Read Time: 9 minutes
In the first of this three-part series, we recognised that scaling doesn’t happen automatically when you grow your revenue or headcount – it’s what happens when the systems, governance and leadership models underneath your business are intentionally designed to handle what’s next, not just what’s now.
It means preparing for not just for growth, but for the next level of firm maturity as that growth stabilises into a new business as usual.
Ask yourself, what will break this at twice this size?
And then focus on closing up those gaps as you grow.
The best way to do this is to leverage the opportunities BAU presents along the way, that in my experience fall into five main buckets: process improvement, systems scalability, customer/client experience, people and performance, and investing in value capture.
1. Remove Friction and Repetition First
Well of course, you say. We’ve already done this.
I’d suggest you take a closer look. Ask your people – not your management team, the individual contributors in frontline and support roles. Then ask your clients what you are not doing well.
You will likely see one or two common themes emerge. I have not yet led or advised a fast-growing, outwardly successful business that doesn’t have some serious frictions in production, or enabling processes, or both.
Case in point. I led a professional services firm that, in its second year, grew from 4 people (including me and an office manager/EA) to 20 almost overnight, then 30+ the year after – 5-6x growth in headcount, and more in revenue. We recruited locally and also seconded professionals from our parent company in Australia to deliver a run of large, high-profile projects we’d won. We kept winning, to the point I started respectfully declining tenders – to protect our people, our quality, our client service, and the sustainability of our growth itself.
Because the reality was that while we were the envy of the industry, we had serious cracks below the waterline. I’d watched other firms in our industry implode, and I wasn’t going to follow them.
Our reference library was a mess and out of date; people informally traded templates and tips instead, reinventing a lot of wheels. It was one of several inefficiencies, but as a team we agreed fixing it, and giving one of our graduates’ ownership of maintaining it, was the easiest, highest-impact place to start. We ran a volunteer “cleanout morning” (morning tea included of course!), asked everyone to share their favourite content, and had our graduate consult our parent company’s library manager on a filing system, then bring it to the weekly team meeting to adapt to our project flow in Asia.
The important point is not that we removed a major friction point, but that we put in place a system that could grow with us. The whole team had a stake in maintaining it, and the graduate-program rotation built in succession, while giving a graduate a highly visible responsibility of their own.
Ask your team what frustrates them most, and how it could be fixed for good, not just patched. Solutions that don’t become BAU systems won’t support efficient growth for long.
2. Streamline Your Tech Stack
Humans tend to conflate technology with process. So as business grows we implement software solutions to scale or speed up a previously more manual process.
Often the manual process is only partly fulfilled; we develop workarounds at the edges that initially don’t seem onerous. The result a few years later is a bunch of separate systems that don’t interface seamlessly, are either too basic or too complex for our needs, and that have become another layer of process rather than part of the workflow.
Technology is an essential enabler of scale (increasingly so with precise, intelligent AI assistance), but frequently it impedes as much as it assists sustainable growth:
- SAAS pricing tiers drive how we manage increasing size and complexity – and at what cost – rather than our business processes (“we can’t add a field for that dataset”, or “we need to go to another module window to do that”).
- APIs aren’t always as reliable or comprehensive as the marketing suggests, requiring manual workarounds or incomplete reporting.
- Tiered levels of user privileges and customisable settings dictate user’s role definition and authorities (“the system won’t let me do that”), rather than the most efficient way to address a customer/user need.
- SASS systems are designed to be sticky and make data extraction painful, creating risky dependencies.
Most of these risks can’t be avoided – but they can be managed.
Weigh the benefits of a lower cost option against an alternative that provides more user customisation at each level of scale, so you can adapt the system to your needs as you grow, rather than forcing an evolving business to adapt to the system structure.
Consider not just operational tech, but management and support systems tech needs at scale. The same risk-management considerations apply, and in addition ask:
Would this work with two or three times as many customers/employees and unique usage scenarios?
Are the financial and operational costs at that tier sustainable?
Will workarounds at each tier become frustrating as they multiply and create inefficiencies that start to hurt
Will systems limitations and settings start to determine how what we can deliver?
The goal isn’t finding software that you never need to change – it’s choosing systems flexible enough that in a few years you’re still the one deciding how your business works, not the other way around.
3. Document How Stuff Gets Done
None of this works of course without people and performance systems designed to grow with you. Performance frameworks, non-financial reward and recognition, work- and decision-flows are systems and processes, not just concepts, and they tend to break in very concrete ways at scale; the informal “everyone just knows how we do reviews” or “new joiners learn the ropes pretty quickly” approach that worked at a dozen people doesn’t survive at fifty or 100.
In People Problems are Growth Problems I shared my experience and advice for getting the seven basics of people management in place early; understanding your communication style and expectations, investing in onboarding, focusing on attitude and on skills, transitioning from doing to leading, and leaning in to the culture that makes your company a great place to work. These tools and templates save you time, frustration and reduce performance risk – letting you focus on growing the business.
You might think a lot of what’s in your head is well-communicated or common sense – but I’ve been surprised by how much my internal company blueprint has differed from my employees’ field of view.
There is also a risk that what feels like continuous improvement to you can look like inconsistency, disorganisation, or plain absent-mindedness to your team.
Scaling requires increasing levels of delegation through the business -with the associated expectations, metrics and controls need to ensure strategic alignment and effective decision-making. This cannot happen if your operating model and expectations are mostly implicit. Document key parts of your operating model:
- your customer and employee value propositions
- the governance lens – quality controls, pricing mechanisms, organisation, and delegated authority structure
- strategic capabilities, including technologies, systems, methodologies, and workflows
- performance expectations – the outputs that drive value and how and when these are assessed
- your culture, the key behaviours, and ways of working together that embed and enable delivery at scale
A word of advice here – don’t assume this is exclusively a job for your people manager, executive assistant, or team leaders. Involve all of your people in different aspects of documenting, so matter how small and specific. Build trust and buy-in as you go and create development opportunities so that documentation will remain relevant and scale with you.
