We talked with Jennifer Goldman about:
- How she helps create healthy businesses through operations, connecting health to employee satisfaction and community impact
- The processes of organizing operational priorities — from visualizing the vision to breaking down goals into actionable steps with team involvement
- Why successful implementation requires both digital tracking tools and visual reminders, with a focus on celebrating wins and communicating the “why” behind changes
About Jennifer Goldman:
Jennifer Goldman, founder of My Virtual COO, transforms businesses through improved operations. She began her career overhauling operational processes before transitioning to consulting, driven by seeing how healthy businesses create positive ripple effects. In this episode of On Purpose, Jennifer explains her approach to organizing operational priorities: documenting everything, visualizing goals, and involving team members in planning. She works with companies seeking to transform their operations through techniques that accelerate change, gain buy-in, and allow businesses to grow while simultaneously improving. Jennifer emphasizes the importance of communicating the “why” behind initiatives and celebrating wins to create lasting organizational change.
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Full Audio Transcript:
00:00:00 - 00:08:07
Lauren Hong
All right, Jennifer, thank you so much for joining us.
00:08:09 - 00:12:11
Jennifer Goldman
I'm so happy to be here. You know I love talking with you. So this will be fun.
00:12:11 - 00:37:02
Lauren Hong
Goes two ways. You all are in for a treat. So, Jennifer Goldman, she runs My Virtual COO and is based on the East Coast. So for those of you who are in that neck of the woods, make sure to give her a shout out. So, my goodness, you have incredible experience. I should also just say we met at the Dimensional Fund’s conference this past fall.
00:37:04 - 00:51:02
Lauren Hong
It was really fun to share the stage with you there and just to hear your wisdom. So many good things. So anyways, I don't want to steal your thunder so I'm going to pass it over to you and let you share a little bit more about your background. And what you do.
00:51:04 - 01:12:09
Jennifer Goldman
Yeah, absolutely. And I just want to say I was happy to meet you there too, because the energy I felt, we had good energy there. And I think that's why we're talking again today. So, let's see, where do we start? Buffalo Bills fan. I'm from Buffalo, New York. Love it. I can say that in an upswing year.
01:12:11 - 01:45:25
Jennifer Goldman
I grew up in Buffalo. Went to school out there, and the story line is, after working for a bunch of small businesses outside of Buffalo and my campus, and being a real young person full of energy and overhauling ops and processes and then going to work corporate and doing that again, I ended up in my late 20s switching to consulting.
01:45:27 - 02:08:26
Jennifer Goldman
I had to move to Boston, Massachusetts, because of the economy at the time and also I wanted to really spread my wings, really go to some bigger companies. So yeah, that's the backstory. And I'm not going to say how many years but it's several, several years later and I’m still doing this.
02:08:29 - 02:14:25
Jennifer Goldman
I moved to Maryland and then back to Boston because it doesn't matter where you are. It’s your impact.
02:14:28 - 02:34:15
Lauren Hong
I love it. So I feel like it takes a special person to really be able to appreciate operations, not just appreciate but to be able to have the patience to get into the nuances, and then also the ability to be able to work with people to figure out how you orchestrate everything you need to work on.
02:34:16 - 02:46:24
Lauren Hong
So talk with us a little bit about what drives you as you got into the space and started working with different organizations and what have you. What was the driver for you to get deeper and deeper into the work you're doing today?
02:46:26 - 03:10:27
Jennifer Goldman
Yeah, this is probably going to throw newbies for a loop. The driver was seeing the impact of healthy business. So let me peel that back a little bit. Being in enough businesses watching and my parents by day were educators but by night how to do other business. And seeing the choices you had.
03:10:27 - 03:29:27
Jennifer Goldman
If you're part of a healthy business, you have choices in your career, you have choices on what you can learn. You're not strapped down by finances as much. Maybe you're not making as much as you'd like but you're certainly feeling that you're in a stable place. I saw how wonderful that was, and for some reason I'm very intuitive and empathic.
