Ops Execution

Firefly Partners was navigating the transition of their Director of Operations within a tight timeline and needed support transferring invaluable knowledge while keeping their business running smoothly.

Upon the start of the engagement, WeConsult went straight to work absorbing the ins and outs of Firefly’s finances, human resources, general day-to-day business administration, as well as responsibilities needed to keep the services side of the business running. Since this employee held the position for several years, we prioritized an in-depth review of all business operation functions, with the goal to document the historical information. 

A key moment in the process was facilitating a smooth departure for the exiting employee, while maintaining as little impact on the team as possible.

Here’s a list of responsibilities maintained: 

• Managing renewals and communication to state tax, labor and unemployment departments due to being a distributed team

• Business insurance renewals

• Maintaining budgets + approving purchase requests

• Maintaining incoming revenue + future month revenue projections

• Offboarding and onboarding for team members

• Assisting with inbound hiring

• Overseeing the accounting assistant responsible for all financial functions within the organization

• Benefit administration, including annual renewals analysis

Firefly was able to rest easy that the departing Director of Operations had a smooth transition and most importantly, their team could continue focusing on delivering amazing work to their clients.

Process

Like so many other creative agencies, Firefly was focused on delivering high impact work for their clients and taking care of their distributed team. This left room for WeConsult to step in and help with process improvement.

Before hiring a full time Business Operations Manager, Firefly wanted to focus on beefing up their infrastructure around their business operations. Firefly had two key goals: to both organize existing historical information, as well as improve documentation around key business operating processes. 

WeConsult jumped in head first to help download, organize, and document all crucial information around the business’ finances, human resources, and business administration.

Our focus was on providing in-depth knowledge to significantly reduce key person risk, plus set up the future Business Operations Manager for success. Our team provided step-by-step process docs to cover everything from new team member onboarding to how to handle benefit administration.  

Having this in place resulted in the following: 

• Faster onboarding for roles involved in operations

• Central knowledge base for business operations information

• Tool to cross train the responsibilities and reduce company liability

• Increase market value by solidifying processes and procedures

Hiring and Training a Business Operations Manager

The final step in WeConsult’s engagement with Firefly was choosing the perfect candidate for the Business Operations Manager position. Beyond that, we wanted to make sure we were leaving the new team member with the skills needed to succeed in the role we had carved out for them.

We had laid the groundwork and had worked hard to document, streamline, and improve business operating processes. The final piece was now finding the perfect Business Operations Manager for the team. We were looking for someone who would be a great fit for this complex role, a wearer of many hats. But it was equally important that the right candidate was passionate about the non-profit industry as well.

We approached this process with direct intention, gathering the critical operations information needed to craft a job description. We aimed to help Firefly strike the correct balance of responsibilities when defining the role. 

WeConsult helped manage the entire hiring process, from posting to relevant job boards, screening all of the candidates, and performing interviews. After just one month from when the job posting went live, we had a stellar candidate. Because we valued visibility in the process, the entire team was ecstatic to extend an offer. The candidate accepted the role as Business Operations Manager! 

Through a partnering effort, the new hire went through 1:1 training with WeConsult as well as with existing Firefly team members, to prepare them for success in the role. We also left them with suggestions for high impact initiatives to tackle upon the end of our engagement. 

Melanie came to Firefly in a critical time during a few staff transitions and literally saved us. She was extremely efficient, thorough, and was always extremely pleasant and professional in a very stressful time. She dove into our messy systems and was able to pick up the pieces and hold things together until we found, hired, and trained a full time person to take over all the items she had been holding together. I don’t know what we would have done without her!.

Jennifer Frazier

President