In this episode we discuss: What does a good COO framework look like? We are joined by Simon Wakeman, former COO of TPXimpact and creator of the B3 Framework. 

We chat about the following: 

• Are investment bets the responsibility of the COO? 
• What is an operating model? 
• What is minimum viable governance? How much process is too much process? 
• How to best manage a risk register to make it useful
• What is in the “systems” box? 
• How do you structure data teams? 
• What are some practices around cadences? 

References:

• B3 Framework
• Simon Wakeman

Biography: 

I help founders in post-seed and series A technology businesses to scale their operations and create resilient organisations. 

I’ve created and used the B3 framework® to enable businesses with 25 to 250 people to successfully grow at pace. 

Before becoming an independent interim COO, consultant and advisor I held senior operational leadership roles in two scaling technology businesses. The first - a digital business - I led from 15 people / £1.6m revenue to 40 people / £3m revenue. The second - a technology and design business - grew from 361 people / £31.5m revenue to 700 people / £83m in around three years. 

My career experience includes co-founder, MD, COO and non-exec director roles in growth companies, including successful exits across listed and privately held businesses.

Summary:

• Creating high-performance companies with a CEO framework. 0:06
• Brandon and Bethany discuss their spouses' reactions to their podcast, with Bethany's husband being surprised by her comment that being married is not part of her identity.
• They welcome Simon Wakeman, former CEO of TI px impact, as their guest to discuss his B three framework for building highly performant organizations.
• Brandon M: Foundation layer of CEO framework includes why do we exist, what do we do, and how do we do it.
• Bethany: Operating model definition lacks clarity, with inconsistent examples across companies.
• Brandon M: Building the organisation layer, decision making is hard due to changing business structures and roles, but it's critical for scaling companies to codify decision-making processes and delegate responsibility.
• Bethany: Finance models are useful for making calculated risks and investment bets, but they need to be holistically thought through with the CEO and leadership team to ensure the right forecast model is created for cash burn and expectations management.
• Business framework for scaling startups. 7:16
• Bethany and Brandon discuss the importance of data ownership and security in business, with Bethany emphasizing the need for a "Source of Truth" and data security foundations to support data-driven decision-making.
• Bethany highlights the importance of data in decision-making, emphasizing that even small amounts of data can be valuable for directional insights.
• Bethany and Brandon discuss the four layers of their framework, including cadence and communications, leadership, performance, processes, systems, and standards.
• Operating models and their importance in business. 11:32
• Simon Wakeman defines operating model as a blueprint for turning strategy into reality, focusing on how to source customers, deliver value, and partner with others.
• Bethany seeks clarification on operating model, which Simon explains as a high-level summary of how a business creates value, turning strategy into a functioning business.
• Simon Wakeman emphasizes the importance of creating a clear and concise operating model for businesses, which should describe how the company creates value on a single page.
• He suggests using a template to help structure the operating model, but notes that the level of detail and complexity will depend on the type of business and its stage of growth.
• Organizational governance and decision-making. 16:02
• Simon Wakeman: Distributed team was deliberately chosen for tech business to address resourcing challenges.
• Minimum Viable Governance means legal duties of directors, policies, and risk management processes for coherent functioning.
• Simon Wakeman: Governance should push autonomy and decision-making to the edges of the organization, with appropriate safeguards to ensure competency.
• Bethany: Too much process can stifle innovation, emphasizing people's brains and good decisions over rules is key.
• Governance in scaleups, risk management, and crisis communications. 21:11
• Brandon M and Bethany discuss governance in scaleups, focusing on risk management and crisis communications.
• Risk management, systems ownership, and data quality in business. 22:58
• Bethany suggests identifying the right people to engage in risk management, such as critical thinkers like herself and structured thinkers like the CFO or ops director.
• Simon Wakeman agrees that these individuals are often the ones who take the lead in risk management and convene groups to do the hard work.
• Simon Wakeman emphasizes the importance of understanding and owning technology in a business, particularly in the early scaling phase, to avoid messy systems architecture and inconsistent data.
• He highlights the need for a clear data model to underpin the business and integrate systems effectively, particularly as AI and augmentation technologies become more prevalent.
• Simon Wakeman suggests a more decentralized approach to ops, with greater autonomy for people, but also a governing framework to ensure coherence and value creation across the organization.
• Simon believes tech leadership should own providing data and capabilities, while CFO should define user needs and bring together quality information for decision-making.
• Creating a cohesive business system through meetings and alignment. 29:16
• Bethany and Simon discuss the importance of cadence in organizations, including recurring meetings, to align teams and create a sense of unity.
• Simon Wakeman emphasizes the importance of understanding how different parts of a business are linked together and making deliberate choices about how to structure and run the business.
• He encourages listeners to regularly review and adjust their business systems as the company grows to maintain balance and coherence.

