People Drive Process: How to Begin Creating Operational Processes

This summer the JuntoIV Apprentices attended our class on Operations & Metrics. The half-day field trip to Nick’s Pizza & Pub and Nick’s University is always a highlight of the year. The cohort gets to actually see, touch, hear and smell (and over lunch, actually taste!) what a healthy, metrics-driven, systemized culture looks like.

The environment that JuntoInstructor, Nick Sarillo, and his team have designed is nothing short of magical to experience, and the way in which their precise processes support a people-centric culture is so exact, thorough and well-run.

Every Junto cohort to tour Nick’s has been both mesmerized by how the business is run and confounded by where to start with implementing this operational excellence into their businesses. Nick and his team stress that people drive process, so in order to run a process-driven organization, it starts with people.

Therefore, identifying where to start in creating and documenting operational processes depends on the current state of the operational team, and whether the team is presently stable and static, onboarding / in transition, or dynamic and hiring.

1. Static: Is there a stable team in place with key players who are familiar with the company’s operations?
2. In transition: Have key people been hired recently who are being trained and onboarded?
3. Dynamic: Is the business currently hiring for key roles, especially at a senior level?

I believe that a company’s natural entry point for designing operational process should be based on the current status of the team. As a result, this series of blog posts will outline how a company can begin creating processes and systems depending on where they are given the above three stages. I'll provide examples from the operation at Nick’s Pizza as a starting point, and include details on how Junto companies and The Junto Institute have applied what was learned at Nick's.

Part one, for companies with a static team, is here. Part two, for a company in operational transition, is covered here. And Part three of this series, for companies with a dynamic team, is here.