Are you curious which business model within the Director of Operations certification program will fit in with your lifestyle (or the lifestyle you are striving for)?
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Today we have a gang of ladies here to help answer your questions about the Director of Operations (DOO) certification program. I know many of you are wondering what exactly a DOO does and what it looks like after students complete the certification. Today we are having real conversations with four women who have gone through the program who are in our next level program, Inner Circle. They will share with you what their life looks like after going through the certification program, because each have different offers and have gone down different paths.
Check it out… we are currently accepting applications for Round 20 of the DOO certification program!
Meet Our Students
Jenna Zantua
Jenna is a Certified Director of Operations and a Certified Online Business Manager. Jenna’s love for all things technology led her to run her own tech implementation agency. Aside from being a part-time COO, the kitchen is where Jenna’s heart truly lies. With over a decade of experience in the food industry, she is also a co-founder and owner of three thriving restaurant brands. Jenna’s professional reach extends beyond operations and gastronomy. She is also the Chief Marketing Officer and founder of Streamline Mavens, a new Virtual Assistant agency dedicated to providing exceptional implementation and management services. When not managing operations or stirring up a storm in the kitchen, Jenna loves to travel and explore the world. Her global excursions, however, always lead her back home to the Philippines, where she gets to experience good food and the company of her loved ones. Currently, she resides in Panama City, Panama, where she enjoys life with her supportive husband and adorable 7-year-old daughter. Whether she’s orchestrating multiple projects, launching and marketing new businesses, or exploring a new city, Jenna is committed to shaping her life on her own terms, embracing each new endeavor with unwavering passion and vivacity.
Jane de Vos
Jane de Vos is a UK-based Operations Consultant and the right hand secret weapon for busy female CEOs. As a Certified DOO, OBM, and Business Strategist with over 20 years of experience, Jane’s expertise and obsession is helping visionary leaders with all the things operations, project management, and backend organisation, to keep her clients in their zone of genius and their companies operating with optimal efficiency. As a mum of 3, Jane is a ninja-level planner and master organizer, who takes the stress of team and task management off her clients’ hands. To learn more about her work and join the waitlist for Jane’s services, visit her website www.janedevos.com or reach out via Instagram @jane_devos.
Danielle Fisher
As Business Growth Strategist and Certified Director of Operations, Danielle helps women entrepreneurs simplify, streamline, and systematize their business operations so they can stay in their Zone of Genius and focus on growing their impact and income. She believes that when we are fulfilled and energized by our business, it has a ripple effect on all other areas of our lives, resulting not only in our own happiness, but the happiness of our clients, our teams, our families, our communities, and ultimately, the world. When she isn’t helping business owners through business operations strategy and consulting, you can find Danielle spending time with her husband and two daughters, or researching her next DIY project.
Ariana Hurdle-Alvarez
I’m Ariana, a Certified Director of Operations who helps high-achieving female entrepreneurs break growth plateaus by optimizing their businesses for their next big milestone. After posting my very first TikTok, I had the internet tell me I was on the wrong career path. Whoops! While I’ve been and done lots of things, I’ve been organizing business, building systems, and streamlining processes in every business I’ve ever touched. Since that post, I channeled that skills and energy into becoming a Certified Director of Ops and Strategist, specializing in operations and financials. With 10 years of experience optimizing six-figure companies, I’ve created massive impact on net profit and given financial clarity to over 30 companies. Sprinkling in the magic of workflows and systems that streamlined time and efficiency has also led to scaling and growth across the board. Creating clarity in day-to-day operations that helps leaders and team members find balance in their work has been a special kind of reward. Which is why I created Ariana Tenine, Leadership + Strategy. I want high-achieving female entrepreneurs, to know that they can build a life they want, without losing time for themselves or their family.
Different Pathways
It is very common for all of our students to offer different services.
At the end of our program we start talking about how you can integrate this, and it breaks into a couple of different business models:
- Retainer: working with someone in a one-to-one capacity, and you may have multiple clients at once
- Project Based Model: for people who like shorter containers, or who want to do consulting
- Agency: one person is the CEO of the company and leverages a team to execute on a deliverable
“Everybody learns all five disciplines, and then we get deep into helping you customize how you are going to use this knowledge and build a career that satisfies you…” – Natalie Gingrich
Describe how your Agency Offer is set up [Jenna]
- She specializes in tech implementation because she is very tech-oriented and it comes naturally to her
- Working in an agency as an OBM and a DOO, it felt like a natural progression to focus on a tech implementation offer
- She felt very comfortable with tech
- She was good at building teams
- She became known as the person to go to with a tech issue
- Recently she co-founded a new tech agency and ventured into a more full scale implementation model that supports online entrepreneurs with a credit system
- Clients buy credits and they use those credits to do implementation in their business
- They get access to a full range of virtual professionals
Describe Your offer [Jane]
- She offers mostly project based work and VIP Days
- She works with CEOs
- She looks at the company strategy and what needs to happen to make a change
- She uses the Strategic Mapping Model ™ as a foundation and creates the projects based on that model
- She works on a three, six, or twelve month basis depending on the need
- She contracts out what is needed, whether it is HR, Tech, etc.
