Consider This When Scaling Your Business

Written by: Kymberli Cassidy & Matt Van Vleet

As an entrepreneur in the early stages of building your business, it’s up to you to handle everything. When you’re a small operation, you’re able look across your sales pipeline, bench, and hiring plan in real-time and make decisions that consider all the variables.

As your business grows, it gets harder for one person to manage. So, you hire people you can delegate responsibility to. More people carrying the load is helpful, but you, the entrepreneur, lose the ability to see the complete picture. However, you’re still responsible for making the decisions.

The challenge then becomes about getting the visibility into the business you need to make decisions and be successful when you’re no longer in full control of every aspect.

Things to Consider as You Scale

As you scale, consider how your data around project financials and projections will help or hinder your team’s ability to achieve your goals.

· How will you be able to give individual groups their view into the data while maintaining centralized visibility?

· How will you ensure that decisions regarding hiring and staffing are made in an optimal coordinated way?

· How will you give people the ability to own their own data while ensuring that it's useable across the company for making decisions?

· How will you empower people to make local decisions while understanding the tradeoffs to make the best decisions for the whole company?

The goal is to manage the data and people in a way that builds a relationship of trust, communication, and empowerment between you and the leaders you need to scale.

The Risk

The more complex your organization is, the more complex decision-making gets. You’ll hire leaders who will be responsible for a subset of the business, but they can’t operate in a vacuum. They must report data in a way that helps everyone makes decisions at all levels.

As the owner, you’re ultimately responsible for your company’s success, and it’s critical that your team provides you with insights that tell you a story about the health of your business. These insights, this story, should be based on the latest data available. It must allow you to glance at the past to identify patterns and peer into the future to see all the possible scenarios, so that you can make the best decision for your business today.

Parting Thoughts

As you scale, and your network of leaders becomes more complex, you should ask yourself: How will I ensure that the data I’ve relied on to run my business will continue to support my ability to make critical decisions?

At the end of the day, the systems you’ve built around finance, project management, and sales must create clarity—not confusion.