achieved enlightenment.

I may have figured it out, at least that's what I think recently. After thinking about it for a few days, I suddenly wanted to talk about the epidemic in early 2020 and how operators responded to it.

So, what I want to talk about today may be a bit vague. The article is a bit long, please read it patiently!

A booming economy, booming practitioners

Our country's economic development has been rapid in recent years. Although the speed has slowed down recently, the scenery is still unique here. This is at the macro level.

This has also directly brought about many micro-impacts. No matter which industry it is, it is running at full speed. Just like driving, everyone is stepping on the accelerator with all their strength. Anyone who dares to step on the brakes is a bastard.

Some of my friends who work in operations and consulting told me that in the past two years, more and more of their paid communities and consulting clients have been practitioners in traditional industries, and they use terms like conversion rate, ROI, penetration rate, user conversion path, positioning theory, and private domain traffic more frequently than anyone else.

Instead, we practitioners try to use some "local dialect" to explain professional terms.

This has also led to the fact that even fraudulent marketing has become popular.

Last year, I accompanied my wife to buy hanging oven pancakes. There were 2 staff members and 3 customers in total. Guess how long it took me to get the pancakes? You may not believe it, but it only took 20 minutes.

Are they not fast enough? No, otherwise in a place like Wanda where every inch of land is valuable, this kind of efficiency would result in huge losses. Is it that they don’t realize they need to do it quickly? No, I and two other brothers in the queue have been urging us.

In fact, as a practitioner, I know they must have heard this fraudulent marketing theory from somewhere: when there are few people, you should slow down your business to create the illusion that there are people queuing up and your business is good, so as to attract more customers.

Everyone wants to be fast, and sometimes even does things recklessly!

In fact, Internet people, don't laugh at the two guys selling sesame cakes above. Don't think I don't know that you looked at two growth cases and wanted to get it at 0 cost, forcing a group of rookies who had only read theories in books to come up with a growth theory and cool operations that others have never thought of, and achieve the successful path of listing in three years and retiring in five years.

We are all the same, no one is better than anyone else.

The ability to step on the accelerator is important, but it is not everything about driving.

My driving instructor was an old man. During a road training session, a red Mazda flashed by and weaved in and out of the place. I said: Look at this old driver, he drives so well!

The coach looked at me and said: Remember, a real experienced driver must drive five cars at the same time, his own, the one in front, the one behind, the side, and the opposite direction. When is the car in front cutting speed? When is the car behind you too close? How to avoid entering the blind spot of the car on the side? The car on the opposite side keeps crossing the line. Does it mean it is going in the wrong direction to overtake? You have to pay attention to these.

For a distance of 1,000 kilometers, 140 kilometers per hour will not arrive much earlier than 110 kilometers per hour, but the speed to see God is definitely much faster.

Starting a business is like driving a car. For most industries, there is actually no window period, just like starting a journey.

The ability to step on the accelerator is of course important, but you will always encounter traffic jams, and at this time the ability to drive slowly is very important.

The epidemic at the beginning of 2020 made everyone slam on the brakes.

• Xibei and Karaoke King are by no means isolated cases. More small and medium-sized enterprises have disappeared silently, as if they had never existed.
• Those who are used to living a fake and refined life, or those who are used to working for performance with high leverage, now realize that their ability to bear risks is really poor!

When I was 23 years old, I started a company with my brothers. We caught the growth trend of the Internet and everything else went well, so the business developed smoothly. Everyone is used to high-speed growth and low-cost traffic, so they just focus on stepping on the gas and renting a big office... just like all entrepreneurs.

When the traffic dividend is over and it is time to enter a completely new "road environment", there will be a very difficult transition period. At this time, what is tested is the ability to conduct refined operations. Only at this time will you discover that there are problems everywhere.

• Where are the new ways of growth?
• How to achieve the change of investment ratio between new and old channels?
• What is the ability to match different growth methods?
• How to continuously optimize or reduce costs?
• How to improve labor efficiency?
• How does financial data assist decision making?

