What does business operations entail?
I was wondering what this encompasses.
3 answers
Gary’s Answer
Hello,
That is a great question, business operations can be many things...management, accounting, human resources, training, finance, logistics and whatever actual product or service the business offers. good luck, hope this and the below help a little.
The below is pasted in from Wiki: (https :// en dot wikipedia dot org / wiki / Business_operations)
The outcome of business operations is the harvesting of value from assets owned by a business. Assets can be either physical or intangible. An example of value derived from a physical asset, like a building, is rent. An example of value derived from an intangible asset, like an idea, is a royalty. The effort involved in "harvesting" this value is what constitutes business operations cycles.
Business operations encompass three fundamental management imperatives that collectively aim to maximize value harvested from business assets (this has often been referred to as "sweating the assets"):
Generate recurring income
Increase the value of the business assets
Secure the income and value of the business
The three imperatives are interdependent. The following basic tenets illustrate this interdependency:
The more recurring income an asset generates, the more valuable it becomes. For example, the products that sell at the highest volumes and prices are usually considered to be the most valuable products in a business's product portfolio.
The more valuable a product becomes the more recurring income it generates. For example, a luxury car can be leased out at a higher rate than a normal car.
The intrinsic value and income-generating potential of an asset cannot be realized without a way to secure it. For example, petroleum deposits are worthless unless processes and equipment are developed and employed to extract, refine, and distribute it profitably.
Karyn’s Answer
That's is a pretty vague question, what type of business are you thinking?
Nick’s Answer
The actual work of a Business Operations department can vary pretty significantly from company to company. In general, however, I think you can divide the work into two broad categories:
1) Operational Duties / Performance Management: Answering questions like how did our business do last week? How do we think we'll do next week/month/year? Which metrics exceeded are expectations and which did worse than expected, and why? For these responsibilities, you're generally building and monitoring dashboards that track metrics (eg sales, signups, user activity, etc) and mounting investigations to figure out why things are trending a certain way.
2) Strategic Advisory: Answering questions like should we enter market X? What would be the impact to our business of adding a certain feature to our product, and how does that compare to other features we could work on? What kind of users are using our product for 1 month, 6 months, 1 year, and how can we move more users into the 1 year bucket? These are generally bigger projects that involve modeling out a business change and then summarizing results and recommendations to company leadership to help them make an informed decision.
Typical skills required at the entry level are SQL/other database languages, Excel, Powerpoint, competitive analysis, and financial modeling