The Handbook: The Operations Podcast
Running a serviced based business, an agency or consultancy isn’t just about great client work. It’s about keeping everything behind the scenes running smoothly.
That’s where The Handbook comes in. Our goal? To help you take your business to the next level of business maturity.
This podcast is for operations and service-business leaders who are juggling it all – people, processes, finance, tech, and everything in between.
Every other week, we dive deep into a specific challenge that businesses face as they grow in headcount and complexity. You'll get practical insights and real-world advice from experts who’ve been there, solved the problems, and know what works.
If you’re looking for smarter ways to scale, streamline, and strengthen your business, you’re in the right place. Welcome to The Handbook community, your go-to guide for better business operations.
And don’t forget to sign up for The Handbook newsletter – we’ll send you the key takeaways from each episode straight to your inbox: scoro.com/podcast/#handbook
The Handbook: The Operations Podcast is brought to you by Scoro.
The Handbook: The Operations Podcast
Ops Quickie: Fixing the Sales-to-Delivery 'Black Hole'
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Ops Quickies – snackable episodes on tech, tools, and systems. 🍿
"Ballpark" is a dangerous word.
Especially when Sales sells the dream, and Delivery is left living the nightmare.
In this Quickie, Harv shares a real story from a consulting session with a 100+ person agency. They had the headcount and the revenue, but behind the scenes? It was pure chaos.
We're talking manual spreadsheet reconciliation, "remembering" to log expenses, and invoicing based on memory rather than milestones.
Harv breaks down why this "Chaotic Era" caps your growth and why moving to a PSA is the way to align what you sell with what you actually deliver.
Stop running your business on memory. Start running it on data.
Hey guys, I'm Harv Nagra, and this is another Ops Quickie. Today I wanted to share a story from a recent consulting engagement that I think will resonate with a lot of you. I was sitting down with the MD of an agency. They had multiple entities and over a hundred people on the team, and we were digging into the biggest risks and frustrations he saw in his business. He told me their biggest challenge was that sales were going out and proposing ballpark budgets to clients. Any of you who have worked in delivery will cringe at the word ballpark. These budgets weren't being sense checked by the delivery team, and the clients would sign off on these numbers without an opportunity to do proper scoping. The delivery team was left on the hook to deliver on promises and scope that simply did not align with reality. The MD was flagging this as their biggest challenge, but it got worse. When I looked at how they were trying to manage the work, it was a complete mess. The project managers would set up their budget in a Google Sheet. Of course, then they were planning the project and logging their time in another tool. Then the project manager had to manually download the time sheets once in a while to try to reconcile them against the original ballpark budget. And purchases and expenses? The PMs just had to remember to log them to the spreadsheet. All right, well, you think that's bad. It gets worse still. They were literally relying on memory to know when to invoice based on checking stages in their CRM. That is not how you track your payments and your invoices. My advice to them was pretty clear. I told them that there were seriously late to the game in bringing in a PSA platform. So the scenario above, it's the definition of'the chaotic era' in terms of business maturity. And the story just goes to show that it doesn't matter how long you've been in the business or what your revenue or headcount is, you can get stuck there. This is simply just not how a mature business that wants to grow and be profitable should be operating, right. And this is exactly why a PSA platform is critical. It stops that ballpark nonsense, first of all, and doesn't let you stick your head in the sand on how you're doing on budget. In a PSA, like Scoro, your sales team builds the quote using the templates that are actually based on delivery reality. And with the margins that have been defined. When the client signs, that quote gets turned into a project budget. And you aren't downloading time sheets to reconcile them, the time gets tracked directly against the project budget in real time in the same system. And you definitely aren't trying to just remember what to invoice. The system tells you exactly what is left to bill. So if you're still running your business on memory, manual spreadsheets and an array of tools, you are capping your own growth. If this story sounds a little too familiar, drop me a message on LinkedIn. I'd love to hear your challenges in tackling the sales to delivery handoff, and I'm happy to share advice on how a PSA could sort out some of your challenges. And with that, I'm Harv Nagra. Thanks for listening to this Ops Quickie.
