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ON · #005
A newsletter for everyone who shares our passion for the wonderful but wily world of startup and scaleup operations.
❦ Your ON team --
Astrid, Aušrinė and Charlene
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When we created Operations Nation a year ago, we spent a lot of time dreaming about how we would accomplish our mission to help operations professionals not only survive but thrive, at every stage of their career.
We came up with four strategic pillars to provide structure around how we will do that, and you will start to see more of that structure in our new website and in the content we share.
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● Discover ●
You'll discover content like articles and podcasts that will expose you to the wide range and complexity of operations in different industries and across the evolving life stages of a startup.
Half the battle is understanding what operations is and how it is actually embedded in every single function, whether it is called "ops" or not.
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● Grow ●
You will find tools, frameworks and resources that will allow you to dive deeper into ops-specific topics which you can apply in your job and grow professionally as an operations manager or leader.
You can pick and choose what's relevant to you.
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● Connect ●
Using the first-ever landscape of operations communities across the globe, you will be able to connect to peers and mentors who can help you flourish in your current operations role.
We will also maintain a job board of Operations roles to help you land your next gig.
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● Celebrate ●
We will celebrate you and the hundreds and thousands of operations professionals who work so hard to run startups and scaleups, often with a lot more guts and a lot less glory.
We hope that this will inspire both early-career as well as seasoned ops professionals to keep fighting the good fight!
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● DISCOVER ● Featured Type of Ops:
RevOps
Charlene: My B2B SaaS company has recently been working on our 18-month hiring plan, and I find org design one of the most fascinating, but complex topics. One of our recent discussions centered around adding a Revenue Operations function to our org, and I found this blog post particularly helpful in explaining what RevOps is, why it's an important function, and what it can do to drive revenue growth:
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What is Revenue Operations?
Revenue Operations (RevOps) is the end-to-end business process of driving predictable revenue, across marketing, sales, renewals, and expansion through transparency and execution rigour. The role of Revenue Operations is to:
- Deliver visibility across the entire revenue team
- Improve efficiency across the revenue process
- Drive revenue predictability
- Achieve revenue growth
In simpler terms, RevOps is a synthesis of three functions that have existed for a long time:
RevOps = Marketing Ops + Sales Ops + Customer Success Ops
The primary goal for revenue operations is to drive predictable revenue by creating a healthy marketing funnel, an efficient sales pipeline, and minimised churn of existing clients.
Here are some of the key metrics measured by RevOps:
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Charlene: I still have a question around the home of Revenue Operations - often you will see Ops decentralised into its respective functions, but I've also seen arguments to centralise these functions under a VP of RevenueOps. What do you think?
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● GROW ● Featured Tool:
Salary and Options Calculator
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Aušrinė: In this age of Google, salary benchmarking has become increasingly transparent, but there is still so much fine-tuning that needs to happen to adjust for level of role, stage of startup, and location.
On-demand workspace company Desana has created a salary and options calculator that is incredibly helpful for both employers hiring staff globally as well as for job-seekers trying to benchmark and negotiate their job offers.
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● CONNECT ● Featured Ops Community:
AdaptivOps
Astrid: We will soon uncover the world's first ever landscape of Operations communities around the world, and we are starting to feature them one by one. This newsletter, our spotlight is on AdaptivOps.
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"AdaptivOps is a cross-functional community built for operations people.
Here, we believe that ops teams are unsung heroes who have the power to create monumental change within their organizations.
Our mission is to empower those individuals to make an impact, while providing a space for them to geek out on all things Ops with like minded individuals - through the sharing of knowledge, best practices, resources, and tools - all relating to operations."
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We love AdaptivOps because you can engage multiple ways, either via Slack or on the online community forum. Plus, they have a treasure trove of webinars converted into on-demand events, such as What Is Operational Debt? And How to Manage It, The Benefits of Operating Cross-Functionally, Legal Ops 101: A Crash Course in Legal Language for Operations and more.
A special shoutout to AdaptivOps' awesome Community Manager Briana Okyere!
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● CELEBRATE ● Featured Operations Leader:
Thish Nadesan, COO of Cleo AI
Charlene: There are hundreds of thousands of ops heroes around the globe, and we will be starting to feature our own spotlights. But until then, we'd love to keep showcasing JBM's COO Secrets series.
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Episode #1 features Thish Nadesan, COO of Cleo AI. Prior to becoming a COO, Thish spent 4.5 years as a Strategy Consultant at Bain & Company, where she specialised in Financial Services and Private Equity.
Here are a few highlights from the video:
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What are the main skills you’d say a good COO needs?
"There are two things I’ve learned are really vital to being a COO. The first is recognising what the most important things to do are and what detail you do them to... And that’s not just you being super smart and having all the context, but you asking great questions, talking to the team, finding out about the industry, having some humility in it… And then it is ruthlessly prioritising so those things happen… it should hurt to not do the things you’re not prioritising. If you don’t really care or remember the other things you haven’t done, they weren’t that important to begin with."
What advice do you have for aspiring COOs?
"Every COO job is really different. And it’s about finding a company, a problem, a team, which is a great fit for you or your skills and the impact you want to have. Once you’re in the company, being really passionate and caring a lot about the problem you’re solving, the team you’re building, the impact you’re having, is critical, because it is a hard old job and emotional rollercoaster."
-- Thish Nadesan, COO at Cleo AI
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Your Ops Voice
Astrid: In case you missed our LinkedIn post, Operations Nation is now on Clubhouse. We'd love for you to join our club by clicking here.
We're planning to host a mix of events ranging from guest speakers and panels to more informal coffee chats, but first we'd love to hear from you!
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Stay tuned as we keep exploring the operations landscape.
If you liked our newsletter, please spread the word and share it with everyone who you think will find it interesting!
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If you're not yet a subscriber, you can sign up to our monthly newsletter and updates here.
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See you next month! 
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