Brandon M 0:06

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the operations room a podcast for CEOs I am Brandon mincing joined by my lovely co host, Bethany Ayers, how're things going, Bethany,

Bethany 0:16

you're doing? Well, Brandon, I got myself into a little bit of trouble this weekend. Oh, dear. So my husband occasionally listens to the podcast. Oh,

Brandon M 0:28

it's an avid listener. That's great.

Bethany 0:32

Occasional, when the rest of politics runs out, and he's doing exercise and the next thing that comes up as us he's

Brandon M 0:39

like, What is Bethany talking about?

Bethany 0:43

And he was listening to a recent episode where I talk about how being married is not part of my identity. Oh, boy. Alright. So I got into like a little bit of trouble when he came down the stairs. And he's like, so I don't matter do

Brandon M 1:04

the spouse reaction always is to reframe it in the worst possible terms.

Bethany 1:09

And I was like, No, it's just up to being married. It's a part of my identities. Like, yeah, yeah, I noticed it. But we've talked about this before, it shouldn't be a surprise. One thing for it not to be surprised privately. It's another thing.

Brandon M 1:25

Bethany 1:57

have an uncle in New Mexico, who is an avid listener, and I only know that and he always jumps on, it's just like, I love the podcast, it's really good. So I'm just gonna say Hello, Uncle Byron in Albuquerque. Thanks for being such an avid listener.

Brandon M 2:15

So we've got a great topic today, which is a CEOs framework to create high performance companies we have an amazing guest in this was Simon Wakeman. He is the former CEO of TI px impact a 500 person digital transformation business, and the author of the B three framework, a tool to build highly performant organisations. And that's the topic for today. The first layer as it were a first layer of the cake, as he called it, the Foundation, which is the what and the how, why do we do what we do? What business are we in? And the how is really the value set of the organisation in this case? So on that foundational layer of his framework for CEOs, what's your take on that first layer?

Bethany 2:56

Well, first of all, I mean, I shouldn't probably say this, but it's the first thing came to mind was, although it's the foundation layer, it is visually the tip of the pyramid. So it's kind of like the inverse inverse of a foundation layer. But I do agree it is where we should start. Simon Sinek says it start with why. So it's why do you exist? What do you do? And how do you do it? Yeah,

Brandon M 3:19

I think this part of it, whether it's the foundation, the top the tip of the iceberg, what have you, I think we're all agreed, this is a core part of every company's structure that they need to have without a shadow of a doubt. So let's park that one, because that's a no brainer. The second layer is what he called making a business and making a business had two layers to it. One was strategy, and one was the operating model. Every company needs to have a strategy that's crisp, that's clear, that's communicated well that people understand because that's the precursor to setting good goals and objectives for the company that wrap into that strategy very clearly manifest this strategy to come alive. I would say this, we did an operating model at Trent. And I found it immensely useful to pinpoint the rest of the organisation in particular leadership and management, where we were having challenges that we needed to solve. I think we mishmash several things together a bit of high level, how we create value in the business, and a bit of lower level, go to market motion II type stuff to try to pinpoint where I thought we were having challenges with executing the strategy, and then illustrating it visually in an operating model back to the company to help them understand where we were having these these issues, essentially. So I think there is value in this idea of operating model, how you represent it, what it needs to look like and what level it is, I think maybe depends on the context in which we're using it.

Bethany 4:40

Yeah, I think I just don't understand fundamentally the definition of an operating model. If we all actually knew what an operating model was. There will be clarity and examples and examples would be consistent in the same way that like a go to market strategy has a pretty consistent understanding and definition. Now. What

Brandon M 4:59

I do You know is that there's a way of representing processes in the company to help the company understand where you have challenges. Layer number three, building the organisation, and he had four layers here. He had roles, roles and responsibilities. He had structure. Third one was decision making. And the fourth one was governance. So building the organisation layer, what's your take on that one?

