This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

A service business rarely stops growing because demand ran out. It stops because every new client is served from scratch, and the person doing the serving is you.

Where service businesses actually break

The work gets done well and the margin is a surprise every quarter. You could not say which of last year's projects lost money, because scope moved by agreement in a series of small conversations that nobody wrote down. Delivery lives in the heads of three senior people, so the fourth client has to wait. Nobody has mapped what happens between an enquiry arriving and an invoice being paid, which means nobody can say where it slows down. And the moment you take a fortnight off, everything queues behind you — which is the clearest evidence that what you built is a job rather than a business.

What this course covers

Forty-six lessons around the full loop. Predictable revenue first: why the funnel needs its own owner, the stages from enquiry to retention, where it leaks, stage criteria, acquisition cost against lifetime value, the system of record and the rules that keep it usable, automation, and a 90-day rollout. Then delivering what you sold, on PMBOK 7: business case and charter, stakeholders, scope and documented assumptions, the plan and network diagram, schedule and resource matrix, the three stages of a budget, risk, a team working across several clients at once, control, and closure. Then the operational layer: why this function appears past fifty people, end-to-end processes and minimum sufficient rules, input against output against outcome metrics with named owners, bottlenecks and context switching, operating rhythms that are not theatre, growth and the chaos it produces, the toolkit including when a spreadsheet beats a corporate system, and how to prove operations pays. Then repeatability: waste, standardisation, maturity, five kinds of process map, architecture, and root cause tools from 5 Whys and 8D through SIPOC and DRIVE. Then the client: journey audit, service strategy and standards, the team, service levels and standard procedures, automation, and the metrics — net promoter, satisfaction, effort, first-contact resolution, handling time. Finally asking properly: survey design, honest participation, the report, the open-ended answers, and the action plan.

A note on one block

The six lessons on surveys were recorded for a people-function audience, so the catalogue of survey types includes engagement and exit surveys alongside client ones. The method is what matters and it does not change with the audience: how to phrase a question, how long a questionnaire can be before answers stop being honest, how to get real participation, and how to read open-ended responses, which is where anything useful is usually hiding.

Who is teaching this

I am Mike Pritula. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.

What is included

• Lifetime access to all 46 lessons

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• A Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Working material: the funnel model, unit economics, the PMBOK 7 charter and control set, the metric ownership frame, five map types, 5 Whys, 8D, SIPOC, DRIVE, service level and procedure templates, the survey and report structure

• Operations treated as a source of margin rather than an administrative cost

Where to start

Take your last completed engagement and write down what it was quoted at, what it actually cost in hours, and where the difference came from. If you cannot reconstruct the difference, that is the whole course. Enrol now and start today.