Ask the expert: How do you scale up a business without diluting client experience?

Growing pains are common for ambitious businesses, but the good news is they can be diminished with careful strategic planning. 

In my experience, too many businesses upsize without taking into account one very simple principle, which is to think like the company they want to become.

If the ambition is to become a 500-person-strong company, then the objective should be to think, act and plan like a company of that size at the outset of any growth journey.

Here are four key ways to adopt a bigger company mindset while still protecting the client experience.

Standardise ways of working

Creating standard operating procedures ensures a growing firm has consistent, repeatable processes, and guards against knowledge silos and key-man dependencies.

This helps support and protect the client outcomes you want. We are not talking here about overly scripted processes, but rather a set of steps to follow that allow for employees to still express their own personality and deal with clients as individuals. 

While considered a bit old fashioned in some quarters, the documentation of processes and procedures is a failsafe way of maintaining business growth while also ensuring each element of business activity is captured in a centralised location.

Quality frameworks can then also be overlaid, to track qualitative metrics such as client satisfaction, complaint levels or employee performance.

Map processes

Process mapping is a more labour-intensive exercise and is used to visually describe a flow of work.

It is very effective for mapping the "route to green" in customer journeys, or in other words the successful completion of a particular process.

It helps identify any friction within that ideal journey and, more importantly, where exactly that friction is occurring.  

For example, in a 10-step flow, if a firm is regularly receiving queries from clients at step four, it indicates there is an issue in the flow of activity just preceding this. 

Process mapping is specialist work, however, and I would recommend employing an external consultant to do this.

Articulate brand values

A further way to maintain a positive client experience throughout growth is for firms to have clearly articulated brand values and to aim to demonstrate these values in everything they do, internally and externally.

According to research, around 80 per cent of large companies publish an official set of corporate values on their website.

This is likely to be because it helps ensure a consistency of approach across the business and supports a strong and meaningful connection with the client base, so it can serve as another useful anchor when upsizing.

It is equally important that employees understand what these values then mean to them, right down to their individual roles.

This can be achieved through training and internal communications, but an effective way to then embed the values is to link them to the annual review process or regular line manager one-to-ones, so team members become familiar with aligning their activities and behaviours.

Plan for success

Successful growth does not happen by accident, and firms must plot a deliberate course.

Establishing some form of working party can be effective therefore, and could involve project managers and the relevant subject-matter experts meeting regularly to plan, assess progress and, crucially, identify where things may not have gone to plan and to take remedial action accordingly.  

In my experience, it helps not to get too forensic in relation to any mistakes. Simply look at what happened, work out why it happened and decide what needs to change to ensure it does not happen again and then move on.

There are a wide range of software solutions to support project management, some commonly used ones being Power BI and Jira, which help turn insights from across the business into actionable tasks and workflows. 

Technology as a whole is an important enabler for any firm’s business needs, goals and desired outcomes. However, firms often look at digital transformation the wrong way round and try to lead with a technology solution, whereas they should in fact be leading with their strategic goals and then sourcing the best tech solutions to fulfil these goals.

Finally, plan ahead to assemble the correct people to support a firm on its growth journey, because recruiting the right talent takes time.

Firms need to identify in advance how many people they need, with which particular skillsets and by when.

This could also mean upskilling existing employees or employing the services of external specialists or consultants, so companies should be pragmatic when assessing what tasks they can cover with their existing capabilities and where they may need to buy in or train up additional expertise. 

By employing a bigger company mindset, with careful strategic planning, firms can plot an effective roadmap and ensure their clients can travel comfortably with them on their growth journey.

Sam Murton is chief operating officer at Progeny