03:30:04 - 03:48:09
Jennifer Goldman
So I picked up on that fact and I thought, oh my gosh. And then going into businesses that were not healthy. I was like, this is destroying not only a business and the community but the employees, who now they don't have choices, right? And then the community doesn't get to benefit.
03:48:11 - 04:13:13
Jennifer Goldman
So I kind of just kind of connected the dots. That's what operations people do. And just said, okay, healthy business, healthy employees, healthy lives, healthy families, healthy community. And that's all. That's what drove me. It was all about that, and it still is today. I very often get asked why don't you work with bigger businesses? Because we usually only work with businesses under 50, 75 employees.
04:13:13 - 04:27:03
Jennifer Goldman
And I say, because that's the lifeblood of a community. And they usually give it forward a lot to communities that need it. So, yeah, that's kind of the answer. A long answer to a short question.
04:27:06 - 04:44:24
Lauren Hong
I love that, especially the connecting, connecting the dots to community — that's part of our mission statement, our vision statement. Well, vision in particular, we really lean on community but it impacts how we operate on a day to day.
04:44:24 - 05:11:05
Jennifer Goldman
It gives you a purpose, right? You know this running a business, on certain days you can lose your way and as an owner, I always say this too, I can lose my way. Why am I doing this? Why am I working so hard? And if you don't have that bigger purpose, it just doesn't feel as fulfilling.
05:11:05 - 05:16:04
Jennifer Goldman
And frankly, then it's not for anybody on the team. They're like, what am I doing here? You know what I mean?
05:16:04 - 05:46:16
Lauren Hong
It's so, so true. So you talked about connecting the dots of operations, right? And you can put that on so many different levels, right? From a strategy level, from actual operations implementation to the tactical nuances. And so I think one of the hard things, at least in what I see, is being able to get people to rally around what kind of key goals and priorities they should be focusing on.
05:46:19 - 06:09:00
Lauren Hong
When you work with teams, how do you lead those conversations if it's around what change do we need to make internally? Do you have one-on-one conversations with just the C-suite? Do you go to department heads? How boots on ground are you getting? I'd love to hear a little bit more about setting the stage, coming into a company, about what are operational priorities as a business.
06:09:02 - 06:32:06
Jennifer Goldman
Well, first off, you always have to ground the visionary. So, you've got to get out of their brain all that swirl. And I mean it literally is like a little tornado of thoughts. So what we do is we document and visualize everything. So when they're talking, we're writing. And we know and you know there is therapy in writing it yourself.
06:32:14 - 06:54:09
Jennifer Goldman
But there's a reason they haven't written it. Maybe it's fear of seeing it or writing. Maybe it's that their brain is going too fast. Certainly in ADHD brain, right? They're all over the place. So we take it, we write it, and we start to organize it. And that kind of grounds on the vision for if you're going to use like, I know we can use video and traction, whatever words we use, right?
06:54:09 - 07:18:10
Jennifer Goldman
We got the vision. Then we have some of the goals to get to the vision because vision is really big right now. Then from the goals, then we'll start to write out, okay, some of the pieces to get to those goals. And that's when we start to bring in more people. So it's not that we don't believe in one-on-one but we believe in as much transparency as possible.
07:18:10 - 07:36:07
Jennifer Goldman
And this is my bias, right? I didn't like being a part of a company. I could have been the youngest person there and believe me, I can tell stories about being 19 years old and doing processes around 250 people. I mean, I was young, and yet if I didn't understand the bigger picture, I wasn't going to give it my all.
07:36:10 - 07:51:17
Jennifer Goldman
So we pull the whole team in together, and then we start to say, okay, of the goals, what are the pieces? What do we have to do in the finance area? What do we have to do in the process area? What do you have to do in systems? What do you have to do with people? There's very defined parts of a business.
07:51:19 - 07:52:24
Lauren Hong
Right, right.