Bethany 5:23

Decision Making? That's a really interesting one. And I think that's the hardest, the structure of the business keeps changing, the roles and responsibilities will keep changing. But we all know how to do that. And it's, as you get bigger, you need to keep rethinking it, but it's fairly well understood. How do you do decision making? How do you codify it? How do you decide who can make what is really hard? How do you delegate decision making responsibility? And how do you deal with a CEO? Who wants to make all the decisions because it's their baby. And so I think that one is super critical, and really hard to do.

Brandon M 6:04

In this building organisation, section, I two additional thoughts of things that are interesting to me that I think are part of the CEO role in a scale up company. And I'm curious what you think Bethany? One is this idea of making good investment bets in the organisation with a forecast that can drive some calculated risks and decision making. And in my view, finance at this level typically is wonderful or creating models, they're wonderful. And thinking through how those models are interconnected, what they're not good at, is making a lot of the the assumptions in the model itself around the go to market motion, and how revenue is created, why it's created, when it's created, who's creating it, what the budgets are, as part of that package, and really having a holistic thinker, thinking about all of that with the finance person to ensure that we're crafting the right kind of forecast model, because ultimately, the cash burn of the business, and also what you're committing to both for the board, and the CEO, and what the leadership team is accountable for in terms of their expectations, somebody needs to manage that in totality. And I think to build the organisation at that level, it feels like this is one of the key bullet points. That being said, I'm curious what you think,

Bethany 7:16

like, what is your business model and your actual model that you're working with? It's interesting, what you say about it being the CEOs role, I would think that it's most of the CFOs. But yet, in every business I've been in, I've been very involved in that part. So maybe it is, it's a slightly different way of thinking, then CFOs tend to have I

Brandon M 7:39

mean, you have a really good point here, because in scale of organisations, I have worked at all levels, except I've not worked with the CFO. So you're right. I think at some point, I would assume or imagined the CFO would definitely take this role if you hired a CFO at that level.

Bethany 7:54

Although like a CFO still doesn't necessarily have all of the go to market experience. And like I've worked with CFOs to build the model, agree the assumptions, and I really own the go to market and therefore I knew the assumptions and why I was choosing the ones that I was. So very much partnering, but leaving it to the CFO and FPN. A to run with the actual work and to like project manage it.

Brandon M 8:25

I say Okay, interesting. The other box that I think is missing, strong use of data within the organisation, I'm really thinking about reporting and KPIs and metrics and making sure this is all very fluid in the business.

Bethany 8:39

So data is one of those things that every size business now really needs to think through. And it's very important, who owns it? What are the data models? What is the data security, if you don't have the nice foundations, suddenly, you just have nothing that you can report on that anybody believes in and you become a non data driven business from the start.

Brandon M 9:00

I think there's a whole topic around this, which is when you have a CRM and your business, and you have your so called Source of Truth. And separately, you have a data T with a BI tool of some nature, whether it's liquor or whatever else, what ends up happening is you end up with different numbers. And it's the worst possible situation you can be in where the you know, the serum is saying the numbers x and then your BI team and your charts are saying that the numbers why I

Bethany 9:25

still see in like, seed and series A companies with small amounts of data, because it's small, they don't really take it seriously. And then as you grow, you don't have that data mined. And everybody's like, Oh, well, those numbers are wrong. So we're just not going to use those numbers rather than like okay, well, for the next quarter, we're going to get everything in line. So those numbers are right, and we're gonna make decisions based on those numbers. It may be directional, they may not be the truth, but at least there's something that we can use rather than just disregarding it entirely. completely.

Layer number four is called operating the business. We have cadence and communications, we've got change leadership, we've got performance, we've got processes, we have systems, and we have standards. So there's quite a bit there, Cadence and comms leadership performance processes, systems and standards. So with that bucket, what do you make of that? So

systems where the data lies, and actually it wasn't missing.

Yes, maybe right here.

And then cadences are really important. And that's also where the data gets distributed, and the information gets distributed. Performance is an interesting one. Because performance is one where when you're an employee, you're being graded. For what reason, lots of box ticking, none of it makes sense, don't feel supported, generally a really bad experience. And so then when I became a manager, and a leader, I was like, who cares about performance? And there was like, generally, I think, a lot of that feeling in senior management, because we all remember what it's like being on the other side, or like, oh, that doesn't do anything. This is actually something I wonder is like, we think as leaders, no, but you can do performance, well, and performance really matters. But I would love to talk to ICs, and businesses that think they're doing performance well and find out whether or not they really are.