You see, when the economy is growing rapidly, you probably won’t pay enough attention to this issue. Therefore, my brothers and I in the team stopped closing our business when we saw that it was going to close!

Slow down and be a classic operator

What is a Classical Operator?

This concept, like the traditional Western medicine, is full of grammatical errors. Readers will scold me for making up nouns again.

Among them, I stole the football terminology. There is a concept in football called: classic attacking midfielder. These people have skills, a sense of the overall situation, organizational ability, and exquisite passing skills (from Baidu Encyclopedia). However, it was gradually replaced because it could not adapt to the high-intensity confrontation in modern football.

A style of play that simply pursues speed is good in sports activities, but not necessarily in business practice. Having technology, a sense of the overall situation, organizational ability, and the decisiveness to deliver a fatal blow are the core skills of classical operations (I think this term is very successfully coined).

Although the refined division of labor has led to the subdivision of operations into various in-depth vertical positions, it is questionable whether this strictly defined boundary approach is scientific.

After all, having a group of professional workers report to someone who has no knowledge of operations is a big problem in itself. [To be frank, most companies still have an operation model where a layman boss manages a group of professional operators, which is "laymen guiding professionals"]

It’s easier said than done. I won’t weave a network for you. I will just throw out some different details and you can work on them first. When you understand each point one by one, you will be able to organize a capability network slowly.

1. Read more news and books

Read more news and current affairs so that you can know what kind of road conditions you are about to drive on and be prepared in advance.

The reason why we read more books is that many of the things we encounter have actually been encountered by the ancients or elites long ago, and they have written down their solutions in books, but we have to read and understand them ourselves.

A lot of operational skills go beyond operations, and a lot of them involve philosophy. For example, when you are about to switch tracks, how do you maintain a sense of crisis and risk awareness, and convey that awareness to your team, how do you make corresponding financial, talent, and knowledge reserves, and at the same time, how do you balance it so that it doesn't become defeatist.

No operations class will teach you these. [A brief interlude: I’m sorry, dear readers, my book Beyond Operations will most likely be discontinued. 】

2. Set up an internal SAT team with a team leader

SAT is the abbreviation of Special action teams, which means special operations team in Chinese. (From Baidu, please correct me if I’m wrong).

For the vast majority of companies and teams, the team will gradually be restricted to a working state in the business comfort zone (Note: even companies that work 996, although physically painful, are actually in the business comfort zone).

This will bring about several problems. Once something new is encountered, no one knows who will do it and how to do it. No matter which department or small team with mature business, it will interfere with the normal operation of the team.

At this time, a SAT team was established, and some energetic young people were drawn from each performance group through voluntary recruitment to specifically deal with this type of problem.

Of course, additional money beyond salary and promotions should be given priority. For example: the various support teams for the Wuhan epidemic are actually a type of SAT team.

3. Complete the team's knowledge base system

In fact, most small and medium-sized teams do not have the habit of building a knowledge base. After all, many tasks can sometimes be explained clearly in just two sentences, so there is really no need to write a knowledge base. Therefore, writing a knowledge base is a thankless task, and sometimes it feels like it has little to do with the main business.

Simply put, it is that kind of thing: important but not urgent.

Therefore, during this epidemic, you found that some companies with knowledge base reserves have handled all remote work. Some companies can even conduct remote interviews, remote onboarding, and remote training. These things cannot be solved by simply downloading DingTalk or ZOOM.

Since everyone’s knowledge base system is different, I won’t go into details here.

What if you don’t know how to do it?

Try to ask the people on your team who know the business and training best; they should be able to give you a good answer.

4. Keep up the enthusiasm for new tools

Tools are guns in your hands. This is a simple truth and everyone knows it.

But my obvious feeling over the years is that many operators pay much attention to the "Tao" aspect, but not much attention to the "technique" issue. After all, one can just listen to some empty talk and then go out and brag, which sounds so great and impressive; while the other needs to keep his head down and work, which not only involves hard work but also means he has nowhere to brag about.