07:52:26 - 08:12:23
Jennifer Goldman
And so naturally by actually writing it out and kind of tying it in, I'm going to say it starts to fall into place. The sequencing is the secret sauce. But that's the end part. It's just getting it there on paper. And that's when people start to say, I have an interest in this.
08:13:00 - 08:14:27
Jennifer Goldman
Can I take it on?
08:15:00 - 08:37:08
Lauren Hong
I love that. I think sometimes when folks think about operations, I immediately go to the CRM, right? How are we going to operationalize this and transact whatever it is? And I feel like in a real, true CEO, a role like it is across the company, it's a bit like job descriptions, organization, organizational structure.
08:37:08 - 08:58:28
Lauren Hong
I mean priorities across departments. There's so many pieces. So once you've kind of pulled those together, you mentioned different tools and talking with different folks. How are you then prioritizing them? And then here's a two-part question: one, how do you prioritize them? And two, how do you roll it out?
08:58:28 - 09:10:26
Lauren Hong
You have to roll it out. So it's not just like hanging out, here's our plan and it's going to go on the shelf kind of thing. We forget to look at it and we keep being crazy. So priorities.
09:10:26 - 09:36:13
Jennifer Goldman
So first, the secret sauce of sequencing. I'm not quite sure I have a method that can be copied. That's how the brain thinks. And let me come back to that because there's a second thing. When you write things out, people will actually start doing some of the actions without even being given permission.
09:36:16 - 09:47:19
Jennifer Goldman
If something hits the gut, it's a micro win. And they're like, yeah, love it, understand it, run with it, or we find out when we get back there it's already a check on the list of being done.
09:47:19 - 09:48:24
Lauren Hong
Quick win.
09:48:27 - 10:11:26
Jennifer Goldman
Yeah, exactly. So coming back to the sequencing. So a couple things. One is burnout. You have to be careful, right? So we never try to tie in three major initiatives in the same quarter. And by major I mean the entire team is involved. And it's a heavy lift and it's expensive. We look at all of those pieces.
10:12:03 - 10:33:28
Jennifer Goldman
So we try to do the micros with the big. The second thing is we try to give equal opportunity to every division of the company. So let's just use you and me. I'm operations. You're all things marketing, right? You can't just do an operations project and leave marketing alone. You have to be doing both.
10:33:28 - 11:26
Jennifer Goldman
So we might say big project in operations because right now we need to free up time. A smaller project in marketing to keep things rolling along and good for business development. So now when you have capacity, you can use it with the new business coming in the door. So it is a look and feel of, like I said, giving equal opportunity across all divisions but also thinking ahead.
11:28 - 11:25:28
Jennifer Goldman
And again, what's our goal? What's our goal for the year? Is our goal to increase revenue by X? Is it to alleviate the C-suite of 50% of their duties? Because without that they can't develop more business. What is that? And then we work back from that and line everything up. It's like essentialism, like Greg McKeown.
11:25:28 - 11:31:16
Jennifer Goldman
Like what you're doing today. Does it tie into the goal? Can you see the goal line and…
11:31:16 - 11:47:17
Lauren Hong
… connect the dots? I love that. We even see that as nuances like the social media post that goes out. Can you connect it back to the business strategy? Where is it aligned and why are we putting our effort there so there's a dot that all connects back even to the smallest pieces so we're aligned with marketing or what have you?
11:47:20 - 12:11:06
Lauren Hong
I appreciate what you're saying of being able to stagger things accordingly against priority, involving different teams as needed. I especially appreciate it because for us, when we see teams grow, usually if it's a smaller team, maybe a dozen people, we're directly often working with a person in an ops role.
12:11:08 - 12:31:01
Lauren Hong
But then as the company gets bigger, I mean, fast-forward to 150-plus employees, we're usually directly communicating with the CEO for what's going on because the operations initiatives go across the company. But if you keep the brand consistency, then it goes across the company with the training. It's like a hand in glove kind of thing.
