More Sales Should Not Mean More Stress – Scaling a Business in Edmonton

Ask an owner how business is and the first answer is usually “crazy busy”, worn like a badge. More sales, more stress, more chaos. Bruce Baker of The Business Builders by Workplaces on why growth does not have to work that way.

Why owners assume growth means chaos

More volume meeting the pieces you never put in place

Bruce: They assume more volume brings more craziness. And when volume increases, what it really exposes is that the pieces you needed to handle it either are not there or are not effective enough.

Ask an owner what the hustle is like right now and the word that comes back is chaos. Ask how business is and you get, it is just crazy busy. So there is a natural hesitation about growing sales, because I cannot deal with more busy. The reason is that there are not enough components in place to organize that volume and respond to it. And responding to the end user is what business is.

The sign your systems have been outgrown

Everything becomes a knee-jerk

Bruce: The core symptom is reactiveness. Something happens, there is more than you expected, you react, and every time you react you apply another band-aid.

Take a business awarded the largest sale in its history. It is tempting to say, how can I say no to this? Most owners will not say no. We look at the emotional feeling of winning a massive deal, take it on, and say we will figure it out later. As inspiring as that sounds, it does not always work. So we take it on, then take more on, and the environment becomes reactive. Crazy busy is not a positive feeling. It is the feeling of keeping your nose above water. Everything has a small band-aid on it and nothing is gaining traction as the business grows.

What poor organization actually costs

Driving at 130 without a steering wheel

Bruce: It hits you two ways. The obvious one is that without organization you hit a wall, and the strange part is that people can see the wall coming. It is like driving down the highway at a hundred and thirty and hoping the car goes straight.

It takes a long time to build trust and brand, to get people to believe your product or service is good. It may well be good. But if you cannot deliver it and the customer becomes the victim, once that is broken it is extremely hard to win back. Like trust in any relationship.

The second way is emotional, and it sits with the owner. We use what is called the builder protector ratio. A builder is less averse to risk and is in it to grow. A protector is sensitive to risk and protects by nature. Neither is right or wrong, and a growing business needs some of each. For a business of one to ten employees, the research puts that ratio at four to one.

What happens without organization is that even a builder, once they hit the wall, turtles. They become less of a builder. A protector shuts down completely. Either way you are headed for an extreme reaction, and owners are usually unaware of it. Our minds work that way. Without something protecting the traction we have made, we pull back.

The builder and protector concept sits within the Organizational ReWilding methodology of The ReWild Group, based on the original stages of growth research of James Fischer. Bruce applies it as a Certified Organizational ReWilding Adviser (CORA).

The first practical step

Ten minutes, and the first stair

Bruce: Take a breath and think about what is not working. It is easier than people think, because when something is not working there is always a first thing that caused it.

To run up a flight of stairs you have to hit the first step. To build a pyramid you need the first level as foundation. A problem caused by a lack of organization is always caused by the first component that created it.

Take five minutes. Dismiss the problem itself, because the problem is a symptom, and ask what the first step is in the process that is not structured. Then work through it one step at a time.

Owners say they do not have the time. You do. It does not take hours. You authored this in the first place. I can almost guarantee it takes no more than ten minutes of thinking, step one, step two, step three. And what usually happens is that on the way through you spot more than the discrepancy. You start thinking, we could do so much better here, why do we do that twice, that sounds redundant.

Our natural state as a species is fight or flight. Taking ten minutes out of reactive crisis time feels like a threat to survival, and that is what stops us. It is normal. But to build a business, it is not about what you think. If your business could talk, what would it say it needs for superior performance? Personify it, work out what is missing, and start there.

Tools worth looking at

Bruce: Depending on your industry there are some excellent tools, but two are worth checking immediately.

Monday.com, which we structure and build for numerous businesses and have for years. It is a project management tool, but it is also impressive at automating flow. Your business is a flow of different processes, and it helps organize that flow from the moment work starts to the moment the service or product reaches the customer. It is free to start.

For construction specifically, JobTread. There are others, and they are good tools, but JobTread is relatively new and it has been a game changer for construction clients we have rolled it out with.

