Business operations
Business operations is the "harvesting" of value from assets owned by a business. Assets can be either "physical" or "intangible". An example of value derived from a physical asset, like a building, is rent. An example of value derived from an intangible asset, like an idea, is a royalty. The effort involved in "harvesting" this value is what constitutes business operations cycles. Overview. Business operations encompass three fundamental management imperatives that collectively aim to maximize value harvested from business assets (this has often been referred to as "sweating the assets"): The three imperatives are interdependent. The following basic  tenets illustrate this interdependency: The business model of a business describes the means by which the three management imperatives are achieved. In this sense, business operations is the execution of the business model. Business operations topics. Generating recurring income. This is the most straightforward and well-understood management imperative of business operations. The primary goal of this imperative is to implement a "sustained" delivery of goods and services to the business's customers at a cost that is less than the funds acquired in exchange for said goods and also self-employee services—in short, making a profit. A business  whose revenues are sufficiently greater than its expenses makes profit or income. Such a business is profitable. As such, generating recurring "revenue" is not the focus of operations management; what counts is management of the relationship between the cost of goods sold and the revenue derived from their sale. Efficient processes that reduce costs even while prices remain the same expand the gap between revenue and expenses and derive higher profitability. Types of recurring income: Increasing the Value of the Business. The more profitable a business is, the more valuable it is. A business's profitability is measured on the  basis of how much income it generates for the: Securing the income and value of the business. A business that can harvest a significant amount of value from its assets but cannot "demonstrate" an ability to sustain this effort cannot be considered a viable business.