6A East Partners

Knowing How to achieve your company’s Why is essential. And fascinating. And infinitely creative in all the ways you can determine How within the operational structure of your business. Talk is cheap, so ours is free. We’d love to learn about your idea, your company, your Why. Team 6AEP #smallbusiness #operations #familybusiness #strategy #whatinspiresme

"The consumer isn't a moron; she's your wife. You insult her intelligence if you assume a mere slogan and a few adjectives will persuade her to buy anything." David Ogilvy Your company's brand is what it does and how its actions embody the values you say you stand for. These are five iconic brands with five storied examples of how they have leveraged their operational prowess to grow brand equity. 1. The American Express Customer Care Professional training program has increased customer retention by 400%. 2. New York’s Waldorf Astoria used their extraordinary Ops team to introduce the world to Room Service in 1931. Hotel stays have never been the same. 3. Nike built a “digital first” supply chain that deploys more than 1,000 collaborative robots and makes extensive use of AI & machine learning to predict demand and optimize inventory levels. 4. In the early 2000s, Amazon built the operational infrastructure for their e-commerce business that would become Amazon Web Services. AWS launched commercially in 2006, and closed 2023 doing $90.76 billion in revenues. 5. "For cars it's maybe 100 times harder to design the manufacturing system than the car itself. Compared to the insane pain of reaching high-volume, positive-margin production, prototypes are a piece of cake." Elon Musk on Tesla The capacity these companies have to deliver for their customers and in some instances, create entirely new product categories, is what makes their brands mean something. Brand is what you do. Brand should be authentic. Operations should be every Founder's partner in building their great brand. John + Team 6AEP If you think your network would appreciate what I write, a repost ( ♻ ) would be amazing! Thank you! #operations #brand #founder #startup

We thought Salesforce CRM would make us extraordinary at tracking customer details and closing more sales. We thought the perfect Vision & Mission Statements would transform us from Good to Great. We thought a consulting team of McKinsey veterans and MIT engineers would make our data sing.  ___________________________________________________________ We were wrong. Here are three things that make our Ops Better: Building a more disciplined and organized Sales Team enabled us to keep track of customers and lead details and close more sales without ever paying a nickel for a CRM. Becoming maniacal about communications and performance management enabled us to call out employees at every layer of the organization whenever our actions were on point with the Vision and Mission. Tying our actions to our mission made the words mean something. Hiring less experienced but tenacious engineers to join our team enabled us to build a suite of forms and applications that provided character-defined fields and would only accept complete entries and automated data loading into our ERP. We solved our duplicate item and dirty data problems, not a consulting firm. Then, we built an analytic suite that was the envy of even our customers. ___________________________________________________________ What Ops needs is so often different than what Leadership conceives. Technology drives how Ops will transform cost structures, margin projections, and company capacity in the future. But technology needs thoughtful humans and disciplined, cohesive Teams to help it achieve the best of what it can do. The future of Ops is human and tech-centric. To build better companies, we need to build better teams. Better Ops is How. John & Team 6AEP #operations #founders #startup #future #entrepreneurship

The future of Ops is being taught to us by fintech startup Klarna. Currently prepping for an IPO, the company has released a series of stunning updates, illuminating an extraordinary set of operational and financial strides achieved with the tools they are building on the back of OpenAI’s GPT models. Their approach eludes to the opportunities for startups to scale revenue while simultaneously reducing costs by deploying native, AI-centric systems to manage their operations. Klarna’s new customer-facing AI assistant independently accommodates nearly 70% of their customer requests in only its first few months of rollout. "Our AI assistant now performs the work of 700 employees, reducing the average resolution time from eleven minutes to just two while maintaining the same customer satisfaction scores as human agents.” Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski Eleven minutes to two. Their repeat inquiries are down 25%. That’s critically insane (🤖💥🤯🌋). To be clear, it’s not 700 seats or instances of the application performing the work of 700; it’s a single application performing all the work. This has enabled the company to reduce customer service headcount by 50% and project their global workforce to drop from approximately 3,800 to 2000 employees in the time ahead. This forecast follows an initial reduction of 1,200 roles from 5,000 to 3,800. The assistant will drive $40 million in additional profit to the company's bottom line. Revenue per employee has grown by 73% over the past twelve months. Then, this week, the company announced it has replaced its Salesforce and Workday instances with internally developed AI tools. I don’t think the general market understands yet how seismic this shift will be. I’m sure I don’t fully comprehend what’s coming, either. But I do know the current systems so many companies rely upon were built for workflows that required human engagement, which will become irrelevant. It will be difficult for legacy providers to foundationally reshape their offerings without starting from scratch entirely. This creates a significant opportunity for startups. Looking to large, legacy enterprises for indicators of AI’s immediate value is also a mistake. Like the software companies, their entire structures are designed for workflows and decision-making that won’t make sense anymore. And it will take a long, long time to disassemble these bureaucracies accordingly. Therefore, if you want to know about the future of Ops as it relates to AI, you have to look at startups and companies that are small, trying to become big. If you want to understand what the future will be, look to the dreamers trying to build it anew. The future is coming. John + Team 6AEP Big thanks to Linas Beliūnas for all the amazing Klarna coverage. Follow him for incredible Fintech updates and an amazing newsletter! If you like our stuff a ♻️ would be great! #operations #future #futurism #innovation #AI

