A company needs to be strong in all of its three functions: Sales, Operations, and Finance.

Your job falls into one of three functions: Sales, Operations, or Finance. It doesn’t matter if your company is a startup or a multinational organization. Every role falls into one of these categories.

For example, Marketing falls under Sales. Design, PM, and Development support Operations. HR and IT fall under Finance.

A successful company is strong in all three functions, and must remain strong in all three. Because here’s what happens when any of the functions becomes weak:

• Weak Sales: There isn’t enough new business coming in. So you get a bunch of talented people sitting around waiting for work, or a product collecting dust on the shelf.

• Weak Operations: Sales brings in a lot of new business, but it’s quickly lost because your product or service sucks. And your reputation suffers.

• Weak Finance: You have a strong sales pipeline and you deliver a stellar product, but you make no money because your people and resources are mismanaged. Culture also suffers resulting in increased attrition.

If any of the functions remains weak long enough, it will drain the other functions, ending the company. I’ve seen all of these weaknesses throughout my career. And there’s one function that’s more critical than the others: Operations.

Operations is the soul of a company. Craft, talent, product, or service. Whatever you want to call it, the thing a company sells is the reason why the company exists. Sales and Finance are add-ons to a successful Operations. If business shrinks drastically or needs to pivot, the focus would be entirely on Operations.

This is also why Operations is the hardest function to fix. A company needs to constantly protect its position in the market or innovate. Ideally both. My escape room company, Puzzle Out, failed because of a weakened Operations function.

Our Sales were solid because we had little competition. One Google ad campaign got us all the prospects we needed. It’s also why we never signed up with Groupon despite them constantly hounding us. Our Finance function was also solid: we had good people and a good handle on our numbers.

Our Operations weakened because I focused my attention away from the business.

Our games, our product, started suffering. There was nobody to obsess over the customer experience. Our weakened product drained our Finance function, because there was no guidance from me on how to improve the games. And it also drained our Sales function, because our reputation suffered due to a lack of a good product. It got so bad that there was even a Reddit post wondering if my escape room was a front for money laundering. COVID finally killed our Operations and eventually the company.

I still believe I can reignite that spark into another company. My brother and I turned one night of brainstorming into a multimillion dollar business. That’s Operations.

Take a look at your current role. Which function do you support? How well is that function doing? How well are the other two functions doing?

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P.S. There’s another function that sits above these three functions: the CEO. Their job is to make sure that the three functions work well with each other and that none of the functions weakens. This role should be owned by only one person: if everybody is accountable, nobody is accountable.

P.P.S. I got this concept from the book “Traction.” I was looking for a framework to organize and run my design team, and this book gave me exactly that. I love how simply it’s written and it seems fairly easy to implement and iterate on.