12:31:03 - 12:49:16
Lauren Hong
So I appreciate the way you're sharing how you roll things out. So how do you keep people on track? Do you use data visualization tools? Do y have monthly check-ins? Because you feel like you have to hear that message again. And it's like a radio ad, if you hear it again and again and again, you have to get the brain share, right?
12:49:16 - 12:54:04
Lauren Hong
You have to buy the brain share. So I’d love to hear a little bit more about that.
12:54:06 - 13:15:02
Jennifer Goldman
How do you keep it front and center for action? So, I'll give you the electronic way and then I'll give you a physical way because there's all sorts of ways to communicate and this falls into your bailiwick because to me, marketing is communications, right? You're basically selling everyone on action, okay?
13:15:03 - 13:33:26
Jennifer Goldman
That's what change is. And you're not selling it in a bad way. You're selling it with purpose and with direction. Deliberate. The why. So electronically we have the board — we happen to use Asana but it really doesn't matter.
13:35:03 - 13:51:21
Jennifer Goldman
Because that's like plugging the USB in the brain and letting it come out. So in Asana, we actually line up everything to tie to four things, and then we start to put dates on it. So here's the order the idea goes in. So think of it like a brain burst.
13:51:24 - 14:18:19
Jennifer Goldman
So the idea goes in, right? Then we say what's the why. What's the benefit? Is it profit? Is it presence? Is it productivity? Is it people? And then once you define the why, it's pretty easy to start figuring out the who. It's the four Ws. And then once you figure out the who based on their capacity and time, then it's the when.
14:18:24 - 14:28:17
Jennifer Goldman
So we do the what, which is the idea, right? The initiative tied to the goal, the why, the who, and then the when. Once you have that, that's your marching orders.
14:28:20 - 14:32:07
Lauren Hong
High level. What did you call it earlier?
14:32:10 - 14:33:09
Jennifer Goldman
Brain burst.
14:33:09 - 14:50:07
Lauren Hong
I totally see it. Yeah, as you can see, like the web. And so then you're using it to basically be able to map all the goals back to those initiatives and then actually transact on kicking off those different actions.
14:50:07 - 14:50:27
Jennifer Goldman
That's right.
14:52:05 - 15:13:04
Jennifer Goldman
Then taking credit for what's done. So actually when you mark something complete out on these boards, you keep it in a wins area. And then when you have your company meetings — hint: I don't even care if you're a three-person company — this is a big deal. Your company meetings every quarter. You don't even have to prep for that part of the celebration.
15:13:06 - 15:18:12
Jennifer Goldman
You just pull up the wins, point them into the slide deck and boom, there you are.
15:18:12 - 15:35:18
Lauren Hong
Done. I love that. When we do our monthly marketing meeting check-ins, we always have a whole slide for wins because sometimes you're just in the day-to-day and you forget — you're like, oh my goodness, we just completed 15 major things or whatever it might be in the last 30 days.
15:35:18 - 15:45:12
Lauren Hong
It could feel like a lift. It's all these little things that lead up to something larger.
15:45:13 - 15:48:23
Jennifer Goldman
I want to give you something physical because that's electronic, right?
15:48:23 - 15:49:26
Lauren Hong
Yes, yes. Okay.
15:49:28 - 16:14:18
Jennifer Goldman
So this is funny. And I have to be honest with you, nobody's actually done this fully. I've seen it done in print on whiteboards but this is my new vision. And actually, I saw it in the dentist's office the other day because the technology hasn't been made; it's been duct taped. So you can put that board we're talking about, literally up electronically on a wall in a frame.
16:14:20 - 16:41:03
Jennifer Goldman
Now, you can duct tape this by taking a monitor or sticking it up there with Wi-Fi and then putting a frame around it. I guess everybody was handy. But there's also those flip frames. I don't know if you've ever seen them in your personal life but now they're making them big enough for walls inside of offices. So because we have some firms where the CEO or someone is remote, they're not even in the physical space so they can write the wins on there and like a scrolling.
