My head was spinning. Sales seemed to be exploding in growth and service delivery was sprinting as it tried to fulfill all of the new customers that influencers@ marketing agency was getting. My task seemed simple – ensure service delivery can keep up with sales and scale operations to do so. Execution proved to be a lot more challenging and I couldn’t quite pinpoint why. There was more work to do, so we could just hire more people, add a proportional amount of resources, etc. I then stumbled upon an interesting dilemma: sales was selling new stuff that we had never done before. It wasn’t super different, but it was outside of our core competencies, and the processes and people we had in place were not designed/trained to deliver the new services.
While we absolutely wanted to scale our start-up, we quickly learned a very important lesson: sometimes, scaling up is far more effective than scaling out. Instead of trying to add lots of new services to our offerings that require totally different people and processes, we should instead focus on building up ultra core competencies in a few distinct service offerings, and recruit the very best people to run them.
This is all about focusing on a few key things and not trying to be the best at everything. When you are a huge company you can consider being a “one stop shop”, but start-ups just don’t work that way. Just focus on what you do best, the rest will work out.
My Solution for influencers@:
I broke our business down into 3 core service areas (I call them the 3 Revenue Channels). These are the 3 ways that we make money, the 3 things that our service delivery department must be great at and the 3 things our sales staff must know inside and out. Our entire team sat down around the conference table and went over each of the 3 Revenue Channels in detail, and then I printed them out on a 1 pager and taped it to the walls of the office.
The results have been strong: we have focus and a common understanding. Everyone knows exactly what areas we are going to scale in and what our goals are. Now we go make it happen.