As with all 5 scaling disciplines, an additional 25% more time when you do something for the second or third time (i.e. you’ve already started to see patterns and make improvements), to expand or generalise the document or tool reuse will save you twice or triple that time later. You need to be intentional about creating the space and permission for yourself or your team to do this.
4. Turn Downtime into Investment
This is a particularly valuable discipline – one that I’ve used to advantage in my own business and with the CEO-Founders I work with.
As discussed in disciplines #2 and #3, investing a little extra time refining and documenting key aspects of your operating model pays off. When people start documenting processes and policies, or turning inputs and outputs into templates, gaps and inefficiencies tend to become crystal clear.
This is a great opportunity to evolve documentation into a deeper re-engineering or innovation project. I say “project” deliberately, because this rightfully frames these activities as value-generating investments in future performance, not admin.
My last firm was a business-to-business consultancy, and like most such companies we swung between periods of insane workload and pockets of quiet – unevenly and not always in ways we could distribute across the team. Those quiet periods were an opportunity: to give someone purposeful work instead of anxiety about job security, and the room to rebalance after a demanding few weeks or months. Often these initiatives also let people learn a new skill, build expertise, or demonstrate a capability we hadn’t seen, adding to their value to the company and themselves.
At our annual strategy retreats, we agreed which innovations, project resources, and automations to prioritise for the year ahead and named and broadly scoped each one. Once activated, we managed the internal project in our system exactly as we would a client project – time planned and allocated against team members, costs budgeted, and regular reporting scheduled. We discussed project performance during regular team and one-on-one conversations, explicitly connecting professional development and recognition to project outcomes.
Your business may run on very different dynamics, but the opportunity will be similar: quieter periods can generate real value through investment in effectiveness and innovation. The benefit goes beyond better processes or customer value – it reminds your people they’re valued as much more than a means of production.
5. Manage Client Expectations
Clients and investors are the engines of your growth – the capital and revenue that let you meet demand, reinvest in the business, and fuel the next stage. It’s a positive cycle, but more fragile than it looks.
Revenue growth isn’t neutral – where it comes from matters. Numbers that look robust can mask a dependency on a handful of large clients or a narrow customer demographic, creating concentration risk you can anticipate but not control: a shift in preferences, a new competitor, a key intermediary falling out of favour, a change of government. Use growth as the opportunity to review that concentration and channel some of it into developing adjacent markets.
When growth stretches your resources past their limits, clients usually feel it first. If any of the following are more than rare occurrences, you may have a problem:
- Your people are working overtime or pulling all-nighters to meet deadlines
- Younger team members are stepping up into client-facing or management roles faster than the oversight above them can mentor and catch problems
- NPS scores stay strong, but comments about communication, turnaround times, manager visibility, or small errors are creeping up
- Employee turnover or absenteeism is rising
- Supply chain or project partners start hinting your team is dropping the ball
This list isn’t exhaustive, and some of this is a normal part of rapid growth – clients and partners will forgive the odd slip. What they won’t forgive is a pattern, and it doesn’t take much for competitors to see the strain and take advantage of it.
The obvious fix is more resourcing at the bottleneck – people, inventory, capacity. In my experience, that’s often not possible in the timeframe you need. So what do you do instead?
Doing nothing risks reputational damage: cancelled contracts, tenders lost to firms that clients believe have more capacity, repeat business dries up. The alternative is to take proactive control of the narrative forming about your company in the market and turn it into something positive.
One approach many consider radical, but which I’ve found works well when your edge is built on exceptional service and long-term relationships: stop taking on new business. Focus entirely on delivering what you have in hand as best you can. Over the last 20 years I have initiated these conversations with existing and potentially new clients a number of times, never fearing that they would never call us again.
Rather, gradual feedback from the industry suggested this approach cemented our reputation for integrity and honesty, for putting clients’ needs first, and for minimising burnout risk for our people.
Use the opportunity to communicate directly and respectfully with customers – the relationship is what matters, and you want to be confident you can meet their expectations. Whatever you do, don’t say “sorry we can’t, we are too busy” – if you think you might need to say “no” but don’t know how to go about it positively, message me for a chat.
I also had a client who temporarily outsourced parts of her supply chain to a competitor to secure important, long-term contracts. It’s a risky approach, but she knew that the industry ecosystem’s reputation for reliability was bigger than any one firms’, and all players would seek to protect it.
Sustainable scaling means always looking ahead, even without the cashflow to build production capacity in advance – the pre-emptive versus reactionary mindset reframes everything downstream.
These risks are not just about operations and delivery – growth can happen quickly and if your strategic governance and stakeholder relationships aren’t up to par, you risk sabotaging your opportunity to scale the next level. The view from the c-suite, board and investors looks very different to the growing pains felt by employees and customers.
In Scaling Without Breaking – Part 3 The Bigger Picture, I’ll cover investor and board expectations, evolving governance capability and curating culture. If you’ve subscribed to The Regenerative Edge and agreed to post-related notifications in your profile settings, you’ll receive an email when Part 3 is available. Otherwise, keep an eye out for my update in your LinkedIn feed or on my landing page here.
If this feels worth exploring further, I’d welcome the conversation.
Caroline M Burns
Some company and situational details in the examples shared have been changed or blended with other cases to best illustrate the point and protect confidentiality.
A shorter version of this article was also published in the September-October 2026 edition of my newsletter The Regenerative Edge.
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