Don't found a company because you want a pet unicorn. Build something because you have a product you must build. Blackstone founder Steve Schwarzman said: "It takes the same energy to think small as it does to think big. But it’s hard to build something big.” To Schwarzman's point, we think the approach, effort, and discipline it takes to build any successful company that breaks out beyond its infancy and achieves some level of scale teaches similar lessons to what is required for the unicorn rocket ride. Here ten non-tech centric hacks for founders to build better companies, faster. And if you’re looking for a unicorn outcome just 10x or 100x your maniacal adherences to many of these principles: 1. You have the most upside. You get to offer work-life balance to your employees, but you don't get to have it for yourself. 2. Work more productively and work more hours than every one of your employees.   3. Work more productively and work more hours than every one of your competitors. 4. Build personal relationships with your customers. 5. Know their birthdays, children's birthdays, wedding anniversaries, favorite sports teams...know everything you can. 6. If you want an authentic brand, make your handshake mean something every time you use it. 7. If you want your customers to be obsessed with your products, then be obsessed with them, what they do, what they like, and how they live. 8. Always do what you say you will do when you say you will do it for your customers and your employees. 9. Commit to your priorities. Communicate clearly to your team what you need. Make sure they have the resources to do what you are asking. And then get super comfortable with confrontation when deadlines aren't hit. 10. It's even more fun to build your company with the right team than with the founding team you're nostalgic about. John + Team 6AEP If you like what you read, a repost (♻) would be much appreciated! Thank you! #hacks #emotionalintelligence #operations #founders #entrepreneurs

Has your company ever been growing like wild fire, but your Team is down in the dumps and stuck in the mud? My companies have. Here's an article on what we've learned from experience and gleaned from the best books and articles on the subject. Hope you enjoy. John + Team 6AEP If you like what we make, a repost would be great! Thank you!

I thought not knowing anything about Excel would create a steep learning curve for my new hires. I was mistaken. I work with a lot of young people just graduating college. Recently, I hired a team for various data management and analytical tasks. None of them had any Excel experience, had ever written an equation into a spreadsheet, navigated a pivot table, or recorded a Macro. But they all had ChatGPT, a bit of Python experience and an awareness Google Script editor. The story is short, just like how long it took them to do the work asked. They learned how to perform work that I had honed my Excel chops to do over twenty years in a matter of days. By the end of the first week, they had completed tasks I expected to take a month or two, and we were able to begin focusing on doing much more involved analysis and develop much more secured processes. Not only was the work they did done faster, it was more accurate and offered more direction for what came next than what I had envisioned. It was Better. This is the future. We will learn faster. We will be able to do more, faster. Excel and spreadsheets were as dead as the abacus when I started working. John + Team 6AEP If you like what you see a ♻️ would be amazing! Thank you and we hope you’re having an exceptional week.

Now would be a great time to start. What will you choose to build? John + Team 6AEP If you like what you see, (♻) a repost would be exceptional!

The future is coming. Billion-dollar companies are going to be built... With very few team members. What is the future of companies? What is the future of working? WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF OPS? That's our question. Follow along to see what we learn. John + Team 6AEP #operations #future #futursim #innovation #questions

Change is inevitable. And a monumental change is happening. How your company navigates will mean everything. How you try to see the impact in advance will determine everything. Ops is How. How 4 Why. History repeats. Thanks for helping us understand this, Andy. John + Team 6AEP #operations #future #futurism #technology #innovation #AI #computerscience