So let's move on to our conversation with Simon Wakeman. What are the four layers of your framework and why those particular four layers in this case,

we start with fundamental basics, the real things that you have to have to be able to build a company from so in there, we talk about things like values, a business's mission, all of those kinds of fundamentals, the next day is about making the business. So that's really about the strategy and the operating model for the business, then we go into building the organisation. So that's kind of taking it to another level of detail, the things you need to actually build an organisation out that can scale. And then the final layer, the bottom of the pyramid is operating the business. So all of the things you need to do on a day to day basis to have a coherent, functioning business that scales.

So the first question that came out, for me when I was reading, this is the operating model. So I'd love if you could explain to me what an operating model is. That is not the your entire framework.

Operating Model is one of those nebulous things that lots of people talk about. And no one really knows exactly what they mean. So my view on it is, it's the blueprint about how you fit together a set of activities that you're likely to be doing in your business to create value. So it's really think about, you've got a company that's got a mission or vision, you've developed a strategy said, here's the things we're going to do, here's the things we're not going to go and do, then the question goes, How are we going to do those things. And the blueprint is a high level summary of how you might do that. Sometimes it's confused with structure. But it's not just about structures, but how you chain together all of the things to create the value coming back in 10 years ago, you might have looked at a value chain or something like that, and consider that as a way of representing that don't think there's a single right or wrong way of showing operating model. But for me, it's Can you draw on a page, something that explains how this business creates value? And if you can, you've probably got an operating model to work with

isn't just a business model. So I'm just going to keep going here till I understand what an operating model is. Because I'm still none the wiser. Yeah,

so for me, the operating model really is about how are you going to turn strategy, a set of choices into a reality about something, you could call it a business model. But for me, the business model has a lot more financial components in it's the business model says, Can we do this profitably? The operating model is purely how are we going to turn this idea, the set of choices into something that functions as a business? So how are we going to source customers? How are we going to deliver? How might we partner with other people, and when you start out is a set of assumptions. But over time, you have to build and refine those assumptions, because they then inform how you structure they might inform how you market they might inform how you contract with partners. They inform lots of other things that follow on in the model. What are the high level things that you chained together to create value and you're in most businesses, ultimately, we have to find customers, we have to produce or deliver something to them of value, and we have to get them to pay us at a really, really high level. That's what's going on. So you could almost use that as the highest level in your operating model. But then obviously, you've got to get a bit more specific for the type of business you're creating. Some businesses spend more time in this Sonos. I mean, for example, service businesses. So the kinds of businesses I worked in for a good few years, the operating model really goes into a lot about how you might deliver the service. So ultimately, whether you're employing groups of consultants, whether you're subcontracting the work, whether you're partnering so all of those kinds of how questions are what I think you should set out in the operating model, because then it informs a load of the things that you do later on, like structure like governance decision making.

So do you have an operating model template as part of the framework.

So in the framework, I relink to a number of different templates, because I don't think there's a single one, part of my belief about the framework is there is no single way that you should do things in business, there's a set of things that you have to do to link together for it to be coherent. And that's why I created the framework. But ultimately, the way to represent your operating model will differ depending on the kind of business you're in. My steer for people that are in scaling businesses, is look for, can you create it on a page, because you can look for operating models, and you can find 100, page, PowerPoint decks and all of that kind of stuff? That, for me, is unnecessarily fair for thinking that the level of necessarily levels of depth, what you're really looking for is something that describes overall, how is this business creating value on a page? Do

you have a case study or like, actual example, a real life example to help us move from the abstract to the tangible on this one?

Let's talk about service business. So the digital agency I ran, we had lots of choices about how we deliver technology. So we're listening about the value chain in in an agency easy basically piece together a team of people with a set of skills to answer a problem for a client and build something, but use that as the basic frame for an agency. To do that we had one of the challenges in a tech business was about resourcing the tech parts of building products for clients. We had choices and doing that we had choices about do we build in house teams, do we outsource to UK base to eat near shore the work? Do we run distributed? And this is back in sort of pre pandemic days. So there was a very deliberate choice about do we create a distributed team? Do we create a team centralised in southeast England where the company was based. So all of those choices were choices we looked at when we develop this operating model on the page. And they then informed what we then did in terms of recruitment strategy, in terms of structure in terms of looking at acquisition of a business to give us the opportunity to have greater bandwidth in that technology delivery, for example. So if we hadn't done that thinking, we wouldn't have been clear about the way we were going to deliver. What's the strategy then. So strategy is less about the how for me, and a strategy is much more early stage decisions about things you're not going to do as a business. So we are not going to be a service business, we're going to be product business, but a very basic example. It's the things that you choose to exclude having analysed the market external factors. So strategy for me is the what operating model is the hub. Now you could get lots of people will link them together and call them the same thing. But because strategy is another nebulous term that everyone defines differently, I chose to pull them apart in the middle, because I wanted to say that they are different things. Ultimately,