16:41:05 - 16:52:18
Jennifer Goldman
Some pictures of the staff, maybe at the last client event or something like that. And then also a list of the major goals and initiatives. So going back to your comment about marketing and we need to see things over and over.
16:52:24 - 16:53:19
Lauren Hong
Right.
16:53:19 - 17:01:07
Jennifer Goldman
It's a physical board that reminds you. It's the glass walls or the whiteboards.
17:01:11 - 17:24:09
Lauren Hong
Super interesting. We worked on a project that was for several clients because of the virtual right, COVID or what have you, similar concept, a little bit different but we designed it in two ways. We designed cards that would go into basically a clear frame. And they had the mission/vision on one side and the values on the other, keeping it top of mind.
17:24:11 - 17:39:22
Lauren Hong
We've also done a few I think are really fun, just to kind of go back to that idea of, say, top of mind. If there's a computer clip, when you put it on the side, it would hold a piece of paper but the company would mail out postcards with like, this is our quarterly initiative. And so it would have the quarterly initiative, whatever it was.
17:39:22 - 17:58:21
Lauren Hong
And it was all branded based on their brand. And so it was just for certain departments; it didn't happen across the company. But I think the idea, especially in such a virtual environment, of having something where you can just glance at it, it's a gentle reminder; it's not just one of your million tabs open on the desktop.
18:07 - 18:20:08
Jennifer Goldman
I love that. That's like the play off pictures in the little paper clips. But the idea of pinching onto your monitor. Well, I don't know about you but I do use sticky notes every once in a while. So what's the difference between a sticky note telling you or something that's branded with the company brand and feeling?
18:20:11 - 18:42:18
Jennifer Goldman
See this is when people talk about if I may go off on projects. People talk about marketing and I'm like guys there's internal marketing that matters. Everybody says I'm having trouble getting buy-in. How are you presenting it? Is it just verbally with no plan and no structure?
18:43:15 - 18:46:13
Jennifer Goldman
That other person is going to get that. Exactly.
18:46:17 - 18:51:18
Lauren Hong
You know what? I know because you have to feel it. And people have to understand, like you're saying the why.
18:51:25 - 18:53:27
Jennifer Goldman
Yes.
18:54:00 - 18:56:01
Lauren Hong
Okay. That leads me to another question here.
18:56:03 - 18:56:28
Jennifer Goldman
Yeah.
18:57:00 - 19:16:22
Lauren Hong
So this is a challenge sometimes we see too — there's early adopters and then there are folks who are really late to the game. It might be you have a problem from earlier. They might just not be the right fit or they might just be frankly, swamped or whatever it is.
19:16:25 - 19:38:20
Lauren Hong
How do you bring people, how do you kind of shepherd and bring people and help to make sure they're hearing those messages and help to kind of get that buy-in, especially when they're feeling like, oh my goodness, I already have all this other stuff going on and this person's out and this person left, and, how do you help shape that to really get that transformational change?
19:38:22 - 20:26
Jennifer Goldman
Yeah, I'm going to be honest, we use the same techniques we're talking about when we do business planning or strategy: writing out. So what we do is we do visual maps. We might do a visual map that says, okay, if you do A that leads to B. I know this sounds simple but it really is important, C to D.
20:01:01 - 20:03:19
Jennifer Goldman
So you say you don't have time to do this.
20:04:09 - 20:25:00
Jennifer Goldman
But because you don't have time these five things aren’t getting done. So we tell them what the pain is. Show them the worst pain that's being caused by it. And we work back from the pain point and say but if you did these three things leading up to that you wouldn't be in that pain.
20:25:07 - 20:28:16
Jennifer Goldman
So it's almost like a process or a flow.
20:28:22 - 20:29:20
Lauren Hong
Yes.
20:29:20 - 20:33:10
Jennifer Goldman
But it's just what you call the effect or cause and effect.
