Mapping Your Operating Model
Your operating model is simply how you do the work of making your product or providing your service, step by step. Writing it down makes it easier to see where time, money, or quality might be lost. By mapping out each step—what goes in, what you do, and what comes out—you can spot problems like bottlenecks and find ways to improve. A clear operating model helps you work more efficiently, serve more customers, and grow your business.
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Great entrepreneurship is about attention to details—doing the little things right. Nowhere is this more important than in how you produce your product or provide your service. It can be extremely helpful to map out what we call your “operating model” or your model for how you “do what you do”.
• If you are a caterer, exactly how to do take orders, prepare meals, and deliver the meals to the customer location?
• If you make baby bibs, how do you source your raw materials, make on baby bib, package it, and make it available to customers?
• If you clean houses or offices, what are the exact steps you go through in cleaning one home. How have you organized everything into steps? What is the exact order of the steps?
Think of your operating model as an attempt to capture inputs, throughputs, and outputs. This means it is a process where you take inputs (raw materials, ingredients, customer requests, customer orders), create value by transforming these inputs into great products and services, and produce outputs in the form value for satisfied customers.
If you look at the examples provided in this section, you’ll notice points in some processes where things can slow down because of what is called a bottleneck. Bottleneck points are places where things can back up because only so much volume can be handled. In this example, when he is cooking the reeds in caustic soda, it is a bottleneck of delay point, because he has a small stove and the pot he is cooking them in is only so large. So, during that cooking period, the amount he can do is constrained or limited. A similar example is the bottleneck at the drive-up window of a fast food restaurant, where only one person can be served at a time, and some customers can take a longer period of time—so things back up. You want to anticipate and plan for bottlenecks. With creativity, you might be able to find ways to work around them, so that you can handle more activity.
If you map out your operating model, and adhere to it religiously, it becomes a win-win-win situation. That means you gain three things. First, you are able to produce more in the same amount of time, so output goes up. Second, you are more focused, make few mistakes and have to throw away less ingredient or product, so your cost per unit comes down. Third, your quality becomes more consistent as you are doing it the exact same way each time. By managing operations systematically, you also begin to see ways to innovate and improve the process.
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📝Example 1: Funeral Services
📝 Example 2: Guest House
📝 Example 3: Beauty Salon
📝 Example 4: Operations Flow Model of a Paper Making Business
Video: Operating Model - Funeral Home Example
Video: Operating Model - Tondo Example
Video: Operating Model - Baby Bib Example
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🖥️Interactive map: Customer Services Process Map for a Small Florist Company
📖Reading: Customer Services Process Map for a Small Florist Company - Map Explanation
🖥️Interactive map: Inventory Management Process for a Small Business
📖Reading: Inventory Management Process for a Small Business - Map Explanation
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📖/▶️Reading and Video: The 5 Why’s: Why Did The Machine Stop Working?
📖 Reading: Process Improvement: Plan, Do, Check, Act!
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Think of your business like a theater production. There’s what the audience sees — the front stage — and everything that happens behind the scenes to make the show work — the back stage. Both are essential, but they serve different purposes and often need to be managed differently.
Front-stage operations are what customers directly experience. This includes how they are greeted, how services are delivered, and how problems are solved. For example, in a Collaboration Hub, the front-stage process might include greeting the client, completing an intake form, assigning them to a student consultant, working together on a solution, and following up after the project.
Back-stage operations, on the other hand, are all the things the customer never sees — but that make the front-stage possible. These include maintaining databases, training and scheduling staff, paying rent, cleaning the space, restocking supplies, and maintaining equipment like printers.
Both areas need structure and consistency. Creating a clear operating model for each helps you identify bottlenecks, maintain quality, and find opportunities for improvement. By regularly reviewing both your front-stage and back-stage systems, you can run your business more efficiently and deliver a smoother, more professional experience to every customer.
📝Template: Frontstage-Backstage Audit
▶️ Video: Frontstage vs. Backstage
Video: Operations - Theatre as a Model - Frontstage and Backstage Operations