if we move on to layer three, building the organisation, there was one phrase that kind of caught my eye a little bit, which is minimum viable governance. And a bit of a similar question, I think, which is, what does that mean, in practice? Part of the definition here was a minimum set of rules, policies and risk management processes needed to ensure that the company functions coherently. So can you give us a bit of a sense on what this is? And maybe the second question is just an example of it that you've actually implemented in practice to make it come alive?

Minimum Viable governance really starts with a base layer of what do we have to do to govern this organisation legally? What are the duties of a director? The minimum viable bit really is about what are the convening forums do, you end up with a leadership team meeting, you'll end up with very decision making distributed across the organisation, then you need to work on communication, but what's the minimum set of things you can do to make sure that as a founder or an exec team member, you've got confidence that the business is moving coherently in the right direction. So typically, it's how you share information, you've got the mix of synchronous and asynchronous forums. It's one of the cadences that you put into an organisation so that people either a reporting, sharing, challenging holding to account, there's different ways you can do it, depending on type of organisation you're trying to create. But what minimum viable governance says is, do the minimum that you need to because if you start just to take it the other way, and you don't go minimum viable, then governance becomes this sort of creeping tentacle into the organisation that starts to stifle what it needs, the agility, the dynamism, it needs to actually be able to scale. So getting that balance, right, for me is the really important thing, and getting the right balance for the right stage of growth as well. That changes pretty quickly, particularly in those early days of scaling.

I've seen businesses put in too much process, I'm just using process rather than governance too soon, because they feel like they need to be a grown up company. And it just stifles innovation. It slows everybody down. So I don't know if you've read the Netflix book, but that's basically what Reed Hoffman talks about in the beginning is for his business he built, he put in way too much process because every time there was a problem, they went back and solved it. And he did not want that the second time round. And so the Netflix is kind of the opposite. In theory, there are no rules, its books called no rules, rules, but there are loads of rules, but they're just slightly different. And there's more of an emphasis on people using their brains and making good decisions, then having process control it. So I think we're, I'm a big fan of the book, I think we're all on the same page when it comes to governance. And I would say it's governance and process rather than just governance alone.

I think as, as people who've worked for many years we've worked for we're conditioned to think about organisations where power is centralised at the top and decisions rise up. And that is fundamentally wrong, in my view. And so everything we need to be doing is about actually how do we push autonomy decision making rights responsibility out into organisations, but you need some appropriate safeguards, boundaries, whatever you want to call them, to allow that to happen. And make sure that it's matched with competency to deal with those that autonomy. So fundamentally, that's what you should be doing with governance, the government should be providing some of the safety robes for that, but giving people the opportunity to really be autonomous in their roles. Now,

it's interesting, just the word governance makes me think of two things in scaleups, pretty specifically, actually, one is purely ISO, sock to compliance and the ticking of many, many boxes to achieve that and maintain that. So like a risk register as an example, whereby leadership has to be exposed to that risk, register on some cadence or basis, and so on, you know, literally going into that meeting, most leaders turn off their brains, and the person presents for five minutes, they leave, and we've ticked a box, essentially, and not that that's necessarily the right thing to do. But that's the reality, what ends up happening in these companies,

not in my companies, I'm there with my brain switched on, I'll just have you say it's not every one brand. And I think you're

exactly, but I guess to the primary point of like, you're creating value in a business and managing risk as part of that process. But where you're trying to do is do as little as humanly possible, ie minimum viable to allow you to create value and to innovate and do the fun stuff, essentially, the other thing that occurs to me, as we're, as we're speaking is, whatever you want to call it, crisis communications, when the server goes down for the if you're a SaaS company in particular, the server goes down, the software goes offline, there's some problem happening, your ability to deal with that crisis very fast, very effectively, that requires very healthy governance to ensure that that reaction on the part of the company takes place. Preparedness

is a really good example. So I think it goes back to that minimum viable bid. And the risk register really is a tool to say actually, how much effort should we put into all of these risks, because some of them, they could be big risks, or they could be very low likelihood, but is significant. But your options for mitigation are pretty limited. So actually, maybe you don't put a lot of time into them, but some of them, maybe you do so. And the risk register, for me is a leadership tool.