20:33:12 - 20:38:21
Lauren Hong
That makes sense. So are these one-on-one conversations you're having or are you having them directly with
20:38:24 - 20:40:06
Jennifer Goldman
Sometimes.
20:41:12 - 21:02:01
Jennifer Goldman
It does. I'm going to say anybody who's really an operator, they already get it. It's usually the visionaries who don't know, the visionaries who can't seem to carve out time or allow the staff to carve out time. So they're the ones we have to do these one-on-ones with, short conversation, or send a picture of what we're trying to say and then we do the one-on-one.
21:02:01 - 21:18:23
Jennifer Goldman
That's another technique I didn't mention. We always prepare our visuals before the calls and we try to share them before because people can't, especially nowadays, they just can't take it in and respond in that same moment.
21:18:26 - 21:47:04
Lauren Hong
It's so true. Honestly, I feel like if there's any kind of cherry on top or secret sauce or what have you, the idea of visualization is much more difficult than it sounds. Simple is never easy but I feel like especially when you're trying to communicate a really big concept, I feel like anyone who’s in the C-suite, especially talking to a CEO, it just helps you to lock in ideas.
21:47:04 - 22:07:11
Jennifer Goldman
That's right. And we don't always succeed. There are a ton of times we just don't know how a person's brain works. So you could say it verbally. You can write it textually. You can visualize it visually. And at some point you just have to walk away. And this is where you get those stories.
22:07:11 - 22:23:06
Jennifer Goldman
You know what, three years later, if you're lucky enough to still be in contact with those people, they’re like, now I get what you were saying. It's three years later but we can't make it faster. That brain is going to work the way it's going to work.
22:23:09 - 22:25:00
Lauren Hong
So fair. Honest too.
22:25:04 - 22:27:14
Jennifer Goldman
So yeah. Okay.
22:27:14 - 22:46:09
Lauren Hong
So I think we could talk about all this and go deep on these topics. Any like other thoughts, any big, kind of look ahead for you all or things you think would be helpful for others to hear that we haven't covered.
22:46:12 - 23:17:07
Jennifer Goldman
I always say that with this topic of change or businesses that are scaling to revisit often the responsibilities of everybody on the team, including your providers. I think that's where we're lacking a little bit on the communications and this buy-in and pace because we're fast-paced, right? It doesn't matter what industry at this point.
23:17:14 - 23:44:03
Jennifer Goldman
It doesn't matter what role of authority you have at a company. Change is part of the game. And that's where I would encourage more and more businesses to just write it down and co-write it. It doesn't have to be the old style — I'm the owner or I'm the manager, and I write the job description and tell somebody — it's a co-effort of documentation because the minute, by the way, that you lock that in somebody's role is going to change.
23:44:06 - 23:54:10
Jennifer Goldman
So let's just be fluid about it in a way that we can co-develop it. So I'm going to leave that as the biggest thing because we're leading with that way more than we ever have. And I don't think that's ever going away.
23:54:12 - 24:11:18
Lauren Hong
So true. I think sometimes, we can get lost in perfection and let perfection drive progress, or we feel it's perfect and it might be in that moment. But you fast-forward four months from now or what have you, and things shift and change. You've got to be able to listen to the market. You have to listen to your team.
24:11:20 - 24:23:07
Lauren Hong
It always makes me think, folks talk about the way you got to your first milestone and the way you're going to your next and so on and so forth. It's got to shift.
24:23:09 - 24:24:10
Jennifer Goldman
So shift together.
24:24:15 - 24:43:18
Lauren Hong
Yes, together now. So true. Jen, this was so fun. I really enjoyed it. Just hearing a little bit more about what you do and what you bring to the table and just more about how you help shape out that ops plan and then help to implement it across the board. So thank you.
24:43:20 - 24:44:09
Lauren Hong
Thank you for your time.
24:44:12 - 24:46:16
Jennifer Goldman
And thanks for the platform.
24:46:18 - 24:51:26
Lauren Hong
Absolutely. Thank you.
