Meeting (and Beating) the Challenge with the OpEx Shop

When it comes to the economy, there’s an old saying: “A rising tide lifts all boats.” In the workforce, if you substitute “employees” for “boats,” then William (“Bill”) Tansey Jr.’s company would be that tide.

Tansey is the COO of the OpEx Shop: Operational Excellence, an enterprise that, according to its website, guides organizational leaders “through resolution of complex business problems and change toward excellence.”

Though his job title covers many roles, he says he’s not exactly a consultant.

“It’s more of an interim chief operating officer,” says Tansey, 49, who lives just outside Saratoga Springs with his wife, Katie. “My focus is to help businesses overcome significant operational challenges. During the time I’m engaged with an organization, I work on helping them pivot or find their way through a challenge. That challenge could be penetrating a new region, overcoming a change in infrastructure or governance, scaling and growing, or acquiring another company—it could be any number of things.”

Whatever the challenge, Tansey addresses the problem area and, in doing so, sets in motion a model that typically leads to better outcomes than the company had previously experienced. With the new business system he helps implement, “you can raise the level of play to almost as good as the [company’s] best person—almost across the board,” he says.

“Think of Operational Excellence as taking the variation out of the way people execute their jobs, freeing up mindshare to be creative and solve problems, and then shifting the need in a way that the customer values.”

Defining the Problem, Leading the Solution

Tansey distills organizations into two primary sectors: commercial (such as sales and marketing) and operational (how a company creates a product or service).

“We go through a full process of defining the problem,” he explains. After that, “it’s my job to lead the business through solving it. I initially start out in a forward-facing role. As time goes on, I fade into the background and let the leadership team or person in charge step to the forefront and begin operating within the new infrastructure we’ve put in place.”

Explaining his role to employees, he says, “I start by opening the door and showing them what could be, and then they start to ask questions. How we answer those is by incorporating additional components. Before you know it, we’ve refined a bunch of different moving pieces. It’s a game changer.”

Operational Excellence, Tansey explains, is a 50-50 mix of transactional processes and people. It consists of four key components:

• Daily Execution – Ensuring the organization’s revenue-generating operation functions effectively with minimal waste, measured simply and visually to maximize net profit.
• Strategy Deployment – Leading teams through planning, budgeting, and measurable execution of change.
• Root Cause & Countermeasure – A process, language, and toolkit that helps teams identify, prioritize, contain, and prevent internal operational problems from reaching customers.
• Team – Aligning employees with company values and business strategy while ensuring competent daily execution. This results in a happy, productive workforce, a strong return on employee investment, and overall operational success.

“It’s critical to have both the people component and the transactional structure component aligned,” Tansey emphasizes. “When those are tied together, they drive performance.”

From Engineering to Business Transformation

Tansey, who grew up in Clifton Park and attended Shenendehowa High School, earned a degree in mechanical engineering from Clarkson University in 1997. But his planned career took an unexpected turn soon after.

Working at an engineering firm, he recalls, “I’m sitting in an office looking at the guy next to me, and he’s the smartest person I’ve ever met. Then I look at the guy over there, and he’s also the smartest guy I’ve ever met. They’re both extremely disgruntled. They’re amazing, and I can learn from them, but I thought, I can’t sit next to these guys the rest of my life at work. These two represent a whole population.”

That moment sparked a desire to transition from engineering to business, leading him to take night classes toward an MBA. Not long after, he was asked to help two companies struggling to deliver new products to market.

“As I was doing that, it dawned on me that the work I was doing to turn around this failure to deliver new products was work I could apply to any other failure, problem, or challenge. The success I was having—the way I was executing—was more broadly applicable.”

By the early 2000s, after earning his master’s degree from RPI, he was fortunate to be mentored by Roger, the head of a local startup where Tansey worked. “He opened up his network to me and gave me numerous opportunities to learn and grow as a professional.”

Later, as Director of New Product Delivery at Danaher Corp., Tansey mastered the renowned Danaher Business System. He then worked as a General Electric global operations leader, overseeing nearly $15 billion in wind turbine installations overseas.

While working at GE and launching HR Resolved Inc., a human resources outsourcing firm, he was hired in 2016 by the founder and president of a local organization to increase its revenue using his business-system model. That turned out to be the OpEx Shop—a move that has worked out well for him.

Transforming Business Culture

Since taking the reins at the OpEx Shop, Tansey has realized that when companies call him, it’s often because they recognize the need for a radical shift in their business model—and, by extension, their culture.

“There’s an interesting phenomenon that says you can’t change a culture until the critical mass of the culture has reached sufficient dissatisfaction,” he explains. “As leaders, we lead with positive intent. If you’re manipulative, you lead with malice. In business, if you create sufficient dissatisfaction to help shepherd a group of people into something better, that’s leading with positive intent.”

Although he is generally positive, Tansey admits to occasional frustration when his work is misunderstood.

“One of the biggest challenges is getting that initial momentum going. Sometimes people hear ‘process’ and pull back, or they hear ‘standard work’ and pull back,” he says.

“A lot of businesses have talked the talk but not walked the walk. Their only experience is, I’ve heard those words, and it didn’t work.”

Digging deeper, he’s found that “it comes down to businesses half-trying something—dipping their toe in the water, adopting the language but not the way of acting or leading—and falling short.”

As businesses grow, he says, there’s a greater need for a structured system. “The work I do really enables a virtual workforce to perform effectively,” he adds. “One of the common questions I get is, How do you know if they’re working well? If you have a business system, you know they’re working because they’re producing results. If they’re hitting the goals and doing what you need them to do, then you’re all good.”

Making Operational Excellence Accessible

As a guest on a locally produced podcast and in short videos on his OpEx Shop website, Tansey speaks with the ease of someone with years of experience engaging people about his work.

Typically, the type of consulting Tansey does is beyond the reach of most midsize companies—but he’s working to change that.

“I’ve made the choice to offer this service to companies with $100 million or less in gross revenue,” he says. “The companies that find the OpEx Shop most appealing are typically in the $6 million to $90 million range.”

“What I’m really proud of,” he adds, “is that the work I bring forward is based on real-world experience—things I’ve learned the hard way under the mentorship of amazing professionals and companies. I’ve been able to package it in a way that’s beneficial and digestible.”

“For me, the most fun is when the lightbulbs start coming on for the people I’m leading. Seeing them play at a higher level, knowing I’ve helped solve their problem, and watching them succeed—that’s the real win.”

For more information, visit www.theopexshop.com or search for William Tansey Jr. on LinkedIn.