So I think that what's important is not to have it be an exec level discussion tool, because most of the execs just don't care. And so what you need to do is find the ones who do plus the other people in the business who do who get excited about like preparing for the unknown and writing out things that may or may not ever be used. And then just briefing the rest of the executive this happens. So I've been in exec meetings where it's the whole risk register, and CEOs who just couldn't care less. And so they do a couple, then they start, they get distracted, like Bugs Bunny might be talked about for a bit, and then that's a risk register done, versus a subset of me because my brain works that way. And I'm clearly a catastrophize there. And the CIO, CTO, you know, there's other kinds of structured thinkers, maybe a lawyer. And we can spend half a day on a risk register and do a lot of critical thinking in the future. And then just let everybody else know, who doesn't care at all that we have it in hand. And so I would suggest businesses, choosing the right people to be engaged, and then informing the ones who just don't care at all about what they need to know about, rather than trying to get them involved.

My experience is, is that it's the CFO role, or the ops director role that is the convener in that because they are the people who think through all of the different options or different things that could happen. So yeah, in my experience, he or she is the person that takes that away, and convenes, that group does their hard work, basically, that's a

real important point to make, because ultimately, these businesses, the logical thinkers around structure and process in particular, when it comes to things like security, this is the CTO, the CIO, really on the engineering side of things. And they can be tremendous partners to carry a big portion of that load as the operator of the business because ultimately, the buck stops with the CFO in terms of the risk of the organisation and making sure that you're mitigating risks appropriately. But those partners that you have on the engineering side can be a tremendous relationship to make it happen. Going

back to the framework. So I mean, is any of this in the framework or if we just gone on a complete tangent on like other boring things, so we talk about a CLS standards

are definitely in the framework. Because really what I'm trying to do with the framework and standards is say to people, you've got to want a level of awareness of your mandatory standards, your legal standards, because for some startups in the early stages, they just don't have the understanding, but particularly how can you use standards as a tool to build organisations that are coherent and stable, but it is standards are just another tool you can put in place. But again, it's doing them for the right reason not doing them, because everyone else does them, or because we did them somewhere else. So

then maybe the flip side of the client in operating the business is the systems box, can you maybe just unpack this a little bit in terms of the CEO responsibility for the systems box,

this one does relate very strongly to ownership of technology in the business. I'm talking here about technology that underpins the business rather than any technology the business may develop for its product. But thinking about where systems ownership sits, who owns things like systems architecture, which is you end up with greater technology focus roles, then, clearly, there's a role there. But businesses that come out and into the scaling phase, the early scaling phase, and haven't done that thinking often in quite a messy systems architecture, particularly if you've got uncontrolled adoption of SAS, you've got people things running on people's credit cards all over the place, which at one stage is absolutely what you want, because you want people trialling and doing things but at some point, the cash burn and that becomes ridiculous. If you start scaling it, you end up with inconsistent data. And data is one of the real problems with that architecture. And you've got to start taking view about what's the right system or systems architecture portfolio of systems that we need, how do we integrate, as we scale, the bit that I've seen the most challenging that actually is about data and holding data consistency of data. And particularly as we think to the roles of AI and augmenting businesses to be more efficient and more effective and taking opportunities, if we don't have underlying data that is high quality, that's been thought about, but we understand how data flows between systems, then we have a real problem. So that for me is the hidden grumbling of the systems box is what systems do and how we're going to integrate them. And what's the data model that underpins this business? So this

is a topic that we've covered a bit in the beginning on, who owns ops, rev ops, Biz Ops, people, ops, etc, should it sit? Is it federated? Or is it centralised? And we've definitely had people argue for both. I'm interested in your take Simon?

The short answer, of course, is it depends. My instinct is for it to be more devolved, because I think that fits with my principles about greater autonomy for people. But I think you need that kind of governing framework that whether you want to call it an operating What do you need something that allows people to understand the overall shape of the organisation how it's going to create value, and then they can understand how to exercise autonomy in a more federated model within that. So I would push stuff out, but I think you do need someone looking over those things that are being done in different parts of the business, to say, is this going in a coherent direction? Because as you start scaling, any of those little fractures that are there, when you're relatively small, become pretty big fractures pretty quickly, and then they become much harder to deal with. So I would probably bias towards a more decentralised approach.

