Building a Scalable Business

Every business owner wants their company to grow at a 25% CAGR. The problem is, even if you are in a growing industry and are better at what you do than your competitors, you’re going to run into hiccups – employees leave, customers have unrealistic expectations, mistakes happen.

If you’re not careful, these mistakes could derail your growth – if you get a reputation based on a mistake your company made, or if you are stuck pinch hitting for an employee that left and can’t focus on growing the business, a growth rate that is realistic becomes impossible.

If you want to be able to sustain a 25% CAGR for your small business, you have to build scalable processes – regardless of what industry you’re in.

How to Build a Scalable Process

The reason companies like hiring people with experience is they (theoretically) know how to do the work already – they don’t need to be taught.

This reliance on experience becomes problematic when an employee with experience leaves, gets promoted, or is too overstretched to be able to keep up with the work load…which is precisely why it’s essential to create a manual for every task that needs to be handled on a day-to-day basis.

The basic premise is to draft a concise and clear (share pictures!) step-by-step manual that is so rudimentary that a new hire could handle the task on their first day on the job with little-to-no handholding.

Here’s one way to build your manual today:

1. Create a word doc that has step-by-step instructions on how to do a specific task (say, update the CRM or dig a sewer trench) with screenshots, tools required, and notes on common problems to watch out for.
2. Share the doc with your team that does that work every day and ask for feedback/to adjust the steps to better fit their process
3. Once the steps are finalized, create a system or to house all the documents and keep it in easy access for the entire team.

Essentially, you are creating a wiki with the files to share at a moment’s notice within the company.

That’s literally it. Then, when something is going wrong and that key employee is out on maternity or paternity leave, you have a playbook to run so someone can handle it.

Where to Start Building Processes

If you don’t know where to start, begin by taking the last twenty minutes of the day to write down the tasks you & your team accomplished. You’ll begin to see a pattern in the activities that you’re doing most regularly and then be better able to build a how-to manual to share with the team.

Once this is done, you can look into how you can take certain components and start automating them so they don’t have to be manually done and really make your company scalable.