07BUSINESS SITUATION

Structuring the company's growth

Growth is there, the structure is not keeping up.

What the problem looks like

Growth is there, but people cannot keep up with it. The company depends on individuals and on improvisation.

What is often behind it

Clear roles, processes and accountabilities are missing. Decisions are made late and without a system.

How Boutique Advisory can help

We design a scalable structure → define processes and roles → set the management rhythm → make growth sustainable.

The company is growing.New customers arrive. There are more orders. A new channel opens. New people are hired.While the company had fifteen or twenty people, a lot could be sorted out with a phone call, an email, a message or a quick word.Someone knew what had to be done.Someone else knew who to call.If something got stuck, the problem got solved.And the company grew.And then there are no longer twenty people.There are fifty. Seventy. A hundred.The business is bigger, but the way of working has stayed much the same.That is where the problems start.

Growth does not create structure by itself.

Sales promises the customer a delivery date.Production hears about it too late.Procurement does not have the material yet.The warehouse keeps its own spreadsheet.Finance is waiting for the information so it can invoice.In the end a few people who “know how things work around here” step in and the problem gets solved again.

The customer may not notice a thing. But the organisation handles every new job with more and more manual coordination. This is not an unusual phase of growth.

So growth very quickly brings more people and more complexity. But the organisation does not adapt to it automatically.

The problem is not necessarily the people.

Very often people are doing exactly what worked for years. The problem is that the way of working was designed for a smaller company. While the number of transactions is small, improvising is fast. Once the volume grows, the same improvising becomes the bottleneck.

The process exists. But in people's heads.

In every growing company there are a few people everyone calls when something gets stuck. They know the special arrangements with customers. They know which supplier will respond. They know how to work around a problem in the system. They know what has to be done, even if it is written down nowhere. Those people are extremely valuable. But if the business only runs normally because they connect the parts of the system every day, the company becomes dependent on individuals and on improvisation.

Hiring more people need not solve the problem then. It can even make it worse. More people means more handovers, more information to pass on and more places where something can be left unsaid.

Structuring growth is not drawing another organisation chart.

The goal has to be that work which keeps repeating starts being done in a predictable way. Take an ordinary order. Customer enquiry. Quotation. Order confirmation. Stock or capacity check. Procurement or production. Delivery. Invoicing. While there are a few such orders a day, people can talk to each other. Once there are dozens or hundreds, it is no longer enough for everyone to “know their bit”. It has to be clear where the process starts, who takes the next step, what information has to be available, and what happens when something deviates from the standard.

That is not bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is a process that exists for its own sake. Good structure should do the opposite. It should reduce the need to reinvent a solution for every recurring situation.

And one more thing. Structure should not be built only for the business the company has today. It is worth checking whether the current way of working can carry the next phase of growth too. Because the problem usually only shows once volume grows again and people start firefighting more and more.

Where to start?

A few things need to be looked at clearly:

where growth is creating the biggest operational bottlenecks today
which key processes depend on improvisation or on individuals
where roles and handovers between functions are unclear
which processes need a standard, and where flexibility should stay
whether the systems and data can carry a higher volume
where the next constraint will appear if the business keeps growing
which capacity, people and processes to build before they become a problem

A company can grow on improvisation for quite a while. Not indefinitely. At some point you have to stop adding people around the problem and start building a system that can carry a bigger business.

Does this sound familiar?

If every increment of growth means more manual coordination, more spreadsheets and more dependence on a few key people, the problem may not be that the company is growing too fast.

The company may simply have outgrown the way it works.

Recognise the situation? — Let us talk