Where do you think bi set so if you're sitting there with Looker and snowflake and a bunch of data that's coming from all sorts of systems within your company? Who owns that? Do you think I

would probably put greater ownership with the tech leadership in terms of providing but I think the CFO probably has a responsibility around defining the user needs, essentially, or bringing together the user needs, what data do we need to see to run this business, because if you provided the capability to pull lots of data, lots of dashboards, lots of intelligence out who's actually going to use it, and where and I think that's where the interface of technology in the business comes in. And we talk about the framework for people to take decisions, they have to have quality information. And you might have the infrastructure to provide quality information, but it's not been used in the right forums by the right people to take the right decisions. That's when you end up with challenges.

I'd also argue that possibly sits with finance depending on how mature your finance team is, whether or not finance is responsible for all the reporting within the business. And then it depends on the finances rolling up to ops. But at least in my experience, a good finance professional is the best at displaying data and explaining why it matters. Otherwise, everybody's just looking at numbers and coming to their own conclusions, or not understanding numbers in the first place. And also just wanted to say for our listeners, when Simon You were talking about the proliferation of SAS tools, we have an episode it's episode 11 of that specific basically covers why licencing 170, SAS tools is a good idea or not. Another thing that caught my eye in the framework was, I can't remember if you called it cadences or not. But basically, and for me, I always think of that as part of the operating model. But I guess it's maybe the operating rhythm. If we go full circle to the start of this, any hints around, what meetings to set up, I was in a golf event last night, one of people speaking with us, like, I hate recurring meetings more than anything, and I try and get them all out of my diary as quickly as possible. And yet, these are basically the recurring meetings of your business. I'd love to hear some best practice around there.

So why have a cadence in an organisation is the drumbeat that the organisation is the the phrase I use a lot? It's about what can you do so that everyone is working on the same drum, but you've got a marching band, and everyone is in step, rather than everyone's in slightly different step in slightly different directions. And so that's what we're trying to do. It does sometimes take the form of recurring meetings and the frequency of those meetings. And the purpose of those meetings needs to be thought about very deliberately. There's something about particularly distributed businesses, the function of cadence in binding people together so that they feel more part of something as a single mission single organisation. But it doesn't have to be meetings necessarily. There can be other convening forum, you mean asynchronous check ins, and that kind of thing can be useful to an extent in fulfilling some of those points of alignment. But I think it's been very deliberate. Why are we having this standup? Why do we have a daily standup? Why do we have a company kick off the week meeting at whatever time on a Monday morning? What's the purpose of those meetings? And then regularly reviewing them saying, are they still meeting those purposes, because I've got one business I worked with where they weren't meeting every Monday morning at nine o'clock for half an hour, to a really deep dive into what the week ahead look like, what the priorities were, what the pitfalls might be, when they were triple the size, that was really inefficient way of achieving that goal. And so they had to look again, but they recognise that that kind of starting the week thing is something that was actually embedded very strongly in the company's culture. But the way they were doing it wasn't something they want. That wasn't something that was right to continue in that form. So I think lesson is about being very deliberate in you must have a drumbeat. But the drumbeat needs to change over time. And think very carefully about use of time use of tools to do that. I

think that's an important part of point is, quite often we build something, we click off the list off the to do list, it's fine. And then you forget that you actually like just because this was the appropriate drumbeat a year ago or even a quarter ago, doesn't mean that it's appropriate now that you're 30% 100% bigger than you were previously. And how do you need to adjust things? Simon, we're rapidly running out of time. And before we go, we've covered so much today, if our listeners could only take one thing away from our conversation, what would that one thing be?

I think the one thing I would say is think about the business you're building as a system of interconnected parts, understand the linkages between all those parts, and be very deliberate about the choices you make in those parts. And that's what I was trying to do the framework is so there are lots of parts, they're all linked together, you can create those parts to be exactly what you need for your business, understand how they linked together and understand how changing one of them affects something else in your business. And the coherence, your business depends on getting balance of all those elements, right? So your business is a system and 10 for it, care for it and keep iterating it as it grows. Love

it. So on that note Simon, thank you for joining us on the operations room. If you liked what you hear, please leave us a comment or subscribe and we'll see you next week.