One thing has become abundantly clear to me in the last few months: scaling a business is harder than starting one.
In today’s digital world, almost anyone can start a company. But sustaining that venture over the long haul and positioning it to be successful when you’re no longer involved in its every detail is another story.
Prosper Strategies turns four this year, and we’ve stabilized a great deal since those highly tumultuous early days. Today, our team of six full-time employees (plus a network of contractors) operates like a well-oiled machine. But six people can only do so much. We can serve only a finite number of clients and drive only a finite amount of impact. If we want to keep advancing our mission to help changemaking companies grow, we need to continue to scale, and we need to do it without losing the things that make our company special. It’s not easy.
Does this sound familiar? It seems nearly every company faces a similar challenge in its “early adolescence.”
Unfortunately, some businesses never solve the problem of scale, but we’re determined not to become one of them.
That’s why we made positioning for scalability one of our six business “rocks” for 2016. We’ve spent the last quarter exploring systems and processes that will help us lay the foundation for next level growth, and we’ve made some highly useful discoveries. If you’re struggling with scaling your own company while growing your purpose and your profits, here are three scalability-focused systems that are helping us and could help you as well.
Priority-Focused Planning
At its core, scaling is all about prioritizing. It starts as the top. Your business needs priorities that only you, the leader, can set. Your departments, projects and initiatives need priorities that are a direct offshoot of the higher level business priorities. And your team members need their own individual priorities that define how they’ll contribute to department or project-specific priorities. Understanding, managing and balancing these priorities can become extremely overwhelming, so this year, we’ve implemented a system for priority-focused planning. We’re applying it at every level of our business, from our company’s big-picture strategy to specific client projects.
It works like this:
Yearly
- Annual company goals: Lindsay and I set our company’s goals for the year. Remember this post about our 2016 rocks? Those are our big yearly goals. We then share them with the rest of our team and have a broad, high-level discussion about how those goals impact the rest of the firm’s work.
- Annual project goals: Each person on our team oversees a handful of specific projects. They work closely with Lindsay and I to define a limited number of annual goals for those projects and then share them with everyone else on the project team. In our case, as a marketing services firm, most of these projects are are client campaigns rather than internal projects, and the goals are part of the strategic plans we develop annually for our clients. However, some team members also own internal projects focused on Prosper’s marketing, business development etc. and this same project-based goal setting approach could be used for product-based businesses and those that do not work with clients like we do.
Quarterly
- Quarterly and monthly company priorities: Each quarter, Lindsay and I develop a list of 3-5 specific, company-wide priorities related to each yearly goal. The purpose of these priorities is to determine the actions that will allow us to make progress toward each of our annual goals in the three months ahead.
- Quarterly and monthly project priorities: Similarly, everyone on our team must define a set of quarterly priorities that stem from the annual goals for each of their projects. Each quarter, our staff takes us through their defined project priorities and we provide feedback, helping them to understand where efforts need to be shifted or amplified. Then, they further break these quarterly priorities down into a set of monthly priorities and accompanying tasks that need to be completed to see them through. At this phase, it’s crucial to determine who is responsible for what and how success will be measured. We use Basecamp to keep track of the tasks related to our priorities, and we love it.
The real beauty of this priority-focused planning process is that it’s totally scalable. Lindsay and I can become less and less involved in the development of the project plans as we continue to grow and can focus more and more on the company plans. Right now, we review the yearly project goals and quarterly and monthly project priorities for each and every project that happens at Prosper, but as we continue to scale, we’ll be able to position our senior staff to oversee quarterly and monthly planning and simply stay tuned into the big picture goals and progress reports along the way.
This may seem complex, but once you get the hang of it, it can be life changing. We’ve developed a spreadsheet for managing the relationship between annual goals, quarterly priorities and monthly priorities, which you can download here.
The Priority All-Staff Meeting
We’ve also carried the priority theme into our staff meetings, which we totally revamped in 2016. We used to use our weekly Monday morning all-staff meetings to talk about what was coming up in the week ahead, but something was missing. We were treating every project-related task and to-do as if it had equal weight, and we were all leaving our weekly meetings feeling overwhelmed rather than crystal clear about what needed to get done and why.
Now, our all-staff meetings serve as the final offshoot of our quarterly and monthly project priority plans. Each team member is responsible for reporting on the week’s 1-3 TOP priorities for each project they manage. Then, because multiple team members work on each project, every team member also reports on their personal 1-3 priorities for the week ahead. This helps us see not just how every project needs to be treated in the week ahead, but also how well each person is positioned to handle the multiple things they have on their plates. Often, these meetings will be an impetus for transitioning a task from one team member to another or for reprioritizing something for a future week or month.
The Standard Operating Procedures Wiki
In case you haven’t already noticed, we’re an extremely process-oriented company. We have processes for how we plan and how we meet (which you just read about). We have processes for how we assign tasks and how we communicate with clients. We have processes for big things, like crafting a marketing plan, and small things, like writing and sending a marketing email. This year, we realized we needed a system for managing our processes.
Yes, I know this sounds a little crazy, but repeatedly searching Google Docs for process overviews and instruction documents that we created months ago got old pretty quickly. The need for some sort of central process organization system was especially apparent each time we added a new member to our team, whether an intern or a full-time employee.
So we got organized. We used Google Sites to create an internal staff Wiki. It houses everything from first day instructions for new employees to overviews that explain how to complete specific tasks for specific clients, like running a social media metrics report or setting up a landing page. It’s been a true lifesaver to have one place to turn for all of our process documents and standard operating procedures.
Leonie Dawson has a great resource on creating a wiki like ours that you should check out if you’re embarking on the journey of standardizing your operating procedures. Check it out.
While scaling is not a challenge that any of us can solve overnight, these systems and processes have definitely been a step in the right direction for us. What are you doing to start scaling smarter this year?