- She does the VIP days both in person and virtually, and spends the whole day on their business
- Spends the morning doing Strategic Mapping, and the afternoon mapping out specific issues
- She is now offering Voxer support as a follow up
How Do You Leverage the Retainer and Consulting Model? [Danielle]
- She is unique in the fact that coming into the program she knew she did not want to be a hands on DOO, she didn’t want to be in the business, but wanted to gain more knowledge and understanding of business operations so she could use it for consulting
- She had served as an OBM in a business and did too many things for too many people and was feeling burned out
- Her signature offer is consulting
- She works with people on a 6 month package
- She starts out the consulting offer with the Strategic Mapping Model™
- She offers the Strategic Mapping Model™ as a stand alone service as well
- She does have one fractional DOO client who is a dream client, but she only wants to be in one business in this capacity
How Do You Leverage the Project Model? [Ariana]
- She has a strong background in operations and finance and she was unsure in how to create her offer
- She wanted a project based approach to be able to engage with people but not be committed for the long term
- Her service offerings have grown and she is working on a 3 step flow of plan-optimize-analyze
- She is working on building a project based system with clients, which targets very specific areas of your business in a six month time frame
- She always does a Strategic Mapping™ Day
- Offers minimal project support in the operations and finance area
What is working for you in your business right now?
- [Jenna] Having a solid team of people that she has trained and spent hours with, and for them to be able to have a level of excellence and service, and knowing and having a solid onboarding process that addresses how they are going to fulfill every client request
- She has been able to work as a DOO in someone else’s business, and this has been an intentional decision to only work in one additional business because it fits in with her lifestyle
“Having the knowledge of hiring, managing your team, and the ability to do project management has been very important when I was building [my business].” – Jenna Zantua
- [Jane] Before going on maternity leave, she did the Strategic Mapping Model ™ and got people on board so there was a seamless carryover of work while she took time off to be with her family. She was able to bring in consistent work and has bookings throughout the fall and into next year
- [Danielle] She loves what she is doing and the program has helped her see that she is where she is meant to be
- She loves the people that she gets to work with and is very clear on who her ideal client is
- She has a lot more control and flexibility with her schedule
- She loves the consulting model because it helps her keep her boundaries
“Why I love the consulting model so much is that it helps me keep my boundaries because there is very little that I have to do in a clients business outside of our meetings.” – Danielle Fisher
“I used to see a lot of the qualities I had as weaknesses… being surrounded by a community of people whose brains work like mine has been one of the biggest takeaways of the program and I realize this is why I thrive in this type of position and that it is in alignment with who I am and my skills and strengths.” – Danielle Fisher
- [Ariana] She took the program a year ago, and in that time she has switched to full time DOO work, attributed to 3 things:
- Knowing her strengths
- Knowing her clients
- Knowing herself
- Her best skills are financials and looking at metrics to help businesses back up their decisions
- She really likes that chaos of working with visionaries, who often hate systems, so she is able to market to potential clients on Tik Tok and other platforms to attract those who match her energy and abilities
- Knowing herself; she is not a quick start, and she likes to engage long enough to understand the people she is working with so that she can build out their projects with confidence
“One of the things that I walked away with is that I know what my best skills are, so I can leverage those skills to create services that can support hiring without taking on the responsibility of hiring.” – Ariana Hurdle-Alvarez
How are you all finding clients?
- [Jenna] A lot of the clients come from the relationships she has built over the years
- Someone on her team focuses on lead generation
- If you don’t have anyone to do this, leverage your network
- She doesn’t enjoy marketing herself, so she leverages her network, word of mouth and relationship marketing where you ask how you can help
- [Jane] Building a strong network of other DOOs
- Become much more consistent of social media
- She has a team that helps her
- She actually enjoys being on Instagram and LinkedIn
- [Danielle] It has all come down to relationships; either people in her warm network, referrals from past clients, and people who she has met online and gotten to know
- It is the work that she has done prior, focusing on the relationship and truly caring about people
- She has been working on getting more visible by consistently creating content
- She tries to build that relationship after that initial connection
- [Ariana] She secures a lot of her clients through Tik Tok
- She actually discovered she was an operations manager through Tik Tok
- She was leveraged that energy and transparency that led to getting leads for services before she even did the program
- Since the program she has refined what she has been doing and offering, she has been able to leverage the engagement that exists on Tik Tok
- Her biggest client came from being tagged on Tik Tok
- She has found other people she vibes with and created referral programs with them, so leads have been reciprocal
“I am in a lot of areas [of a company] and I don’t do all the things, so that means I can leverage my network to step in and do a project for a client.” – Ariana Hurdle-Alvarez
How are you using your DOO skills today to generate your livelihood?
- [Jenna] Because of the DOO program she has gained so much confidence despite already being an OBM, but her confidence has increased in working with one retainer client and she has leveraged whatever she has learned in the program and brought it with her into her clients business. She also leverages the tools and resources in the program into the agency and makes sure they are high functioning as a business. She is able to take good care of her clients because of these resources and set appropriate boundaries.
Contact Jenna
Website
- [Jane] She refers to all the amazing resources from the certification while working with clients
- She has used the Strategic Mapping Model and integrated it with her project management tool (Click Up)
- She has been able to put boundaries in place, and clients respect her more in return
Contact Jane
Instagram
LinkedIn
- [Danielle] The program has made her feel confident in using her innate skills to make a living the way she wants to make it
- She realized that in the past, people saw her as a leader even when she didn’t see herself that way
- It helped deepen her knowledge of operations, and she uses strategic objectives and the content from the program as her framework for how she works with her clients
- She believes that she can help people in their business, and that her services are needed
Contact Danielle
Facebook
- [Ariana] When she came to the program she thought she was going to build someone else’s business legacy but she went from an ops manager to a CEO in a year
- She has been able to build a program all by herself and replace her income and is almost to the point where she can hires someone else
- She is now thinking about how she can help other people have more
- She has helped her husband grow in his career with her skills, and the program has allowed her to be in her zone of genius
Contact Ariana
Tik Tok
LinkedIn
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