Growing a business takes clarity, and the ability to both map out and follow through your vision with unwavering confidence. You simply can’t do this with dreams and aspirations; you need standardization to achieve scalability.
Scalability allows a company to successfully grow and adapt to increased volume without compromising on quality, performance, service, or any element that’s key to the business.
Unfortunately, it’s not unusual for business owners to put the cart before the horse, so to speak. When growth is put ahead of building a scalable infrastructure, leaders are likely setting themselves up for major obstacles when their business starts expanding.
At GrowthForce, we’ve spent more than a decade providing accounting services and bookkeeping solutions to our clients. We’ve grown into a happy, prosperous company that SMBs all over the country look to when they’re ready to outsource their bookkeeping and accounting functions. Of course, it wasn’t always this way.
As a service start-up, we had our share of lessons to learn. We wouldn’t be where we are today if we hadn’t focused on scalability early on. With this in mind, here are some key lessons that are fundamental to any service business that is looking to grow.
Consistency is imperative to the success of any business. You want to make sure that each customer receives the same time, attention, and quality of work. This is particularly important during the onboarding phase since an in-depth discovery process is a key to a strong relationship.
Once upon a time, GrowthForce clients were onboarded by the services teams who would be managing their accounts going forward. Over time, we discovered this approach to onboarding made it difficult to create consistency and quality control.
We came to recognize that the people who design and customize accounting systems have very different skill sets from those who maintain it.
Today, we operate with a centralized onboarding process. It’s all about putting the right people in the right places throughout the process.
At GrowthForce, we’re careful to utilize our employees’ skill sets in a manner, which benefits both our internal and external customers.
Small businesses that want to grow must develop and refine a solid onboarding process, which encourages scalability.
The second part of scalability focuses on a company’s core functions. You need to create processes and procedures that facilitate streamlined operations. By standardizing your company’s core functions, you’ll begin to build a foundation for long-term success, rather than operating on reactive, short-term fixes.
Excellent project management is an essential component of scalability. As your business grows, you’ll have more and more work to manage. Each client will become a new project, and each project will likely have sub-projects. Create a roadmap of project management from the very beginning so your workflow won’t be impeded by oncoming growth.
Each project should include:
At GrowthForce, we’ve developed a web-bsed project management system called "GrowthForce Connect™". This web-based platform connects our team, our clients’ staff, and the CPAs and CFOs who advise them, allowing us all to work as a single team on each project with seamless connectivity.
Standardization optimizes consistency while minimizing shortfalls in quality. The more standardized your process are with regards to projects, roles, and tasks, the more scalable your business.
At GrowthForce, every single balance sheet account gets reconciled each month, because that’s the only way you can be sure the Income Statement is right. We may not necessarily be the people doing the reconciliation – the clients' CPA or clients’ staff might perform some of the reconciliation – it is our responsibility to ensure that every account is reconciled.
Because we have standard processes in place, we’ll be able to catch any account that wasn’t reconciled outside of GrowthForce so we can complete the process on behalf of our clients.
Checklists will help ensure defined company standards are applied to each interaction your team has with clients. There should be a customized checklist for each client, which is built using your company’s standard best practices.
In our company, we’re able to scale our accounting services because we’ve created checklists for each and every one of our clients customized, based on the services we provide them. We’ve created checks and balances to ensure we have separation of duties and nothing falls through the cracks.
For example, a month-end checklist has multiple columns because each client’s account has several sets of eyes on the numbers. The process looks something like this:
No matter what industry you’re in, if you’re a service business, service is what you’re selling. That means you need to put measures in place to manage it. When it comes to service management, you have to have a team approach to solving clients’ problems.
Getting buy-in from other team members, or from other teams, can enhance clients’ experiences and reinforce consistency across an organization.
Here’s a look at a few service fundamentals that are characteristic of successful service management:
This takes time, and businesses that focus on billing by the hour, instead of a fixed fee, tend to put performance metrics that encourage people to skip these steps. However, if you spend 15-20% of your time planning for the other 80-85% of your week, you’ll build a high performing team and a more profitable business.
As a service-oriented business, you need to have service standards that are set in stone. These standards should be ingrained in your company culture, setting clear expectations for both your staff and your customers.
The biggest mistake people make when they hire an outsourcing firm is not changing the job descriptions of their internal staff, which means they’re not properly managing expectations. It’s important to understand how outsourcing can be perceived by the people who were already doing the job in-house.
You must explain to employees the WIIFM, why outsourcing is a good thing for them. They’re not being replaced; now they simply have a resource that can help with certain tasks so they can be freed up to help with proposals or and attend local Chamber events.
With GrowthForce as an example, rather than being directly responsible for data entry or reconciliation, your employees now can become responsible for other revenue generating activities. Or your overworked bookkeeper will now have someone to help with data entry. Your office manager will now be freed up to attend industry events.
People’s roles will be redefined, and job descriptions need to be updated. In the end, your employees should feel like valuable contributors to your organization; how you choose to address outsourcing from the beginning will pave the path for acceptance by your team.
As you form a game plan to manage expectations internally, consider the following:
Scalability means having a separation of duties and processes in place. It means not having a single point of failure. As a service business, you must designate the right people with the right skill sets to perform onboarding, core functions, and service management in order to sustain your growing company.
When you build a foundation for growth including standardized processes from the beginning, your business will have the ability to gain traction as your revenue streams increase.