To give an interesting example: I used to know an operations director (the title in a small company is basically just a joke, you know), and he had a lot of ideas about how to attract traffic. When discussing how to use WeChat to manage a community and thousands of friends, this brother decided to rely on PC WeChat and WORD to do the manual processing.

As long as you pay attention to tools, you will know that there are software like WETOOL in the world (should they charge some advertising fees?).

So when people often say correct nonsense like: Improve conversion rate through data analysis?

I asked him: What software is used, where does the data come from, what tools are used to process it, what algorithm is used, how to graph it, and what is the frequency? You see, I was dumbfounded.

In addition, if you want to create a local DOC for the knowledge base mentioned in the previous section, you will find that the information is out of sync after sending it back and forth.

At this time, online software may be very convenient. Properly learning tools such as WPS, Mubu, Graphite, and Tencent Docs will greatly improve team efficiency.

5. Continuously optimize business processes

What is continuous optimization of business processes?

The optimization of business processes involves factors at multiple levels and cannot be achieved simply by reducing costs and decision-making complexity.

Taking the traditional industry as an example (after all, I am a foodie), if your waiter hears a customer complain that the dish is too spicy, what he does next is called a business process. There may be several options at this time:

1. She retorted to the customer: Sorry sir, authentic food should be this spicy.
2. She called the boss and said: Boss, look, this gentleman said this dish is too spicy, do you think you could notify the kitchen to reduce the spiciness of this dish?
3. She went straight to the kitchen and said: Lao Liu, don’t make the twice-cooked pork too spicy next time. Some customers said it was too spicy.
4. She said: OK sir, we will pay attention next time, but in fact she did nothing.

You see, they have the following characteristics:

1. Method 1 is divorced from customer needs and is too rigid, but when a product reaches a certain stage of development, it does need to have its own persistence.
2. Method 2 is a centralized decision-making method, which can avoid risks but reduces flexibility.
3. Although method 3 is flexible, it brings various operational risks due to the non-compliant decision-making process.
4. Although method 4 seems lazy, it is sometimes the best solution.

You see, these four different business processing processes must be determined according to the company's development stage. When to switch and at what pace to switch, not only must the operator himself understand it, but he must also be in sync with the team, right?

6. Clarify the company's operations-led team strategy

There used to be an old saying on the Internet: the fast fish eats the slow fish. In fact, this is the highest summary of this sentence.

For the vast majority of small and medium-sized companies, unless your team is engaged in deep technical research and development, technology is the core capability. Otherwise, the vast majority of companies should establish an operations-driven work model.

Whether you are a sales-oriented or production-oriented person, you should actually establish a scientific operational approach.

When everyone adopts the same solution, who can bring products to market faster, who can find the 60-point quality line faster, and who can quickly adjust their direction according to market changes, these are all operations-driven capabilities.

In my own words: The above is correct nonsense, but the vast majority of operators must have this kind of "big operation" global view, not convincing themselves, not convincing the BOSS.

Only when consensus is reached can the subsequent HOW issue be considered.

7. Try remote work occasionally [very important]

In fact, for most companies, except for the core business, most of the work may be outsourced in a "shared" manner. For example, many companies have achieved financial outsourcing, some companies have achieved design outsourcing, and even many industries have achieved de-corporatization.

The Internet era has brought about changes in the way people collaborate. Technologies such as 5G, VR, AI, big data, smart contracts, and smart assets will greatly promote this process.

In the foreseeable future, most small companies will probably retain some core businesses on a project-based basis and have non-critical businesses handled remotely by talents in third- and fourth-tier cities, thereby reducing costs.

It may even lead to concepts like “shared employees”. You see, “shared employees” is actually a good entrepreneurial project.

So, try remote work more often, you will get addicted!

Author: Barley

Source: Damai Operation View