Worth following
Verne Harnish
Scaling a business past the founder
The operating routines that stop a growing business falling apart around thirty or forty people.
USA
Photograph: Drumdad19 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Scaling a business past the founder
The operating routines that stop a growing business falling apart around thirty or forty people.
Photograph: Drumdad19 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Harnish writes about the specific problem of scaling: the point where the informal habits that worked with eight people stop working and nobody can say quite why everything feels harder.
His answer is routine rather than inspiration — a small number of disciplines run relentlessly: a clear one-page plan, a fixed meeting rhythm, a handful of priorities, and the right people in the right seats.
The most transferable part. A daily huddle of a few minutes, a weekly meeting on one issue, a monthly on progress, a quarterly to reset priorities. It sounds bureaucratic and it replaces a great deal of ad-hoc interruption.
Three to five for the quarter, one of them the top. Businesses with fifteen priorities have none, and the fifteen are why nothing finishes.
The plan matters less than the fact that everyone meets on a known cadence to check it. Most small businesses have plans and no rhythm, so the plan is read once a year.
Two separate questions: is this person right for the business at all, and are they in the right role? Owners conflate them and end up keeping someone in a job that is wrong for both of you.
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Businesses somewhere between fifteen and two hundred people where the founder is becoming the bottleneck and nobody is quite sure who owns what.
Overkill for a business of five. The routines cost time, and below a certain size the informal version genuinely works.