When you start your own company, your goal is to scale.
At first, though, you’re working with a small team of people that handles everything from onboarding new hires to daily operations. You all use a few shared spreadsheets, a chat channel or two, and things go great. If a problem pops up, it’s easy to handle it at this point because there are no big departments yet, and the distance between the issue and the fix is relatively short.
Then you go from having 6 people on your team to 60.
Now, the new hire someone forgot to add to the payroll is 1 out of 15. What used to be a simple workflow is now full of hiccups because everyone is busier than ever, and it’s no longer that easy to follow who does what.
Sometimes, it’s bad luck or a bad day. It happens.
But more often than not, simple workflows start to break when you scale, and the first sign of that is when you notice that routine tasks take twice as long.
Small Gaps Start to Slow Everything Down
Early on, quick fixes work just fine.
If someone misses an order, you send one direct message, and the issue is resolved. If someone can’t log in, the only thing standing between you and the solution is an email. Every process is fast, and every action is effective, even though you haven’t actually built real processes yet.
Once you start to scale, this whole thing falls apart.
Small fixes no longer work; they just make everything worse. If you had a conversation that involved 2 people, now that same conversation involves 6 of them, and everyone has a different schedule. That missing order message? That’s now buried deep under 20 other threads, so by the time someone gets to it, the customer has already waited for far too long.
The best way to describe this situation would be chaos. It’s great that you’re starting to scale, but your daily operations are an absolute mess. Information is scattered all around, and sometimes it reaches the right person; other times it doesn’t. The more people you have at the time, the longer the wait.
A team member needs approval, and now has to wait 3 days for it because it has to go from the manager to finance to someone else.
The result is that, although you have more people and can technically handle more work, the work slows down. You expected it to speed up, so you’re scratching your head because the numbers don’t match what’s happening in practice.
Why?
Because you’re not organized, a company with 6 people doesn’t work the same as one with 60 or 160, which is what you’re trying to do. And failing miserably at it.
What Breaks Down
Basically, your workflow is working at a scale it wasn’t designed for, and that’s your main problem. Unfortunately, there’s no set dramatic moment where it all crumbles down. Instead of that, you’ll notice things aren’t working the way they’re supposed to.
Here’s where that shows up first.
You Can’t See What Gets Stuck Anymore
When you have a small team, everyone has this rough picture in their mind of where every task is. Then your team expands, and that picture gets completely lost. You can’t keep track of 20 different handoffs across 5 different tools, so when something gets stuck, you have to manually check to find the problem.
And does anyone even have to tell you what a hiccup that is?
It’s a huge waste of time and resources.
Payments Create Friction Instead of Flow
Payments are a piece of cake on a small scale. A handles invoices, B cuts the checks, and C follows up if something goes awry. Once you scale, however, you get all kinds of new cases. New schedules for contractors, reimbursements for all kinds of expenses, bonuses, and it all comes without a warning.
The problem is that you’re still stuck working with patchwork solutions when you need secure merchant services to help you combat things like fraud, non-processed payments and any similar situations that would hurt your business and stain the reputation of your business.
Ownership Is No Longer Clear
When the process involved 3 people, things were simple.
The person in charge of the task sent the email, and the person who replied to it was responsible for what happened next. Now there are 15 people involved, and you can’t see who’s supposed to do what. It’s not that your team is lazy, but until someone says, ‘Hey, that’s my job,’ the task sits and collects metaphorical dust.
Fixing Things Makes Everything Worse
Once something breaks down, your instinct is to fix it, which makes perfect sense.
But what happens is that you get in the habit of making all kinds of small fixes that pile up into extra steps that make the situation even worse. You see a missed approval, so you send an email as a reminder. You notice a lost request, so you fill out a new form to make it go through.
Do that 10 times, and your workload is much heavier, even though you tried making it lighter and more efficient.
Conclusion
What do you do next? Your workflows have failed, so where does that leave you?
The truth is that your workflows didn’t fail. They still work fine for a small scale, but you tried using them for a larger one, so of course, you weren’t happy with the results. It’s important to understand that things didn’t fall apart in a day or two. This chaos was happening little by little until you were no longer able to ignore it.
The best way around this is prevention. As soon as you start adding more people and more processes, tweak your workflows. And then keep tweaking them. Don’t ignore small problems and don’t rely on quick fixes.
