Coaxing growth from an organization is similar to the work necessary to grow fruit or vegetable bearing plants. You need the right ingredients at the right time, with the right support nurturing the seed to sprout and grow.
Many small companies never break the $10 million in revenue mark or even the $5 million mark because of a lack of clarity over organizational structure, systems, automation, roles, responsibilities, and authority to enable accountability.
If a business does scale to those heights without those nurturing structures, you may find burn-out, conflict, lack of information when and where it’s needed and a lot of stress and worry about keeping up the pace.
It’s a delicate balance having the right capacity, trained for their role with the authority to do what’s needed in balance with the cash flow necessary to recruit and on board them.
You want an aspirational organization structure so that everyone sees how the roles fit together. You also need to recognize when people are in multiple roles, wearing several hats and at what point, those hats get passed to new people.
Scaling up is both a structural and a cultural exercise that if not done well, can leave employees feeling threatened, in roles that are not a good match for their strengths and people managing others without the skill set or authority to make decisions. This is why that breakthrough to higher revenues is problematic.
When we assist a business to plan for this scalable future we pay attention to the cost of bringing on those new people, the ability of the company to transfer knowledge through existing systems, networks and automated processes and/or through job shadowing. Some new systems may need to be built to enable knowledge transfer and automation to take the weight off the person who is suddenly thrust into the role of mentoring a job shadow candidate.
In our experience to create the ideal organization structure, we facilitate care and planning for all these aspects simultaneously which is essential to scale.
To learn more about how some of the areas we pay attention to in scaling, you will want to go to the links for:
