The Foundations of Scaling Your Business

When I was at the University of Alabama, the President of the University had goal of drastically increasing enrollment. The university did not, however, plan for enough housing to accommodate the students who both wanted to and were required to stay on campus.

The result?

While the goal was achieved, the necessary accompanying items that would have made the entire process better were neglected. Nearly condemned dorms were kept open, and their scheduled demolition/rebuilds were delayed. We all made it work, but it was less than ideal. Roll tide anyways, right?

This is much the story of many businesses.

Whether growth is organic success, acquisition, or outside funding, the choice to say, “We’ll address that problem when it becomes big enough,” is what leads to the inability to scale.

Another experience during my time at the U of A was Hurricane Katrina. As bad as my issues were with in Tuscaloosa, it was for more as disastrous for Louisiana. One major reason the damage was so bad was because the levees broke. If the levees were only good when it didn’t rain, they weren’t good levees.

Your business is the same.

If your business processes are only good when things are “normal” and break under higher volumes, you don’t have good, or at least scalable, business processes. This is a truth you must accept to begin healing (or preventing) the issues of scalability.

The answer cannot (always) be more people (check out The Mythical Man-Month, if you’re unfamiliar). Sometimes your tools hold you back, but the right tools in the wrong hands do more harm than good.

So what’s the antidote?

First, you must build a better foundation. You need a business structure that connects everyone to the vision. If the frontline is disconnected from the vision and has no understanding of how their daily tasks directly, sequentially impacts the final output in an A-through-Z manner (not a shortcut, A-to-Z manner), you cannot hope to have everyone pushing your business forward in the same direction.

You must also have a perpetual culture of healing and documentation. Healing is not a one-time event, and the idea that documentation is a one-time event is a fallacy. You must, by your own example, be a practitioner of documenting what’s important in a repeatable way. You must also address problems as the arise—not just when they’re big enough to “deserve your attention.”

And, the more your business grows, the more precisely you must know what you’re doing. You must be aware of how your company communicates with itself. If one department believes it’s isolated from another, you no longer have departments. You have kingdoms (silos) that believe the fall of the empire won’t affect their dominion. By implementing a company-wide approach that teaches people to think of where their work comes from, how they do it, and who they hand their work to, you can achieve scalable business processes.

The company that connects each employee’s work to their vision, proactively heals and documents to help others only miss things once, and understands who works immediately right and left of them is the company that will scale.

Will they scale perfectly? We’re all human, so that’s unlikely. But they will scale better and ahead of their competition and ahead of where they were the day before each and every time.

Like the case of student housing, the problems your company is facing are preventable. Build a lasting, healthy framework for your company today.