Ours
Ours is a seed stage company building a modern-day relationship wellness platform offering virtual couples therapy and premarital counseling. I worked with Ours as an operations executive for 2 months, reporting to the founders.
Challenge
The company was experiencing rapid growth in demand for virtual couple’s therapy and needed to scale the supply of providers to match that growth. I was asked to develop and implement a scalable growth strategy that improved supply liquidity without taxing the team’s existing resources. My goals were to:
- Immediately increase provider supply in markets with couples on waitlist
- Develop a playbook that would allow the team to continue to grow the provider base after my departure
- Improve operational efficiency to allow the team to support an influx of providers
Solution
My approach was a 3-part process:
1. Meet, Learn, Shadow
Build relationships within the organization at all levels by meeting with many individuals, understanding their roles, and learning about what they believe are the key barriers to success. Triangulating between the challenges leadership wanted addressed, the challenges that frontline employees were facing in their roles, and my own experience at startups in rapid growth mode, I was able to determine the top problems that I could help the team solve in order to grow supply and be set up to scale.
2. Quick, communication-heavy, basic improvements
Develop buy-in from the team by starting with small process and product improvements that made their lives easier. Through my initial conversations with the team, I identified a straightforward but labor-intensive provider marketing process that was taking up significant amounts of the team’s time. With some basic automation, we were able to extract the team entirely from provider marketing while also improving the process’s throughput. This created trust within the team that I was there to help, and trust from leadership that I would have a positive impact on the business.
3. Paradoxically simple but far-reaching process improvements
While rolling out a couple of these quick wins, I was also developing and sharing out the proposed roadmaps for the major workstreams that, when implemented, would be the main drivers of improvement in the areas I was asked to focus on. These improvements were:
- Automation of standardized, labor-intensive process
- Provider search previously took up 5-10 hours of team time per week and was completely manual. Automation reduced this to 1 hour of work, while also increasing search results by >10x.
- Creation of new provider outreach channels
- With my added bandwidth on the team we were able to identify and test multiple additional channels through which to acquire new providers. Some of these new channels were incredibly productive.
Outcome
There have been tremendous improvements in the key areas I focused on:
- >90% increase in efficiency of provider search
- >50% increase in provider supply in 2 months
I was also able to develop sufficient training materials and process documentation to allow for easy handoff and for the team to execute on these new processes independently.
Thanks to the Ours team for an awesome experience!
