The real secret to scaling organisations? The seeds you plant early on.

You’re an early stage business. You need to prove you have a product and that it has a market before you run out of money. How your business runs and building something for millions of customers might not seem like a major priority when you’re still small, but here’s what it pays to think about early to minimise organisational and operating friction when you’re scaling rapidly. 

Make time to think about the kind of business you want to be, what your core mission and values are. 

• Sounds obvious I know. But while how you articulate this and what you do day-to-day will evolve, clear values and principles endure and help shortcut decision making, make it clearer to the team & recruits what you’re about, and set the tone for how you’ll get things done, at any scale. 

Think of Operations as Product

• What is the MVP version, what do you need to learn and how fast can you test it, and what would the next iteration look like? This will include who you need, where you need them, and how you get work done together. 

• In the same way you’ll understand your product market fit better the more you know about your customers, you’ll understand more about the right organisational shape for you as you get to know the business better. You wouldn’t lift and shift someone else’s product, so don’t lift and shift someone else’s org and operations. Their problems won’t be yours. 

Build it well enough, keep it useful longer. 

• It doesn’t need to be perfect - even if it is it won’t be perfect for long - but when you’re designing operating systems and processes cutting too many corners inevitably causes pain (a bit like doing a shoddy repair job will lead to a bigger leak in your house). Not sure what ‘good enough’ is? Conduct some thought experiments and ask around. 

Think ahead to inflexion points & put future ‘problems’ in perspective 

• Take note of the breakpoints at which your current solution might not work (10x volume? 3x complexity?). This puts you back in the driving seat and able to respond rather than react to the demands of the business as it changes.

Already up and running and now running into friction? It’s never too late to add these things into the mix for how you take your business forwards, 

Getting started or running into organisational friction? I can help. I’d love to hear from you.

I help leadership teams work out what they need to do next, and how they’re going to do it, so they can be a better business, faster.