From an Excel sheet to five points of gross profit

A construction company that outgrew its spreadsheet

Bruce: A construction business, two or three years old at the time, ran everything on an Excel sheet. Initial estimate, drafting, estimating, all the way through to managing the project. The owners loved that sheet, because it had been built by an Excel guru and it was impressive. But it started creating redundancies. Excel is a fantastic tool and it only goes so far.

We implemented JobTread. There was sticker shock at first, I do not want to pay two or three hundred a month. They took a trial and extended it. About eighteen months on it is not only handling the process from estimate to final walkthrough, it has given them metrics and dashboards, and the way they measure the business has changed.

Any good construction company worries about direct cost. For every dollar we make, how many cents go out on direct costs. It has helped them find waste and improve efficiency, and it has given them five to six points back on their gross profit line.

Getting employees on board

Do not write the SOP by yourself

Bruce: A standard operating procedure sitting in a binder or a PDF is not much use. The bigger problem is that owners tend to build them alone, and that is a lost opportunity, because an SOP has to be bought into by your employees.

Managers say, well, they have a job, they just need to comply. That is short term and not sustainable.

With a manufacturing company we have worked with for seven years we needed a complete structural overhaul, so we involved the whole management team and several key employees in building it. We rolled it out two days ago and adoption started immediately. People saying, we should build a checklist for this and put it on the wall so we can work through it step by step. The owner and his VP sit back and watch it unfold with the team leading rather than them. That has been very successful.

The two misunderstandings about structure

It takes too long, and it kills creativity

Bruce: The first is time. Owners know they need to implement it but believe it will take far too long, which is really a money and profit fear, so they avoid it. My employees will not have time to learn new things, they will reject it. The time is far shorter than people realize. You know your business well. Your employees who perform well perform well because they know their positions well.

The second is the fear of too much structure. People genuinely tell me it will curb our creativity, I do not want my employees in a rigid structure where they cannot think outside the box. That is far from the truth. This is not about stiff guardrails, because a guardrail that is too stiff does damage when you hit it. An SOP and the checklists that follow are guidelines.

They are standard ways of doing things that people need to comply with, or you get inconsistency. Inconsistency in a business means inconsistency in the system, and that means chaos. As long as you work within the bounds, the idea that it destroys creativity is completely false. In fact it enhances it, because employees become comfortable enough to say, boss, this seems redundant, can we improve it? Give people the freedom to be involved in making things better and it makes an enormous difference.

Supplier and customer, inside your own company

Bruce: A client using Monday.com told me recently they thought they had outgrown it. I do not think it is about outgrowing a system, because a tool is a tool. What a tool relies on is people understanding their role and what they are responsible for.

From a lean manufacturing standpoint there is a supplier and a customer inside your own company. If I do one task before it passes to you, you are my customer and I am your supplier. You rely on me to finish my part. What clarity in an SOP gives you is that I know what Bruce does, I know I can confidently take on what he hands over, and I know when he will be finished so I can plan my own work. It is predictable, and predictability is what we want in business.

Owners always want to know what is round the corner, what the blueprint for growth is. There is one good place to start. Get consistency, and organize it so every team member understands their role and what they can expect from the person before them and the person after them.

The one tip to use today

And then, and why

Bruce: Watch a small child. They ask why, why, why. They also play a game called and then, and then.

When you know there is a symptom, and notice I am saying symptom rather than problem, whether it is cash flow or logistics or an outcome that is not there, take a whiteboard or a piece of paper. Ask where this starts. Then ask what happens after that. And alongside it, ask why. Not only what the procedure is, but why you did it that way in the first place, and why that step exists at all.

Ten minutes, somewhere quiet. Step one, step two, and then, and why. You will be surprised what comes out. Look at the business at a really basic level instead of assuming the system you already have could not be causing the cash flow issue. Nine times out of ten, it is.

And the daily huddle is where this keeps working, because your team will give you the feedback, if they feel comfortable giving it. I had a client who could not get the production flow right. One of the leads, Christina, said, have we tried this? There was complete silence in the room, and the first thing he asked her was what she had eaten for breakfast. Frontline employees who are not stuck in your groove can offer you an enormous amount.