I’m always talking with business leaders about their company’s Operations, their goals, their challenges. Here’s one such conversation thread I recently had with a Harvard- and Duke-educated executive:

CG: Are you looking for your Business Operations to become a strategic business advantage? That is, do you want to continuously increase the value you deliver to your customers, continuously improve your operating margins and continuously improve the engagement, productivity and happiness of your employees?

Exec: When we get bigger then those things will be more important. Right now, simply making the product well is the priority. What you’re describing might be a better fit for a larger company.

This leader’s response is the norm and—despite his highly respected business education and experience—so is his ignorance of the impact every company’s Operations has on its business, its customers and its employees.

4 Truths Often Missed About Business Operations

1. Revenue Growth

Operations always and directly affects revenue growth. How a company transforms materials and/or information into its finished product or service is its Operations. This how cannot avoid but to either enhance or degrade the company’s designed value proposition to its customers—most often by a large degree. Any executive using a laissez-faire approach to Operations puts their company’s business proposition and its connected revenue growth in material peril. At best, they leave critical potential growth on the table.

2. Financial Investment and Competitive Advantage

Operations improvements do not require special financial investment and they return significant financial competitive advantage. Significant Operations improvements are abundant—and free! The prerequisite is for company leaders to allow employees to act on the frontline improvement expertise they already possess. Improved Operations deliver greater customer value using reduced resources, quickly producing a financial and competitive premium. The only reason the myth of Operations improvement being costly persists is that misguided business execs give them a bad rap when they unwittingly make decisions that are counter to the principles governing good Operations. These efforts end up causing more problems than they solve.

3. Employee Engagement

Operations is the only domain where true employee engagement can be achieved. Employee engagement is the widely sought after condition that unlocks innovation, productivity and retains a company’s best employees. In every type of company, the strongest engagement doesn’t center on compensation, titles, or perks, but is the result of enhancing the meaningfulness of employees’ work assignments and then enabling them to make progress on these. How work is done, that is Operations, is the only place where this strongest engagement can occur. And the best Operations practices happen to be the very same efforts used in these effective employee engagement approaches.

4. Business Operational Improvement is for All Companies—of Any Size or Stage

Neglecting or postponing Operations improvement is as smart as continuing to build a house on a foundation you know is faulty—the value of the resulting business is always and immediately compromised and the cost to remedy the situation only gets more and more expensive.

It’s true that having an expert plan in other areas of a business, like marketing or partnerships or product design, can help compensate for inattention to Operations. But that disregard always comes at a price: reduced growth, lowered profitability and unhappy employees. It seems many company leaders are ok with that. I’m not. That’s why I tell every company that now is the right time to leverage the truths about Operations to their competitive advantage.